Interesting Facts About Love

 

Love is pure, love is painful, love is sweet, and love is dreadful. True love is overwhelming. Our lives depend on it and it often seems like our planet would stop spinning if love didn’t exist. Endless love is something we strive for and something we mourn the loss of.

A famous love quote “if you’ve never been hurt, you’re either very lucky or very lonely.”

We understand the poetry of the heart, but throughout our lives, we tend to demystify this precious feeling more and more. We learn about biological processes that cause specific reactions. We learn about cultural influences on how we behave and think about love. We learn about the psychological facts about love and physiological processes that get us falling in love with someone.

And as soon as we think there’s no more place for romance in a world explained by science, we fall in love, or simply look into the eyes of our beloved, and all of that knowledge is pushed to the back of our minds. In the end, the feeling itself is what matters most.

Let us present you with some interesting theories and love facts that will explain much about this all-absorbing phenomenon without dispelling its romance and poetry.

Love Is All That Matters.

Even though we often think of ourselves as a faithful species, we’re not the only one in the animal kingdom. Wolves, swans, gibbons, black vultures, albatrosses, and even termites are just a few of those animals that find a mate for a lifetime.

If you want to make a good impression on someone, you’ve only got about 4 minutes to do it. It is believed that it has far more to do with your body language, tone, and speed of your voice rather than exactly what you say.

Couples who are in love and bond in a romantic relationship synchronize their heart rates after gazing into each others’ eyes for three minutes.

Falling in love is much like taking a dose of cocaine, as both experiences affect the brain similarly and trigger a similar sensation of euphoria. Falling in love produces several euphoria-inducing chemicals that stimulate 12 areas of the brain at the same time.

Oxytocin, the so-called love or cuddle hormone, is produced during an embrace or cuddle. The hormone appears in the brain, ovaries, and testicles and is thought to be involved in the bonding process. A dose of oxytocin decreases headaches significantly, and for some it even makes the pain go away completely after 4 hours. It’s worth trying to hug and cuddles medicine before jumping to chemicals and pills.

Even though it was long known that the presence of a significant other has a lot to do with patients’ improvement, it has been proved that the same goes for even a picture of the beloved, when experiencing pain, study participants exposed to pictures of their beloved and too distracting word games had their pain reduced far more than those exposed to the same distracting word games and pictures of acquaintances.

Many psychological and social research indicates that there is a significant pattern in how people choose people to establish romantic relationships with. People are more attracted to those with that they share a level of attractiveness, or, in other words, are equally socially desirable. Even if successful couples differ in physical attractiveness, one of them usually compensates for it with other socially desirable qualities.

As the well-known saying goes, opposites attract. And it proves that this is partially true. Couples that are either too similar or too different tend not to last very long. There always has to be a foundation of similarities, but there also have to be things that the two learn from each other.

Intense, traumatizing events, such as a break-up, divorce, loss of a loved one, physical separation from a loved one, or betrayal can cause real physical pains in the area of one’s heart. This condition is called Broken Heart Syndrome. Deep emotional distress triggers the brain to distribute certain chemicals that significantly weaken one’s heart, leading to strong chest pains and shortness of breath. The condition is often misdiagnosed as a heart attack and tends to affect women more often.

Couples at the very beginning of a romantic relationship will be very different a year later. It is estimated that romantic love, which is linked with euphoria, dependence, sweaty palms, butterflies, and alike, only lasts about a year. After that first year begins the so-called “committed love” stage. The transition is linked with elevated neurotrophin protein levels in newly formed couples.

People at an early stage of love have lower levels of serotonin, which is associated with feelings of happiness and well-being, and higher levels of cortisol, associated with stress. This is strikingly similar to those people who have OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), which explains why we act so out of character when we fall for someone. It works the other way around as well – people with lower levels of serotonin fall in love and get into sexual relationships quicker than others. Reminders of love influence more abstract and creative thinking because they are associated with more distant and abstract considerations of long-term relationships, devotion, commitment, and intimacy. Reminders of sex trigger concrete thinking, making a person focus more on momentary details than on long-term plans or goals.

The Triangular Theory Of Love suggests a clear formula for the components of different kinds of love. Three kinds of love are a product of two different pairs of basic components: 

• romantic love = passion + intimacy.
• companionate love = intimacy + commitment 
• fatuous love = passion + commitment. 

Of course, the truest and strongest of all is consummate love, which consists of all three components.

There’s evidence that when looking for a fling, the body wins over the face on a physical attraction basis. The opposite is true, however, for those who are looking for a long-term relationship partner.

Long-Term couples with deep, strong connections can successfully soothe each other in stressful situations or when one of them experiences pain simply by holding hands.

When you fall for someone you probably won’t be able to avoid the butterflies flying, dancing and fooling around in your stomach. They’re caused by adrenaline, which floods your body during flight-or-fight response situations.

As early as the 1870s, Darwin proposed that pupils expand during heightened attention and focus. This is indeed true, as this occurs when gazing at an object of desire or beloved one, even if it‘s only a picture or a video. Moreover, people with dilated pupils themselves look more attractive.

The eyes are the mirrors of our souls, as they say, so there’s probably no surprise that simply looking into each others’ eyes can make us fall for each other, even if we don’t know about each other. It has been proven that when someone is gazing at you, the person’s body produces a chemical called phenylethylamine, which is associated with the fight-or-flight response. So if you decide to continue looking at each other, you’re asking for Cupid’s arrow.

Love Is All That Matters. The participants’ lifelong experiences revealed that happiness and life fulfillment revolved around love or simply searching for love.