From Love to Heartbreak and Back to Square One

The key to heartbreak lies in childhood

That was the major discovery made by the English scientist John Bowlby (1907–1990), who detailed the structure and nature of the sense of security generated by early childhood attachment. Rejection by a partner or a loss of love evoke the primal and powerful feelings triggered by separation from loved ones.

Bowlby found that humans are endowed with neural circuits for attachment that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, and we are born with mechanisms programmed to form strong emotional bonds. When these bonds are broken, the alarm bell of fear of death or abandonment rings. That emotion is triggered every time we sense that something is permanently separating us from a loved one.

Modern science suggests that heartbreak dredges up the fears that, as children, fueled our anxiety about separation from our mothers—and now, more than ever, paradoxically, from our fathers as well. As adults, we have no more tools to cope with heartbreak than we did as children to combat separation anxiety, because the mechanisms and hormones at work are the same.

In all likelihood, the most stressful experience for a baby is separation from the mother who cares for it to ensure its survival. The mechanism of distress caused by separation or uprooting is innate in newborns to help them survive. This mechanism is triggered when the mother leaves the children’s bedroom. In adults, the same mechanism is activated when a great love is lost. Early separations from the mother increase levels of corticotropin, the biochemical marker of fear. Studies conducted on both monkeys and rats have shown strong correlations between premature separations and elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

Raise your hand if you know what a child feels inside when he or she is alone. In a way, to a greater or lesser extent, we’ve all felt it, and we carry that feeling into adulthood, where it manifests in our behavior as anxiety. We know the impact of loneliness fueled by separation anxiety. The foundation of attachment to family—or a safe haven—has always been the starting point.

Is love in the brain or in the heart?

Today we are beginning to understand that love is driven by very specific evolutionary and biological factors. The technological revolution is allowing science, for the first time in the history of evolution, to unravel the secrets of love. Everything happens for a reason… sometimes it’s hard for us to understand why we’re attracted to someone, or why we fall in love, or why we feel the need to start a family, or why we experience the irresistible urge of desire. The keys to understanding love lie in the brain’s chemistry and imagination, as well as in the thousands of evolutionary reasons for pair bonding that keep our species from going extinct—all tied to our survival instincts. The brain also has many similar responses that are directly linked to childhood and that seem incomprehensible to us—such as the heartbreak experienced by adults, which is a sense of helplessness in the face of the same devastation felt by a child who has been abandoned.

Serotonin and Heartbreak:

Serotonin tops the list of substances that shape heartbreak. A lack of serotonin has been linked to aggression, depression, and anxiety.

According to Marazziti, his method showed that people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder—who have unusually low serotonin levels—share one thing in common with people in love: they have similar obsessive thoughts, and both they and the patients can spend hours and hours absorbed in thoughts of an object or person. Both groups may even be aware that their obsessions are somewhat irrational, but they cannot free themselves from them. So Marazziti wondered whether serotonin levels also dropped sharply in people in love.

In explaining these findings, science communicator Kathryn S. Brown notes that, to verify them, Marazziti and her team set out to track down and study love among students (both men and women at a medical school in Pisa) who had fallen in love in the past six months, They selected individuals who were obsessed with their love for at least four hours a day but who had not had sex with their loved one.

They were looking for twenty Romeos and Juliets with a spontaneous passion, free from the disruptions typical of hormonal storms or the calm that comes with the passage of time.

The team recruited twenty more people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and another twenty who were neither in love nor suffering from psychiatric disorders.

The results of the experiment confirmed the initial suspicions: “normal” students had typical serotonin levels, while the other two groups (those who were in love and those with obsessive-compulsive disorder) had lower levels—by as much as 40%.

To confirm their hunch that serotonin levels plummet only during the early stages of love—and not afterward—the researchers had six students undergo the same tests one year after the study began. They found, indeed, that serotonin levels had returned to normal, and that more subtle feelings of affection toward their partners had replaced their earlier emotions.

People in love have higher cortisol levels, reflecting the stress caused by the stimuli associated with the early stages of a romantic relationship. Moderate levels of stress are necessary to start a relationship. Love is a double-edged sword, and while falling in love and having those feelings reciprocated certainly makes us feel good—even euphoric—it also makes us obsessed with the person we love, giving the impression that this state is identical to obsessive behaviors characterized by behavioral disturbances.

What happens with serotonin is intriguing because it’s the “pleasure hormone,” but paradoxically, in the early stages of love, it doesn’t usually produce the mental calm typically associated with serotonin. A meaningful encounter generates anxiety because, even though you may be starting to fall in love, it’s not usually comfortable to feel the uncertainty that comes with experiencing that particular kind of love.

The hormones of love…the hormones of fidelity

According to Bartels, the brain regions rich in oxytocin and vasopressin—the “love hormones”—overlap significantly with those rich in dopamine, the neurotransmitter traditionally associated with the brain’s reward circuit.

It has been suggested that the preferences shown by a long-term couple are due to vasopressin circuits, which are somehow connected to dopamine circuits, thereby associating a particular partner with a sense of reward.

In the dopamine-rich regions of the brains of monogamous mammals, so-called vasopressin receptors are more abundant than in promiscuous mammals. Their high levels could be the cause—or one of the evolutionary causes—that led to the connection between these circuits.

The regions that correspond to the oxytocin and vasopressin areas clearly represent “basic attachment,” which is why, in humans, these regions could be described as the “neural substrate of pure love.” As it happened, the circuits responsible for identifying one’s chosen partner merged with those associated with pleasure, and from that, irresistible love was born.

Therefore, the early stages of love are like a hormonal roller coaster, with sharp ups and downs that trigger various emotional states and allow a relationship to stabilize later on.

Who hasn’t experienced a situation like this? It’s a sudden, chemical reaction, yet it already holds the full potential for absolute love. It’s not the right time for calm, and coupled with low serotonin levels, a reluctance arises to let oneself be immediately swept away by new stimuli that disrupt existing commitments. Vasopressin levels rise… who wins? Who loses? The one most likely to win is the one who realizes they’re riding a roller coaster and knows how to wait for the final whistle to blow, so they can start over after the hormonal storm has passed.

Another reason for falling out of love… the brain’s take on sex…

The truth is that in the past, people only broke up because they hated each other, whereas now it’s because they no longer love each other enough. We can also add that neuroscientists have acknowledged that another reason we can suggest biological foundations for falling out of love is the principle that the brain has a gender.

Due to fluctuations that begin as early as three months of age and last until after menopause, a woman’s neurological reality exhibits a degree of variability that is difficult for men to understand. Sudden mood swings and the sensory excitement that women experience are often cited as major causes of a loss of love. Nor is it easy to reconcile the different spatial structures in the brains of men and women. Women have a greater number of neurons in the centers that govern the senses of language and hearing, and the areas occupied by the hippocampus—which encompasses the nerve centers of memory and emotions—are also larger. Why else do men find it so strange that women remember with such precision details related to love that are imperceptible to them? In contrast, men devote two and a half times more brain space to their sexual instinct, which is why they are so frustrated by women’s phrase, “I don’t feel like it right now…”

It is widely known across all cultures that men fall in love faster than women, but no one has been able to prove that their libido functions differently. The recent discovery regarding the incompatibility between stress and the female orgasm explains not only many romantic misadventures, but also the extent to which social organization runs counter to biological determinants.

True love isn’t blind; perhaps we are the ones who are blind, allowing ourselves to be misled by the certainty of banishing loneliness from our lives or finding a partner who completes us spiritually and with whom we can share our sorrows and joys. It’s up to us to stay on track and not deceive ourselves.