What is romantic love?

Romantic love is a power full physiological need, an urge, a motivation, an instinct the evolved
specifically to enable men and women to court and win a preferred mating partner said by the
“Love expert”, author and presenter of BBC world service love series Dr Helen Fisher

Attraction is a feeling of liking someone, and often being sexually interested in them and with
given time attraction leads to romantic love.
The three stages of falling in love by helen fisher
Lust, Attraction and Attachment

Lust

When you’re in the stage of lust, you feel physically attracted and drawn to the object of your
affection. You want to seduce them or be seduced. There may be an element of mystery or an
intensity that makes things exciting. Imagine a hot one night stand! Lust is driven by the
hormones testosterone in men and estrogen in women. Lust occurs across species and may be
part of the basic drive to find a partner to spread our genes with. But lust is different than love.
Injecting men with testosterone makes them desire a potential lover more, but not necessarily fall
in love in any lasting way

Attraction

In the second stage, you begin to obsess about your lover and crave his presence. Your heart
races and you don’t feel like sleeping or eating. You may even get sweaty palms. You feel a
surge of extra energy and excitement as you fantasize about the things you’ll do together. These
feelings are created by three chemicals: norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin.

Dopamine - Increased dopamine is associated with motivation, reward, and goal-directed

behavior, hence the drive to pursue your loved one or create them in fantasy if you can’t be with
them. Dopamine also creates a sense of novelty. Your loved one seems exciting, special and
unique to you and you want to tell the world about his special qualities.

Norepinephrine - Norepinephrine is responsible for the extra surge of energy and racing heart
that you feel, as well as the loss of appetite and desire for sleep. It puts your body into a more
alert state in which you are ready for action.

Serotonin - Scientists think serotonin probably decreases at this stage, but more studies need to
be done. Low levels of serotonin are found in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and are
thought to cause obsessive thinking. In one Italian study of 60 students, those who were recently
in love and those with OCD both had less serotonin transporter protein in their blood than regular
(not recently in love) students.

Attachment

Attachment involves wanting to make a more lasting commitment to your loved one. This is the
point at which you may move in together, get married, and/or have children. After about 4 years
in a relationship, dopamine decreases and attraction goes down. If things are going well, it gets
replaced by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, which create the desire to bond, affiliate
with, and nurture your partner. You want to cuddle and be close and share your deepest secrets
with her. You plan and dream together.

Oxytocin - Oxytocin is a hormone released during orgasm (and during childbirth and breast-
feeding). This may be the reason why sex is thought to bring couples closer together and be the
“glue” that binds the relationship. There is a dark side to oxytocin as well. It seems to play a role
in needy, clinging behaviors and jealousy.

Vasopressin - Scientists learned about the role of vasopressin in attachment by studying the
prairie vole, a small creature that forms monogamous bonds like humans do. When male prairie
voles were given a drug that suppresses vasopressin, they began neglecting their partners and not
fighting off other male voles who wanted to mate with her.

Love and attraction and its differences by Mark J Hamilton

There's a hairline between attraction and love, but they are never the same. Attraction can happen
any time of the day, while love is something that takes time to grow. Who said said it's "love at
first sight" clearly never heard of attraction before. The initial good feeling you experience when
you meet someone is "attraction" not "love". Love is pure while attraction can simply fade away.

To put simply, love entails attraction, but attraction can exist without love. You can simply say
you're attracted to someone because of their beauty, talents and personality, but love goes
beyond that. You love someone permanently their faults and limitations. Two people who are
attracted to each other can either fall in lust or love. If it's true love, it goes beyond sex and mere
physical magnetism. With love, you do your best to make the other person happy, while
attraction is mainly focusing more on your own needs and needs, to fulfill self-satisfaction.

Attraction is a step towards love. It takes time yes, but the more you open your heart to the
possibility, the greater chance it is for you to make it grow to something more meaningful than
just a plain lure of your carnal instincts. If you accept someone despite his flaws and
shortcomings, then that can be love. If you only want to be with someone during the good times
and then disappear during the bad times, then maybe it's just petty attraction.

Positive and negative effects of love

POSITIVE IMPACT OF LOVE:

 Health: Various studies have indicated that loving someone or having someone to love can
help contribute to good health. Each time you express your love to that person, your brain
release serotonin which is a feel-good hormone. So yes, with more love to go around, your
health is bound to improve over the long run.
 Personal ties: love can help you form close personal bonds with others; as a species, we
happen to be quite sociable and often form various relationships in the course of a single
lifetime. And that’s why love or feelings of deep mutual affection that you share with others
can help you cement that relationship and even help make it permanent.
 Relationships: Love can help cement relationships and this is one of the reasons why most
married couples are advised to renew their vows after a certain period to affirm their love for
each other.
NEGATIVE IMPACT OF LOVE:

 Depression: love is a powerful feeling, one that can make you feel as if you were floating on
air and in case of unrequited love; it can push you into a deep depression. Love, surprisingly
is one of the main causative factors behind many young suicides and yes love can be fickle
and cruel but that’s just characterization. The fact of the matter is that love is a powerful
emotion and one that impacts nearly every fiber of your being, so naturally, with unrequited
love, you may run the risk of becoming clinically depressed.
 Stress: Love has also been known to cause stress, especially during the early moments in a
relationship. As most couples start a new relationship, they often face stress as each tries to
adjust to the other person in the living room, in the bedroom and in their very lives.
Sometimes the stress can even cause the relationship to falter and break apart. Similarly,
unrequited love can cause you to experience high stress.
 Suicides: Several young men and women commit suicide because of love; the reasons could
vary from unrequited love to being cheated or betrayed by a loved one. This often causes
others to experience hopelessness, a feeling of shock and despair as if life no longer holds
any meaning. This is why the number of love suicides keeps jumping up each year with nary
an end in sight.
 Psychological effects: Love is a profound feeling, one that can even help alter your brain
chemistry. So to claim that love can affect one’s mental health would indeed be an
understatement. Love can literally make a person go mad; often when one person loses the
love of his life, the same emotion can drive him stark raving mad. Experiencing the short end
of the stick as far as love is concerned – from the end of a relationship to unrequited love,
can cause you to experience a whole range of negative emotions, stemming from depression
to a loss of self-esteem. All of these can affect you psychologically and even impair your
cognitive abilities.