"Why is it so painful when romance goes wrong? Blame the wiring of your brain and the harsh realities of evolution", says anthropologist *Helen Fisher.
Emptiness, hopelessness, fear, fury: almost everyone endures the agony of romantic rejection at some point in their lives. Why do we suffer so? Sorrow and anger are metabolically expensive and time consuming. Why didn’t humanity evolve a way to *shrug off romantic loss and easily renew the quest to a suitable reproductive partner?
I have been studying romantic love for 10 years or so and have come to see it as an evolutionary adaptation. The ability to fall in love evolved because those who focused their courtship attention on a preferred partner saved time and energy and improved their chances of survival and reproduction.
Unfortunately, the same applies to love’s darker side. We humans are soft-wired to suffer terribly when we are rejected by someone we adore- for good evolutionary reasons.
The fact that intense, early-stage romantic passion is associated with areas rich in dopamine suggested to us that romantic love is not, in fact, an emotion, but primarily a motivational state designed to make us pursue a preferred partner. Indeed, romantic love appears to be a drive as powerful as hunger.
But we weren’t interested in just the love-dovey side of romance. We wanted to understand every aspect. So in 2001 we began scanning the brains of people who were suffering the trauma of a recent rejection in love.
Even before the results come in, there is a lot of we can say about the biology of rejection which suggests that it is an evolved response with specific functions. Psychiatrists have long divided romantic rejection into two phases: “protest” and “resignation/despair”. During the protest phase, deserted lovers become obsessed with winning back the object of their affections. They agonise over what went wrong and how to rekindle the flame. They make dramatic, often humiliating, appearances at their lover’s home or workplace, then *storm out, only to return to berate or plead anew. They phone, email and write letter. They revisit mutual haunts and mutual friends. And alas, as the adversity intensifies, so does the romantic passion. This phenomenon is so common in the psychological literature(and in life) that I coined a term for it-frustration attraction. When romantic love is thwarted, the lover just love harder.
What brain systems might underlie these odd behaviours? Psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, all of the University of California, San Francisco, have argued that protest is a basic mammalian response to the rupturing of any social tie. They believe it is associated with dopamine, as well as with the closely related neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Elevated levels of both these chemical lead to heightened alertness and stimulate the forlorn animal to call for help and search for its abandoner-generally its mother.
The rising level of dopamine may help explain the biology of frustration attraction. Since our research suggests that the dopamine system is activated during early-stage romantic love, one would think that as dopamine activity increased during protest the rejected lover would feel even greater passion. And another brain mechanism* kick in during the protest phase that could add to this frustration attraction- the stress system. In the short term, stress triggers the production of dopamine and norepinephrine and suppresses serotonin activity, that heady combination of neutransmitters that I maintain in my book, Why We Love, is associated with romantic love.
What irony! As the beloved slips away, the brain networks and chemicals that most likely create the potent feelings of love increase.
The protest phase of rejection may also trigger activity in the brain’s panic system. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University of Ohio believes that this brain network generates that well known “separation anxiety” response in infant mammals abandoned by their mother. When their mother leaves, infants become troubled. They express their alarm with a pounding heart, sucking gestures and distress calls.
Yet another brain system often becomes active as one protests against the departure of a lover: anger. Even when the departing lover severs the relationship with honestly and compassion, and honours social and parental obligations, many rejected lovers swing violently from heartbreak to fury. Pshychologist Reid Meloy of the University of California, San Diego, calls this reaction “ abandonment rage”. I use a different term: “love hatred”. Whatever you call it, it’s a curious reaction. Hate and rage don’t generally entice a lover to return. Why does love turn to hate?
At first I assumed that hate was the opposite of love. But it isn’t. The opposite of love is indifference. Moreover, it occurred to me that love and anger might be linked in the brain, and indeed they are. The basic rage network is closely connected to centres in the prefrontal cortex that anticipate rewards, including the reward of winning a loved. In fact, experiments in animals have shown how intimately these reward and rage circuits are intertwined. Stimulate a cat’s reward circuits and it feels intense pleasure. Withdraw the stimulation and it bites. This common response to unfulfilled expectations is know as the “frustration-aggression hypothesis”.
So romantic love and love hatred are probably well connected in the brain. And when the drive to love is thwarted, the brain turns passion into fury.
Why did our ancestors evolve brain links that enable us to hate the one we cherish? Rage is not good for your health: it elevates blood pressure, places stress on the heart and suppresses the immune system. So love hatred must have evolved to solve some crucial reproductive problems. Among these, I now believe that it developed to enable jilted lovers to extricate themselves from dead-end love affairs and start again.
Sadly, abandonment rage does not necessarily extinguish love. In a study of 124 dating couples, psychologists Bruce Ellis of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and Neil Malamuth of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that romantic love and feelings of anger are independent, and can operate simultaneously. Hence, you can be terribly angry but still be very much in love.
Eventually, however, the jilted lover* gives up. Then he or she must deal with new forms of torture: resignation and despair. Drugged by the potent liquor of sorrow, they cry, lie in bed, stare into space, drink too much or hole up and watch TV. Feelings of protest and anger or the desire for reconciliation sometimes resurface, but mostly the just feel deep melancholy.
Resignation and despair are well documented in other mammalian species. When infant mammals are abandoned by their mother, first they protest and panic. Later they slump into what psychologists call the “despair response”.
Despair has been associated with several different networks in the brain. One is the reward system. As the abandoned partner realizes that the expected reward will never come, the dopamine-making cells in the midbrain* scale down their activity. And diminishing levels of dopamine produce lethargy, despondency and depression. The stress system also plays a part. As the stress of abandoned “wears on, it suppresses the activity of dopamine and other potent neurotranmitters, contributing to feelings of depression.
Like abandoned rage, the despair response seems counterproductive. Why waste time and energy moping? Some scientists now believe that depression evolved millions of years ago as a coping mechanism. Theories on the subject abound. One I particularly like has been proposed by anthropologist Edward Hagen of Humboldt University in Berlin, biologists Paul Watson and Paul Andrews of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and psychiatrist Andy Thomson of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. They argue that the high metabolic and social cost of depression is actually benefit: depression is an honest, believable signal to others that something is desperately wrong. It is a cry for help which compels stressed people to request support in times of intense need.
As a result, we are built to suffer terribly when love fails-first to protest the departure and try to win the beloved back, and later to give up utterly, * dust ourselves off and redirect our energy to fall in love again. We are likely to find evidence of any combination of these the myriad motivations and emotions as we examine the rejected brain in love.
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