Being In Love Literally Alters Your Brain — Here’s How, According To Biological Anthropologist
Being in love doesn't just feel different; it rewires your brain.
bojanstory | Canva When you fall in love, they say you get weak in the knees and get butterflies in your stomach. But have you ever considered what your brain does when you finally find your soulmate?
Love is always seen as such an emotional response, but it turns out that neurology and brain physiology actually play an enormous role in the development of long-term happy relationships. How does your brain keep you blissful and in love? It overlooks things. Yes, the key to building a strong relationship and growing a love that lasts is in your brain. (Really.)
The late biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and neuroscientist Lucy Brown led a fascinating discussion about how our brains employ “positive illusions” to keep our relationships healthy.
The two scientists described “positive illusions” as our ability to overlook what we don't like about somebody and instead focus on what we do like about them. (Psychology Today has similarly described positive illusions as a way to “allow you to maximize your partner’s virtues and minimize their faults.”)
In their studies on long-term love, Dr. Fisher and Dr. Brown have performed multiple brain scans on hundreds of people in various states of love and commitment.
Look Studio via Shutterstock
In these studies, they found that when a couple is in a long-term happy relationship, three particular regions of their brains become active:
- The brain region linked with empathy
- The brain region linked with controlling your stress and emotions
- The brain region linked with positive illusions
That area associated with positive illusions is called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It’s the region where we process judgment, as shown by a study in the Cerebral Cortex Journal. When we’re critical about something, that’s where it originates in our brains.
Do you know what happens to that region when we’re in a loving relationship? The activity in that area decreases.
When we're in love, our brain chooses to suspend our processing of negative judgment. In other words, being in love gives us the benefit of the doubt.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore every bad quality in your significant other or make excuses for any truly vile behavior or abuse. But it does suggest that, even on a neurological level, we know that, to make any successful relationship work, occasionally, we have to cut each other a little slack.
Because that’s the hard part about being a couple, isn’t it? You’re together so long and in such close quarters that you both have ample opportunity to get on each other’s nerves, to see the worst in each other, to say “I told you so.”
But, through Dr. Fisher's and Dr. Brown's research and actual physical data, we can see that when we’re really in a supportive relationship, our brains decrease how harshly we judge our partners.
We soften. We show more empathy. We’re more open to each other’s faults and foibles. Maybe this is why the human race has endured for so long. Those positive illusions are worth having.
Because, even on a biological level, our bodies and our brains have an idea of what it takes to keep two people together for a prolonged period.
Neuroscientist Lucy L. Brown, Ph. D., and the late biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D., are the writing team behind the Anatomy of Love. Their work focuses on matters of the brain and romantic love.
