Why do we fall in love?

There are as many reasons for falling in love as there are people and circumstances. And it is hard to know exactly what another person means by falling in love. Are they talking about intense lust? (Usually). A feeling of deep connection and understanding? (Sometimes). Pleasant company and easy familiarity? (Often). An almost spiritual experience of rapture and wonder? (It happens). Preoccupation, even obsession with another person and profound fear of losing him or her? (Quite common).

So what am I telling you? Who wrote the book of love?

Well, lots of people and things did.

To begin, we should never forget that we are animals and are driven by instincts to reproduce that are part of our genetic code. These instincts are profound and powerful, and even though each individual plays them out in a slightly different way, they are always at work in us. Replicate your genes! That command is sent to us by our hormones, our emotions, our families, our society, our deepest selves.

Let’s look at how “love” affects us physically, first.

PUBERTY! Getting our bodies ready for adult reproduction is a complex and universal physical process. It is recognized in every society as a life transition, and various rituals have evolved to recognize it. In certain tribes adolescent males build towers tens of feet high, attach ropes of vines to the top of the tower and to their ankles, and jump off. Completing and surviving the jump is proof that they have become men - they have the courage, skill, and judgment that an adult male requires in their society.

All societies recognize the first menstruation in girls as the beginning of their reproductive lives. Sometimes this event is recognized by a slap in the face, or a close mother-daughter talk and tears. Sometimes the whole community dances and celebrates.

And here is how Nature makes sure that we do what she wants. Not only does adolescence mark the beginning of fertility, but also - how shall I say this - of horniness! (And, as many people have noted, our particular society does not deal with adolescent horniness at all well).

Yes, ladies and gents, lust rears its ugly head in a big way in adolescence. And lust is a primary mover for us in “falling in love”. No one falls in love and never wants to touch the other person. No one falls in love and says “I adore her but can’t stand to look at her”. And that is because lust is about getting together to replicate our genes.

Aside from “innate lust”, a number of physical factors contribute to sexual interest in each other. Studies have shown that the smell of another person may be strongly attractive, or not, depending on our individual biochemistry. It has been hypothesized that humans emit pheromones, which act as sexual signals. Women may emit more or more specific pheromones when they are ready to conceive, thus becoming more attractive to more men. Medical conditions or disease may affect how others perceive our sexual attractiveness. The enormous perfume industry directly addresses making us smell good to each other.

Societies also develop standards for what constitutes beauty and sexual attractiveness. Right now this country is touting very thin women as the most desirable. Most countries prefer women of more normal weight. All societies, however, base their standards of beauty, no matter how peculiar, on some idea of how a healthy, genetically desirable person looks. Standards of beauty or sexiness devolve from a search for a fertile, healthy mate.

So by virtue of needing to reproduce sexually we look around for attractive partners, fueled by our amazing primate lust. But as we all know, falling in love is much more complicated than combining the right genes.

There is a psychological component to love, and it is so powerful that it can - and does - prevent some of us from falling in love or reproducing. And sometimes, even if we do produce offspring, our psychological effects are such that we are unable to raise children to adulthood. It is in this realm that we see child abandonment, infanticide, abuse, and just bad parenting.

In their lyrical and profound book, “A General Theory of Love”, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon combine science and compassion as they examine love, loneliness, and relationships. They talk about the centrality of relationships in human life and the physical structures in the human brain that affect how we are in relationships. They show how we become predisposed to fall in love with certain kinds of people.

Everyone has heard that “You marry one of your parents”, or “There’s a perfect person for you somewhere”, or “I fell in love the moment I saw him”. Like all truisms, these are both true and false.

Part of what makes us fall in love are the emotional patterns we have laid down during our first years of life. From our relationships with our parents, as mere infants, we store “an impression of what love feels like“. We can’t remember this information, but it is put indelibly into our brains in the form of neural patterns, which UNCONSCIOUSLY affect all of our love and relationship behavior for the rest of our lives. We also attach to the kind of person our parents are, good or bad. So when we reach adolescence and begin preparing for reproduction, we are attracted by people like our parents - good or bad.

It is these unconscious patterns that cause us to fall in love - or not. And it is these unconscious patterns that determine whether love will be a happy or painful experience for us.

These patterns are physically based (in our brains) and psychologically manifested. They cause us to prefer the emotional patterns of the family we know, no matter how unsatisfying or destructive they may be. Our brains literally cannot recognize or resonate to other kinds of relationships. As Lewis et al say, “People target the mates who mesh with their own minds, and they do so with speed and precision that our smartest smart bombs are not sufficiently intelligent to envy.”

The cortex in our brains (which controls the higher functions and conscious thought) says, “I want to find a man who is kind, generous, and spends most of his time and energy on me”. The limbic system (which is where emotions and “implicit memory” reside) says, “I am passionately attracted to men like my cold and critical father”. This phenomenon is called limbic resonance when your encoding activates another’s and you begin the emotional feedback loop called a relationship.

The more primitive, emotional part of the brain wins every time.

Unless. Unless we can remodel our brains, our thinking, our feeling. This recoding of neural patterns can be accomplished through what used to be called a “corrective experience” in psychotherapy. It is the experience of someone understanding you and relating to you in a consistently different way over a long enough period of time such that your unconscious programming can change. “. . . One mammal can restructure the limbic brain of another”! People have relearned ways to love through relationships with friends, other relatives, and spiritual disciplines. As “A General Theory of Love” says:

A person . . . CAN encounter another by chance who will teach him what he needs to learn. . . . .Through the reach of their relationship . . . he can gently and incrementally dissuade his student from headlong flight down paths that terminate in sorrow. Because of the tremendous variability in the configuration of human hearts and the randomness that throws people together, such felicitous combinations are as inevitable as they are precious. Against the odds, as it has since the beginning, life finds a way.

All of us have things to learn about managing our feelings and conducting relationships. We fall in love, each with varying degrees of ability to love, and we are lucky if we find someone who can help us, as we help them, to love better and better as the years go by. We are each other’s salvation, through love. We are each other’s comfort, through love.

There is an infinity of reasons why we fall in love. There is an infinity of definitions of what love is. But for us, as humans, as animals, as living beings, love is necessary to our very survival. As the Beatles said more than 30 years ago,

“All you need is love, All together now, All you need is love, Love is all there is, Love is all there is.”

Suggested Reading

A Fine Romance Judith Sills A General Theory of Love T. Lewis, F. Amini, R. Lannon The Dance of Intimacy Harriet Lerner

Mary Symmes is a professional writer, speaker, and collaborator with women who want to extend their power in their lives.