Why Do We Fall in Love?

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher

The Three Stages of Love

Lust

Not surprisingly, the lust stage centers around sexual craving. Lovers have a frequent and urgent desire for intercourse, and think about sex constantly. Some relationships end at the lust stage, but many develop into romantic love.

Romantic Love

Without romantic love, we would have no poets. Romantic love is a refinement of the lust stage, and centers on a specific partner. This stage features intense feelings of desire, emotional highs and lows, and obsessive thoughts of the loved one.

Long-term Love

The final stage of love is long-term attachment. During this stage, partners settle into emotional stability. Tempestuous drives and emotions give way to feelings of calm, comfort and security.

Prairie Voles in Love

About 3% of mammals have the ability to form relationships and fall in love. In a study at Emory University, Georgia, researchers found that prairie voles go through the same stages of love and relationship bonding as humans.

In the first stage, these small furry rodents copulate like maniacs for about twenty-four hours. Once the wild sex is over, each prairie vole associates the scent of the other with the pleasure of copulation. They become committed partners.

In the romantic stage, they groom each other obsessively and spend every moment together, ignoring other potential mates.

In the final, long-term stage, they settle into parenting roles and prepare for the birth of pups. The male becomes aggressive and defends the female. When the pups arrive, both male and female are affectionate parents.

The prairie vole bonds with its partner and mates for life. Its cousin, the meadow vole, goes from one partner to another. The two species are 99% genetically identical. Why does one fall in love, and the other not?

Love is an Addiction

Feelings of love originate in the ventral pallidum, also known as the pleasure center of the brain. The ventral pallidum is also responsible for addiction. In fact, the brain of a person in love is identical to the brain of someone who’s just snorted coke.

It all comes down to a simple pleasure principle.

Humans need to eat, drink and copulate in order to survive. The brain rewards its human for appropriate actions by releasing the chemical dopamine, which causes high levels of pleasure. When a human has sex, the reward is euphoria. Without the reward, humans wouldn’t bother having sex, and the species would perish.