ABCnews reports on the human love drive (excerpt):
The lead researcher of the study, and author of a new book, Why We Love, says scientifically, sex and romance are two different things. And what is commonly thought as the drive for love, explains anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., is actually three different desires.
“One is the sex drive that gets you out there looking for anything remotely appropriate,” says Fisher. The next is “romantic love, that giddiness of first love that enables you to focus that mating energy and conserve your courtship time. And the third mating system in the brain is attachment.”
The most powerful of the three desires may not be sex but romance, Fisher adds.
“People don’t die for sex,” she says. “I’ve at looked at poetry all over the world, even as much as 4,000 years ago. People live for love, they die for love, they sing for love, they dance for love.”
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But if romance, not sex, is so powerful and so important in a life, and if the brain scan shows men are activated by romance as strongly as women are, why does romance fade so fast?
“I think it evolved for an important reason,” explains Fisher, “which is to enable to focus your mating energy on one individual at a time, thereby conserving courtship time and energy. We would all die of sexual exhaustion, and we wouldn’t get to our jobs … if we had this intense emotion all of our lives.”
She adds: “I think what goes on generally is you move away from that intense feeling of romantic love into a deeper sense of calm and peace and unity with the person, attachment associated with a different brain system.”
Couples don’t fall out of love, they fall into attachment, she believes. But there is a way of preserving that feeling of romance, suggests Fisher — doing novel things together.
“One thing that I and my colleagues [on this project] have established is that love does change over time. And if you do want to continue that obsession and craving and elation and focused attention on that person, do novel things with him or her. That drives up levels of dopamine in the brain. That’s one of the main chemicals associated with romantic love.”