What Happens In Your Brain When You Fall In Love

Love is a confusing thing. We're not just talking about the love we know your mum has for you, but the kind of love that is very much more complicated. She sat beside you in Commerce. Not entirely unlike sticking your hand in a plug socket, something crazy went through you. Drunkenly you got the score in a week later at a 21st. There was something infinitely more satisfying about this experience. It was amazing. She was amazing. She was the one you actually wanted to see again. You wanted to impress her, she made you nervous. She wrecked your head, she gave regular head. She was the one. You became lame. You felt like what you were experiencing was extremely new and exciting but actually (and thankfully) being in Love is quite common.

In the video below, from the American Chemical Society, psychologist Abigail Marsh from Georgetown University describes the process: "Some of the reason that love feels good is because a lot of the feel-good hormones are involved. Dopamine is the reward-seeking — energized, excited — neurotransmitter in the striatum that is definitely involved in feeling in love."

These hormones work in the brain to make us feel good. For example, in the monogamous, mates-for-life prairie voles, the act of mating releases a ton of oxytocin and dopamine. Like other reactions that cause a large dopamine release — like cocaine — that action of being with that specific mate is then regarded as "rewarding."

"Our best guess is that humans are probably built similarly," Marsh says. "People who excite romantic feelings in us probably also trigger increases in oxytocin, which results in this increase in dopamine when you find that person that you want to stick with."

There's still a little mystery to the process, though. What sets off these love feelings — who you fall in love with  — differs from person to person. How this chemical avalanche is triggered, we don't know.