BoomerGirl Diary

A young man gazes at his date across the dinner table and starts a conversation with himself.

I’m falling for her, he thinks. She’s beautiful. Kind and thoughtful. Incredibly intelligent. I can’t get her out of my head.

It must be love.

Now, if he could hear his genes scoping her out, says Kansas University psychology professor Steve Ilardi, the internal dialogue might sound more like this:

Potential mate. Symmetrical features, therefore attractive. Largely free of parasites. Thoughtful, hence, relatively likely to be faithful.

It must be ... biology?

Not exactly what most people have in mind when they think about the great mysterious bond that for centuries has captivated poets, fueled wars and driven otherwise stable folks to behave like complete ninnies.

But alas, it’s true. In many ways, love can be explained by the utterly empirical discipline of science.

“It’s kind of unromantic,” Ilardi says. “While we think that we’re falling in love with people based on a set of considerations that are either quirky or magical or completely up to our own free will, on closer inspection it looks more like we’re falling in love based on a set of considerations that work in our genes’ best interests.”

So from an evolutionary perspective, romantic love is simply a means to an end: To draw two people together and keep them together long enough to mate and then care for their helpless baby, thus proliferating their gene pool.

Take that, Shakespeare.

Addicted to love

Fortunately, humans are wired to remain blissfully unaware of the rather basic motives of their genes, Ilardi says. In fact, the region of the brain that’s stimulated in the early stages of a relationship is the same area that becomes active when, say, someone reaches for a piece of chocolate or smokes a cigarette.

Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love” (2004), proposes that we fall in love in three stages, each involving a different set of chemicals.

First comes lust, driven by the hormones estrogen and testosterone. The sex drive motivates people to try a range of partners, she says.

Attraction follows. This is the aforementioned love-struck phase that makes people downright obsessive about their new object of affection. Everything about them is special, and they can do no wrong. Suddenly the smitten parties are consumed with an intense energy that enables them to walk all night and talk until dawn.

Biologically speaking, they’re addicted to one another.

Evolutionary drive

Fisher and her colleagues documented this in a 2005 study that analyzed brain images from 17 college students in the first weeks or months of new love. As the students looked at a picture of their beloved, the researchers scanned their brains with an MRI machine.

“We found activity in a little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, in a group of cells that actually make dopamine and then send it to several brain regions,” Fisher says. “This pathway through the brain is called the reward system. It’s the brain system that becomes active as you want something and you are highly motivated to get it.”

The results led Fisher to conclude that romantic love is basically a drive that evolved to make mating more efficient. After the libido leads us to a partner, she says, attraction helps us focus crucial mating time and attention on that person.

As a scientist, Fisher finds the chemistry of romantic love exhilarating, but she has encountered people who don’t want to know the mechanics because they’re afraid it will ruin the high.

“People kill for love. People die for love. It’s important to understand what this thing is,” she says. “I know an awful lot about romantic love, and it certainly hasn’t spoiled it for me.”

No love potion

After the initial rush subsides, the third phase, called attachment, begins — but only if the relationship is going to last. During this stage, the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin help lovers form long-term bonds — the kind that are useful when raising children.

Humans are among the 3 percent of mammals that are generally monogamous, Ilardi says, and it’s no coincidence that these hormones are not present in the other 97 percent of species.

Still, science knows much less about what keeps people together for the long haul. And besides, says KU psychology professor Omri Gillath, “one shouldn’t think that love is just its biological components, or a tool in the hands of evolution.”

“It’s much more complex than that,” he says.

So people should be highly skeptical, for instance, when a company touts its pheromone-laden perfume as a sure-fire way to attract a mate.

“There’s no love potion,” Gillath says.

Dennis Dailey, a sex therapist and retired Kansas University professor, acknowledges that the body’s chemistry plays a role in love, especially erotic love.

“But it’s more of an emotional bond, driven by the richness of what connectedness can mean,” says Dailey, who has been married 46 years. “What happens in mature, successful relationships — 50 percent of them go in the fricking toilet — but the ones with longevity, the thing that dominates them is balance.

“So the eroticism that drove early lustful connection is still there, but wraps into the relationship in a more balanced form. It’s like a leveling process.”