The of Love
All of our lives we are accompanied by the need for food and water, for sleep, for maintaining body temperature; so too, it seems we are also accompanied by the need for love. For our survival, interaction and connection to another is essential. The word for this interaction and connection is relationship. Without interaction and connection, we cannot feed or eat, maintain our body temperature or sleep safely as youngsters. We cannot reproduce. To be in connection, in relationship, is a basic physiological need.
To encourage this basic physiological need to be fulfilled and maintained across a long childhood and enable relationships to expand as we learn to work together as family and village, to find others with whom to connect and reproduce, nature has provided us with a cocktail of chemicals and brain structures to create ‘emotional’ threads and ties. These weave connections beyond those of pure physiological need, providing a place of safety to return to, even if at times only conceptual, that is, held in mind. We call this need Love.
Evolution has provided us with two intertwined loves.
The need for love, and its role, comes in different forms, and actually in as many forms as we have types of relationships!
We have maternal/paternal love, social attachment (including family, friends and furry friends), spiritual love, romantic/ sexual love, reproduction, and around we go again. So, its true, “love is all around us…”.
Love in its various guises builds us and maintains us, just as food and water does.
Love arrives not only in the romantic form, although in western cultures this tends to be our focus. And this perhaps is our challenge. By not fully embracing the importance and vitality of the other forms of love, we do not always create the time for them, the space for them. The time and proximity needed for our senses to enjoy direct interaction, that ‘serve and return’ of sensory cues with another. To hear a voice, to touch, to look into each other’s eyes, dance together, eat together, sing together – these are the moments that create relationships, when our rhythms are synchronised and our chemicals can do their job, connecting, trusting, rewarding. These are the moments that support all types of love, bringing safety, comfort and joy through a social connection, providing the opportunity for growth, learning and the medicine for stress, in all its guises.
Stress can change the way we sense the world, be it hyper or hypo sensitivities, bringing forth associated behaviours in pursuit of the goal to keep us safe. So too does its antidote, love. Love changes the way we sense the world, it’s goal to attach us to another and keep us safe through that connection.
Both stress and love then have a similar goal, to keep you safe. And they can even feel similar, especially in the first throws of love where, as in stress adrenaline and norepinephrine are produced and serotonin levels drop. Increased adrenaline and norepinephrine are why your heart beats faster, your skin flushes, your tummy has butterflies. Reduced serotonin alters our appetite and increases intrusive thoughts. You can’t get your new love out of your mind. In early stages of love, we can become obsessed with small details and think about someone constantly. When stress creates these responses, we call it anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder!
But ultimately stress & love create and carve different paths for our safety. Stress with its cocktail of adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol keeps us safe in the face of immediate danger, but when overactive and not neurobiologically blunted by the presence of active love, stress exhausts the brain and body and reduces opportunity for social interaction, sense of safety, comfort, joyfulness and learning.
Love on the other hand shifts us from the early adrenaline highs to our cuddle chemicals, oxytocin and vasopressin, our long-term bonding chemicals. Instead of cortisol coursing through us, it’s dopamine, our reward chemical that settles and our serotonin increases, supporting our long-term attachments.
These chemicals of love are literally created and maintained through close interaction and connection with others. The chemical concoction of love supports us to build a neurobiology that senses safety by trusting the interactions and connections the social world offers. It creates a path to safety via relationships; these will read your need and offer support, providing co-regulation. Such relationships give us confidence to go out and explore, learn and adapt in ways that bring agency and the ability to connect and share with others.
Like the food we need every day to survive, better still if we can access healthy food for us to thrive, we need access to relationships to provide at the very least morsels of love for us to survive, but preferably, whole dollops of love, especially early in all relationships for us to thrive. As with food we need top-ups, so too our love chemicals also need reviving. To do this we need time together, to attune and reattune, to touch, to talk, to look into each other’s eyes, to share moments and yes eat, drink and dance together again.
When we don’t receive and experience love, especially early in life, or we lose those we co-loved and co-regulated, stress has no antidote. It is allowed to run free, overwhelming us, producing its whirlpools of anxiety, anger, hopelessness.
The chemicals of love buffer us from stressors, resolve stressors, help us to grow in a way akin to food and drink. As a society we put enormous amounts of time, energy, resources of all kinds, into ensuring food and drink is available when and where it is needed.
Just imagine if we thought the same about love!
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