Love

In love and life… admiration is the basis for love—if I don’t admire you, how can I love you…Pamela Anderson

Think about that. If I don’t admire you, how can I love you?

Individuals are complicated beings. And so often, we don’t take enough time to get to know someone’s inner core. We don’t give friends and family our attention long enough to hear what each other is saying, or not saying. Paying attention to inflection and body language.

Think about this, a species will be completely solitary unless it absolutely has to cooperate with someone else. And, when we do, we get a huge rush of dopamine, a feeling of joy and excitement.

“And the way evolution made sure we cooperate was to come up with chemical bribery. At the basis of love are four neurochemicals. Each has a different role but together they motivate us or to give us confidence to go into social relationships. Ultimately, we get addicted to those chemicals. We get this hit of joy, of euphoria, of reward when we interact with the people important to our survival. It’s biological bribery. It’s like if I give my kids a sweet because they’ve done something good, which is bad parenting, but it works”.~~ Brian Gallagher, Love is Bribery, http://www.nautil.us

“Because the only point of evolution is to pass genes down. This form of bribery is controlling us to make sure we do that. It’s a benign control. For most people, most of the time, the experience is lovely and warming and beneficial in terms of health. Unfortunately, our biology to seek love, crave love, find love, keep love, is a weakness. That visceral need can be exploited, it can be used to make us do things we don’t necessarily want to do. And that’s the cost of love. It can be used to manipulate or abuse or coerce us. That’s what separates us from the animals. Animals don’t use love to manipulate others. We do.”~~ Anna Machin

People with higher levels of Oxytocin are more open to love.

“Is it something to do with the same way that oxytocin lowers your inhibitions? Maybe it’s to remove some of the hurdles that you might place in your own way when you’re going to try and start a relationship. If you were constantly paranoid that everybody’s going to cheat on you or steal from you or lie to you, the species wouldn’t get very far. So maybe we have to remove that ability so that we have confidence and enough belief in the person that we fall in love with that we will carry on doing this. We see the same deactivation occurring when people listen to a charismatic religious leader.” ~~ Brian Gallager

We all have a biological market value on our head. Is it lust or love? Why can we tell within the first few minutes of knowing someone whether they are good, average, or better material for falling in love and procreating?

It is because there are certain areas of our brain, like mentioned above, that turn off so that we can fall for that person. If we were constantly worried about someone lying or cheating on us, the species would never survive.

But if oxytocin and dopamine are released, then off we go without much thought from our conscious brain.

So, as Ann Machin and Brian Gallaghers say, love is bribery. We are being bribed by our genetic makeup to fall in love with another in order to continue the human species.

Even with all the scientific mumbo jumbo, still, falling in love feels good, even if it doesn’t last. It’s bribing us to continue the next generation and once that’s completed, well, that sounds like a different kind of love, to me.