The Building Blocks Of A Lasting Love

One of the most complicated experiences in life, love cannot be precisely defined, but some basic indications help to characterize the feeling. Love is a very deep, passionate affection one person has for another or a relationship of the same nature that implies a unique intensity of emotion. It requires an especially strong connection and compatibility between two people, usually identified by a total understanding and respect for each other and a fundamental similarity in ideology. Love can also be seen in the way it alters people’s normal behavior; when someone is in love, the object of their affection seems like the most important thing in the world, and they do extreme things for that feeling to be requited. Love cannot easily be

In the movie Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz, two different kinds of love are exposed. The love relationship between Ilsa Lund and Rick is a more passionate relationship while the one between Ilsa and Victor Laszlo is more intimate. Love is composed of different feelings and because of that it can be expressed, as seen in Casablanca, in different ways. “The Intimate Relationship Mind”, a text by Garth J. O. Fletcher and Megan Stenswick, helps support that claim providing a scientific background on how love is shaped by those different feelings. It says that “love is composed of three distinct and basic components that each represent evolved adaptations; namely, intimacy, commitment,

The article '' love: the right chemistry'' by Anastasia Toufexis efforts to explain the concept of love from a scientific aspect in which an amateur will understand. Briefly this essay explains and describe in a scientific way how people's stimulation of the body works when you're falling in love. The new scientific researches have given the answer through human physiology how genes behave when your feelings for example get swept away. The justification for this is explained by how the brain gets flooded by chemicals. The author expresses in one point that love isn't just a nonsense behavior nor a feeling that exhibits similar properties as of a narcotic drug. This is brought about by an organized chemical chain who controls different

The human idea of love is quite possibly the most misunderstood in today’s society. Love can be between a man and woman, mother/father and their kids, or even really good friends. However, these relationships of love go through many interactions and stages to start and progress. Many psychological events must occur and be worked through in order to be successful. All relationships must endure the five perspectives of human behavior. These perspectives are biological, learning, social and cultural, cognitive, and psychodynamic influences.

Love is the basis of our existence. It affects our every moment, dreams, and hope for the future. Love has caused wars, ended lives, toppled governments and has been expounded on by poets, musicians, philosophers, and literates throughout the centuries. Research from Syracuse University shows that it takes about a fifth of a second to fall in love and it affects almost every part of our body. Our brain releases dopamine, a natural chemical that gives us energy and optimism. Love is similar to a drug and can become an addiction because it affects our brain much like other drugs by triggering the dopamine reward part of our brain. Love even affects a persons’ heart when a person is in love their blood pressure will lower and has been

1. According to Robert Sternberg, love goes through 3 stages of love he calls “The three dimension of love; passion, intimacy, and commitment. Sternberg believes when you go through the three dimension of love, there are also seven different type of love. The seven different type of love is liking, infatuation, empty love, romantic love, fatuous love, companionate love, and consummate love. The first dimension of love is passion; it is the process where we first start falling in love with a partner. Passion is what I call the “getting to know each other” stage of a relationship. The second part of the three dimension of love is intimacy. Intimacy is when you feel close to a person whether it’s emotionally or physically. It is also a stage where you share your deepest secret about you to the person who you feel that you’re in love with. Intimacy is where you feel the closest in your relationship. The third and final stage of the three dimension of love is commitment. Commitment is the phase where people decide that being with that one person is enough and they would spend the rest of their life being together that leads to marriage and children. I feel that Sternberg’s dimension of love is associated to Erikson’s intimacy vs. isolation. “Adults seek someone with whom to share their lives in an enduring and self-sacrificing commitment. Without such commitment, they risk profound aloneness and isolation.” (Berger, p.525) I believe

In the excerpt from “Love 2.0” by Barbara Fredrickson, the feeling of love is explained to be more biological in nature. Love is often seen as an intense emotion that connects two or more people through trust and communication. It can click into place after a lengthy conversation or just a shared glance. While this may seem dramatic, Fredrickson offers her own biological perspective to explain these phenomena in a more grounded sense. These biological reasonings aide her in proving that love is not unconditional or exclusive, but rather shared with all that give off a positive resonance. It is also made possible through the synchronized flow of the two people’s brains, the release of the hormone, oxytocin, and the healthy control of the vagal. The combination of these parts enables a person to experience this feeling of love and receive it from others as well. It is important to understand these scientific reasonings because they show how people can obtain this deep love with multiple people by just listening to their bodies. The different biological processes enable people to love better by creating a deeper connection in conversation, a strong sense of trust, and providing the skills people need to acquire the love their bodies crave.

“The third ingredient is decision and commitment. Sternberg observed that when many people speak of love, they refer more to a conscious decision than to a feeling state. Emotions come and go, but commitments based on decisions remain constant unless they are deliberately revoked” (Baumeister & Bushman, 2014).

In Helen Fisher’s book about romantic love she describes the chemistry behind the human feelings of passion and romance. She hits upon major themes such as why we love, how men and women vary in their romantic feelings, love at first sight, etc. Her scientific study lasted over six years and she collected over 144 pictures of brain activity of about forty men and women who were in love. She describes how she believes love is a physiological need instead of a random emotion.

After people have been in love for some time, the body develops a tolerance to the pleasurable chemicals. The attraction phase gives way to the attachment phase, when the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin permeate the brain and create feelings of well-being and security.

Chemical reactions in the brain are responsible for feelings of love and lust. During periods of lust, both men and women release higher than normal levels of testosterone, and dopamine levels skyrocket in the pleasure center. Norepinephrine, another neurohormone involved, is responsible for that excitatory rush. Within the limbic system, the hypothalamus is accountable for sexual sensations; removal of this structure fully impedes sexual desire and performance. On the other hand, other brain regions and hormones react to love. The hormone, oxytocin, drives feelings of comfort, security, and love. Better known as the "cuddle hormone", the release of this neurotransmitter is amplified with skin-to-skin contact, and even social interactions without

It’s easy to get swept off your feet by an instant feeling of love for another person. In fact, you don’t have to put much effort into falling in love; it just happens. And it can bring with it a host of changes to your brain that can give you a feeling of euphoria or manic intensity that you may not be used to. Falling in love often leads to changes in appetite, changes in sleep patterns and changes in energy levels. You become focused on the object of your affection and you can’t wait until you can see them and talk to them again when you are separated. Because your brain is operating on overdrive, everything

Just as Mcgregor and Bowen (2012) demonstrated the effect of oxytocin on addictive behaviors, Ross and Young (2009) show how oxytocin effects and regulates affilitative behaviors. Up until about 50 years ago, the role of oxytocin was mostly focused on regulating female behavior and reproduction (parturition and lactation). More recent studies have shown a more generalized role for oxytocin in modulating affilitative behavior in both sexes. This was proven by examining the behavioral effects of oxytocin, which is formed by the plasticity in the neural expression of the oxytocin receptor. Oxytocin plays an important role in mother-infant attachment, and since mating results in vaginocervical stimulation, which releases oxytocin in the brain,

Simply put, love is mysterious. As humans have evolved, it arguably remains one of the least understood concepts in existence. As Helen Fisher quoted Emily Dickinson, “Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you. You lose your sense of self.” The successful neurologists studied the effects of the human love for years and concluded that love propels individuals to often follow their heart instead of the less spontaneous route that the mind would suggest.

Study shown that couples who want to make their relationship permanent (e.g. through marriage) tend to have higher level of commitment than passion, while couples who never thought to make their relationship permanent tend to have higher level of passion (Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, & Campos, 2006). This shows that commitment is a much important factor when transforming people’s bonding to a long-term relationship, but not passion. Even if dating couples are married base on the infatuation, such passionate love may not last long. As love at first sight is a kind of love that only involves intense passion, people may idealize their partner when getting along with each other (Ben-Ze'ev, 2000), which means people are often in love with the idealized image but not the real one. However, such situation may not hold long. Study found that the amount of passion between couples who had intensely passionate courtships decline very quickly over the first twenty-four months after reaching the peak level due to marriage (Niehuis, Reifman, Feng, & Huston, 2014). Once the passion fade and the couple still did not develop sufficient level of intimacy and commitment, which is an important factor for long-term relationship (Sternberg, 2007), to maintain their bonding, the couple may divorce. These research studies reflect that although love at first sight has