Falling in love: Difference between revisions

A “readiness” to enter a relationship is identified as an antecedent to falling in love, originally emphasized by the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik.^[15][16][17] Readiness is also likened to the idea of being “in love with love”.^[18] The process of falling in love can be seen as an interplay between both this readiness (on the one hand), and a potential partner’s appeal (on the other hand). Sometimes readiness can be so intense that a person falls in love with somebody who only has a minimal appeal. With lower readiness, the specific set of partner characteristics becomes more important.^[17]

Reik believed that unhappy people tend to be the most vulnerable to love, elaborating on a claim by Sigmund Freud that “happy people never make fantasies, only unsatisfied ones do”. Elaine Hatfield concurs, saying “the greater our need, the more grandiose our fantasies”.^[19]

An experiment by Hatfield found that college women whose self-esteem was lowered by negative feedback liked a man who asked them out on a date more than those women whose self-esteem was raised by positive feedback. The finding has been related as fitting a drive-reduction interpretation of reinforcement, that is, liking was greater for those that needed the ego boost of a potentially positive experience.^[20][15] Another important factor to readiness is loneliness.^[17][21][22] Phillip Shaver & Cindy Hazan argued that if people have many unmet social needs and are unaware, then a sign somebody is interested in them may become magnified into something quite unrealistic.^[21]

Readiness is described as heightening one’s susceptibility to limerence—the kind of passionate love (or “all-absorbing” infatuated love) which is commonly unrequited, and felt for somebody unreachable.^[17][21]

Falling in love is believed to follow mechanics similar to addiction, although not identically.^[29][30] One of the major differences is that the trajectories diverge, with the addictive aspects of romantic love tending to disappear over time in an intimate relationship.^[30]

By comparison, in a drug addiction, the detrimental aspects magnify with repeated drug use, turning into compulsions, a loss of control and a negative emotional state. It has been speculated that the difference could be related to oxytocin activity—present in romantic love, but not in addiction.^[30] Oxytocin seems to ameliorate the effects of drug withdrawal, and it might inhibit the more long-term, excessive effects of addiction.^[31]

A number of theories have been proposed for how addictions begin and perpetuate.^[32] A theory by Wolfram Schultz states that rather than encoding reward per se, dopamine encodes a “reward prediction error” (RPE): the difference between the predicted value of a reward, and the actual value upon receiving it (i.e. whether it was better than, equal to, or worse than expected).^[33][34] In this theory, RPE is part of a mechanism for reinforcement learning, which associates rewards with the cues which predicted them. An example of a reward-predicting cue is a lever used in an experiment, which opens a box with food (the reward).^[35] Rewards have to be surprising or unexpected for learning to occur, because (in other words) if there is no error then a current behavior can be maintained and will not change.^[35][33] An fMRI study found that people in relationships experienced brain activity in reward areas consistent with RPE, in response to having expectations about their partners’ appraisal of them either validated or violated.^[36]

Drugs of abuse (like cocaine) artificially overstimulating dopamine neurons, thus hijacking the mechanism by mimicking an RPE signal which is much stronger than could be produced naturally.^[33]

In the theory of “incentive sensitization” developed by Kent Berridge & Terry Robinson, repeated drug use renders the brain hypersensitive to drugs and drug cues, resulting in pathological levels of “wanting” to use drugs.^[37][30] The attribution of incentive salience “wanting” (what is attention-grabbing) follows a Pavlovian learning paradigm (i.e. classical conditioning). While “wanting” can apply innately to some unconditioned stimuli, it can also become attributed to a conditioned stimulus by pairing it with the receipt of a natural (innate) reward, thereby attributing incentive salience by Pavlovian association. When a conditioned stimulus is attributed incentive salience, it becomes a reinforcer too, being attractive and guiding motivated behavior towards reward, once encountered again.^[38] This cue-triggered “wanting” (by a conditioned stimulus) can even be so powerful that crack cocaine addicts sometimes “chase ghosts”, scrambling for white granules they know aren’t cocaine.^[38] For a person in love, reminder cues such as letters or photographs can also induce craving.^[39]

In the nascent phases of both addiction and attachment, when interactions with the desired object produce rewarding outcomes, dopamine is released in the nucleus accumbens shell which increases the salience of cues predicting the reward. In a “partner addiction” (unlike drugs of abuse), the sensory information being gathered is mostly social, for example, looks, touches, words, scents, body shape and face, or sexual experiences.^[29] Salience in response to social stimuli is believed to be modulated by oxytocin, which is projected to reward areas.^[40][41]

These different neurochemical systems interact, as a cooperation between dopamine (incentive salience), opioids (positive rewards) and oxytocin (enhancement from social cues). A positive feedback loop is created, where behavior and predictive cues then become positively reinforced, accumulating positive associations over time.^[29]