- If love is a drug, I need rehab
- By Susan Maushart
- The Australian
- 17/02/2004 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: admin ( 100 articles in 2004 )
After years of recurring Colin Firth dreams, I finally had a different one last night. And you know what?
It's a lot more comfortable without the bustle. (I once had a real-life boyfriend who was into costume drama. It got old pretty fast. I called it quits once I realised that, if I didn't dress up, he'd have trouble maintaining his art direction. But I digress.)
When I am at the movies, I simply lust after Colin Firth. Which is easy, especially when he gets that confused little look between his eyebrows, and he looks just like - well, just like everybody else I've ever gone out with, actually. But when I am dreaming, I am ashamed to admit, I am in love with Colin Firth.
And I don't just mean I dream I am in love with him. I am in love with him. I can feel it. When I awake, I can even see it: a fine mist of dopamine and testosterone and norepinephrine suspended over the bedclothes - like a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, played at an all-night chemist.
In the latest version of the dream, Colin and I meet at the Fremantle Aquatic Centre. I spot him in front of the waterslide. We lock eyes, and I can feel something dragging me down, down, down. I knew I should have waxed! The pool is crowded with lesser mortals. But does this stop us from diving right in?
It does not. As we head for the Leisure Lane, my resistance - to chlorine, to Colin, to anything - vanishes.
I know with absolute conviction that I would follow him anywhere. Even to the stagnant end of the kiddie pool. (O, the madness! Oy, the germ count!) Is that the sound of my heart beating, I think to myself, or are the kids playing the soundtrack from Jaws again?
The point of the dream, of course, is that it's never safe to go back in the water. It's important to be reminded of that every now and again - fun, too, as long as you are careful to stay unconscious. That's probably one reason I've fallen so hard for Helen Fisher's new book, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. If you can't sign up for stroke correction with Colin - and I got there first, remember? - Why We Love is probably the next best thing. (Having said that, I'll confess that I haven't actually read the whole book yet. Then again, I haven't actually shagged Colin Firth yet, either. So what does that prove?)
Fisher, an anthropologist based at Rutgers University's Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in New Jersey, argues that love, like so much else in life worth having - from margarita mix to a McDonald's milkshake - is a largely chemical cocktail. "With orgasm," she explains, "levels of oxytocin go up in women and vasopressin in men". (I love it when anthropologists talk dirty.) These 'satisfaction hormones' give a sense of calm, peace and cosmic wellbeing - sort of like the Department of Homeland Security, but at a fraction of the cost.
Ergo, if you have enough orgasms with somebody, you're going to feel attached to them. (Mmmm. So this is why so many guys can't get over themselves.) But mess with the delicate chemical balance, and you've got a prescription for disaster. Take 'lifestyle antidepressants', such as Prozac and Zoloft. (Everybody else seems to.) These SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, may not douse the flames of love. But they can sure throw cold water on the Bunsen burner of lust - and the two are more closely related than you might have dared imagine. The depressing thing about antidepressants, Fisher points out, is that they dampen the ability to have orgasms. Bottom line (and just a little to the left)? 'If you're not having an orgasm with somebody on a regular basis, you are not juicing your brain with attachment chemicals.'
Couldn't we just buy frozen concentrate and be done with it, one wonders? Apparently not, especially if we are female. Fresh-squeezed seminal fluid contains a veritable pharmacopoeia of feelgood chemicals, including dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, testosterone, oestrogen. Now, if only they could figure out how to add the chocolate.
The biological link between love and sex, and between sex and attachment, is the good news in Why We Love.
The bad news is that, if love is a drug, sooner or later most of us will end up in rehab. Extensive cross-cultural research suggests that pre-historic humans were hardwired (and chemically sharpened) for serial monogamy, with the average reproductive relationship lasting only till Pebbles or Bam Bam was ready for preschool. Even today, interestingly, divorce is most prevalent in the fourth year of marriage. (Of course, some of us are just precocious.)
Personally, I'm sceptical that science will ever get to the bottom of it all. As Pascal reminds us, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. And that goes double for a few other organs I could mention. Now, where did I put my flippers?
It's a lot more comfortable without the bustle. (I once had a real-life boyfriend who was into costume drama. It got old pretty fast. I called it quits once I realised that, if I didn't dress up, he'd have trouble maintaining his art direction. But I digress.)
When I am at the movies, I simply lust after Colin Firth. Which is easy, especially when he gets that confused little look between his eyebrows, and he looks just like - well, just like everybody else I've ever gone out with, actually. But when I am dreaming, I am ashamed to admit, I am in love with Colin Firth.
And I don't just mean I dream I am in love with him. I am in love with him. I can feel it. When I awake, I can even see it: a fine mist of dopamine and testosterone and norepinephrine suspended over the bedclothes - like a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, played at an all-night chemist.
In the latest version of the dream, Colin and I meet at the Fremantle Aquatic Centre. I spot him in front of the waterslide. We lock eyes, and I can feel something dragging me down, down, down. I knew I should have waxed! The pool is crowded with lesser mortals. But does this stop us from diving right in?
It does not. As we head for the Leisure Lane, my resistance - to chlorine, to Colin, to anything - vanishes.
I know with absolute conviction that I would follow him anywhere. Even to the stagnant end of the kiddie pool. (O, the madness! Oy, the germ count!) Is that the sound of my heart beating, I think to myself, or are the kids playing the soundtrack from Jaws again?
The point of the dream, of course, is that it's never safe to go back in the water. It's important to be reminded of that every now and again - fun, too, as long as you are careful to stay unconscious. That's probably one reason I've fallen so hard for Helen Fisher's new book, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. If you can't sign up for stroke correction with Colin - and I got there first, remember? - Why We Love is probably the next best thing. (Having said that, I'll confess that I haven't actually read the whole book yet. Then again, I haven't actually shagged Colin Firth yet, either. So what does that prove?)
Fisher, an anthropologist based at Rutgers University's Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in New Jersey, argues that love, like so much else in life worth having - from margarita mix to a McDonald's milkshake - is a largely chemical cocktail. "With orgasm," she explains, "levels of oxytocin go up in women and vasopressin in men". (I love it when anthropologists talk dirty.) These 'satisfaction hormones' give a sense of calm, peace and cosmic wellbeing - sort of like the Department of Homeland Security, but at a fraction of the cost.
Ergo, if you have enough orgasms with somebody, you're going to feel attached to them. (Mmmm. So this is why so many guys can't get over themselves.) But mess with the delicate chemical balance, and you've got a prescription for disaster. Take 'lifestyle antidepressants', such as Prozac and Zoloft. (Everybody else seems to.) These SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, may not douse the flames of love. But they can sure throw cold water on the Bunsen burner of lust - and the two are more closely related than you might have dared imagine. The depressing thing about antidepressants, Fisher points out, is that they dampen the ability to have orgasms. Bottom line (and just a little to the left)? 'If you're not having an orgasm with somebody on a regular basis, you are not juicing your brain with attachment chemicals.'
Couldn't we just buy frozen concentrate and be done with it, one wonders? Apparently not, especially if we are female. Fresh-squeezed seminal fluid contains a veritable pharmacopoeia of feelgood chemicals, including dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, testosterone, oestrogen. Now, if only they could figure out how to add the chocolate.
The biological link between love and sex, and between sex and attachment, is the good news in Why We Love.
The bad news is that, if love is a drug, sooner or later most of us will end up in rehab. Extensive cross-cultural research suggests that pre-historic humans were hardwired (and chemically sharpened) for serial monogamy, with the average reproductive relationship lasting only till Pebbles or Bam Bam was ready for preschool. Even today, interestingly, divorce is most prevalent in the fourth year of marriage. (Of course, some of us are just precocious.)
Personally, I'm sceptical that science will ever get to the bottom of it all. As Pascal reminds us, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. And that goes double for a few other organs I could mention. Now, where did I put my flippers?
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