Love is surely one of the greatest forces in the human universe. It has shaped our history and built civilisations. It has given us some of the most beautiful art the world has ever seen (and some of the worst if you factor in my teenage poetry about Keanu Reeves). Love is a primary motivator in our lives, something we all search for and mourn the loss of.
As an historian, I have studied and researched sexuality for most of my professional career, and I know just how significant love has been in determining our history. What would British history look like if Henry VIII hadn’t fallen desperately in love with Anne Boleyn and was prepared to break with the Roman Catholic Church to marry her? How would Egyptian history look if Queen Cleopatra and Mark Antony hadn’t fallen in love and waged a war against Rome? Academically, I know how powerful love is. So, imagine my surprise when my tween-age goddaughter stumped me with a very simple question: “How do you know when you are in love?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. How do you know? It seems like it should be obvious, but I don’t think it is. There is no love litmus test you can take to find out. No certificate arrives in the mail to let you know that what you are feeling is officially love. How do you know when your feelings for someone have shifted from, “I like you quite a lot” to, “I love you?” I might sound like Spock, trying to understand this human feeling you call love, but I’m serious. How do you know when you are in love?
The fact I study this as a subject but cannot adequately explain the experience of it to an 11-year-old vexed me, and I was determined to find out the answer. The first thing I needed to do was try and get to grips with what love is.
According to anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, love is about pair bonding. That might not sound very romantic, but millions of years of evolution have created a powerful need to attach to someone to share resources, raise young, and increase everyone’s odds of survival. No one is going to put that on a Hallmark card, but that’s really what love is all about: teaming up to survive.
Knowing we are hardwired to fall in love actually makes me feel a bit better about it all. Love is often very confusing, but when you learn it’s really about sharing snacks, it starts to make a bit more sense.
Did you know that love will show up in an MRI machine? It might sound counterintuitive to attempt to apply rational, scientific study to something as mysterious and subjective as love, but the results are extremely useful when it comes to understanding romantic attachments.
In 2005, researchers from Stony Brook University scanned the brains of seven men and 10 women who reported being intensely in love in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The team found that when participants looked at a photograph of their beloved, the midbrain’s ventral tegmental area (VTA) lit up. This is the area of the brain that controls our most basic needs, such as eating and drinking. So being in love really is a very primal survival instinct.
But does any of this help to explain how you know when you are in love if you don’t have an MRI machine handy? We are raised on stories that tell us that love is going to arrive like a lightning bolt. I wanted to tell my goddaughter this version of events, but I don’t think it does. In my experience, love is something gradual and much quieter than the movies would have us believe. It is something that sneaks up on you, almost unannounced.
Maybe I am just a terrible pessimist, but I don’t believe in love at first sight. I don’t believe in soulmates either. Am I romantically jaded? Perhaps, but when it comes to love, we have overly romanticised romance.
You might be reading this and thinking “well, I fell in love with my partner instantly!” But I don’t think you did. I think you fell in lust at first sight. According to research, we humans can evaluate a suitable sexual partner in less than a second (0.10 seconds, to be exact.) I certainly believe in that. I know immediately if I fancy someone and would be happy to take them home, but that’s not love. In fact, my limbic system’s skill at selecting a sexual partner that I would also be happy to introduce to my mother leaves much to be desired.
There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of love at first sight, but it’s not borne out by the science. One 2017 study published in Personal Relationships investigated the phenomena of love by surveying 396 participants online and in person, and concluded that love at first sight is “not a distinct form of love, but rather a strong initial attraction”.
What’s more, this paper found that couples who reported falling in love instantly were most likely sharing a “memory confabulation construed by couples to enhance their relationship”. In other words, they really fancied each other and fell in love later, but telling everyone this was love at first sight made them feel good.
It’s very easy to confuse an intense initial attraction with love – I’ve done it myself. Anyone who has been through the emotional turmoil of crushing on someone can attest to the intensity of that experience. There is only one known cure for such an infatuation: actually getting to know the person you are fixated on. Love is about commitment and intimacy, whereas a crush is quite superficial and (hopefully) short-lived.
Anthropologist Helen E Fisher has spent her career researching love and proposed that romantic love can be broken down into three categories: lust, attraction, and attachment. It’s the attachment bit that I would happily call being in love, hopefully with a hefty dollop of lust and attraction left over.
Fisher defines the attachment stage as “the maintenance of close social contact in mammals, accompanied in humans by feelings of calm, comfort, and emotional union with a mate”. Each stage is distinct and has its own “discrete constellations of neural correlates”, but they are not independent of one another and there is a lot of overlap. Once you have waded through the heady haze of lust and the giddy thrill of being attracted to someone, if you are left with a quiet, but powerful urge just to be with someone, that’s love. I don’t think it is dramatic fireworks or what Shakespeare called “a madness most discreet”; it’s quieter and more enduring than that.
When I think about the handful of people who I can confidently say I was in love with, there was no earth-shaking moment where the skies opened, and angels sounded their trumpets. I almost wish there was, especially if they could do the same thing when you have fallen out of love with that person, just to give you a heads up.
For me, realising I was in love was a very gradual process of allowing someone in and finding that I really liked having them around. It was slow, like easing myself into a hot bath. There were no bluebirds singing or big musical number, just the dawning realisation of: “Oh! I actually love you.”
And what about falling out of love? What does the science have to say about that? This is actually quite an under-researched area, which is baffling to me. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could understand why we can go from thinking someone is the best human on the planet to wanting to shoot them into outer space?
What we do know is that once you are no longer in love the brain’s pleasure centres are no longer stimulated by that person like they once were. All those yummy hormones that had you enthralled dry up and you no longer feel that primal attachment. Quite why this happens is not yet fully understood.
Comedian George Burns once said: “Love is a lot like a backache. It doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.” It might not show up in an X-ray, but we now know that it will show up in an MRI machine. Of course, knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to explain to an 11-year-old how anyone knows when they are in love.
Slightly defeated, but armed with a lot of information about anthropology and MRI scanning, I called my goddaughter to tell her that I still didn’t have the answer.
“Oh, don’t worry, auntie Katie,” she beamed. “I’ve worked it out for myself. You get a flower, and you pull its petals off, and ask if you are in love, or if you’re not, and if it stops on a petal that says you are, that’s how you know you are in love!”
Maybe in the end, that’s as good an answer as any.