Sonnets have been written, songs have been sung, temples have been erected, and lives have been taken, all in the name of love. Long before there was a term for the strong emotions we felt towards others, love existed. In today’s society, the term is used to cover an array of feelings, and is applied casually towards objects or concepts, with little consideration for the immense power it possesses. In examining the various types of love, it is eros, romantic love, that displays the obsessive, physical response that our brains have when triggered by this powerful emotion.

In a study of 17 people who reported to be happily in love, Anthropologist Helen Fisher found, through MRI scanning, that in these 17 people there was activity found in the base of the brain, more specifically in the ventral tegmental area. This activity included stimulation of cells responsible for the release of dopamine, and was found in the reward system of the brain. This suggests that when we feel love for someone, deep, romantic love, our body has a chemical response. We, as humans, are born with certain innate processes. We have cravings and desires that register far below our thought processes. These same processes are triggered by the brain’s response to romantic love, thereby proving that love is not just an emotional response, but a chemical reaction in the brain that elicits longing and desire. Fisher found that ultimately, “Romantic love is an obsession”, that, “It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about another human being”. In cases of unreciprocated love, she finds that our brain even utilizes its ability to calculate gains and losses to further understand “what went wrong”. So, the obsessed lover not only feels intense love, albeit rejected, but is calculating their losses, and, Fisher states, is “engulfed with feelings of romantic love…feeling deep attachment to this individual”.

In her extensive research, Fisher has “come to think that romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive”. She goes on to clarify that this is separate from the sexual drive that leads to mating, that instead, this “Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy, and start the mating process with this single individual”. In her explanation of this driving, obsessive emotion, she relates her findings to the ideals of Plato, agreeing that love is an addiction. She finds that the tolerance we build that causes us to need to see them more, the withdrawals we experience when we are separated from them, and the eventual relapse we experience after seemingly moving beyond the obsession, are “all of the characteristics of addiction”. She concludes this subject with the statement that “…indeed, romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth”.

While the obsessive and addictive nature of love relates to all humans, regardless of gender or race, the way that we feel intimacy is dictated by our sociological past. Since the dawn of civilization, the patriarchal nature of most societies led to different conceptions regarding intimacy and closeness. Fisher found that women find intimacy in face-to-face contact, utilizing a tool called the “anchoring gaze”, that evolved “from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words”. Conversely, she found that men used that positioning when facing their enemies, and that they receive intimacy in a side-by-side position, much like they sat alongside friends millions of years ago, and still do today. It’s true that many men feel threatened, or uneasy, when locked in a stare with a woman they love, or really, with anyone. They are less accustomed to working in face-to-face positions, even in today’s society. Women, on the other hand, still use this physical arrangement in their interactions with their children, and often with each other. This concept, while simple in explanation, is feasible in its application to the gender differences found in intimacy.

Much like Fisher states in her closing thoughts, our challenge in love is not in the discovering of it, as “love is in us. It’s deeply imbedded in the brain”. Rather, “Our challenge is to understand each other”, to consider the gender differences that we face in the intimacy that leads to romantic love, and to cultivate that intimacy in our desire to love and be loved in return.