Romantic Love and Addiction
In the comments of this blog, people have accused me of being “cruel,” “heartless,” and “the kind of guy who would repeatedly pound a burlap bag full of cute and fuzzy puppies with a rubber mallet” on account my opinions about romantic love, especially how it relates to marriage redefinition.
Rather than bask in the warm glow of such heartfelt and fulsome praise, I’m going to set out to earn it still further by pointing out some recent scientific findings.
If my posts have a general theme it is this: love is not what you think it is. Happiness is not what you think it is. Without knowing the nature of love and happiness, we cannot have a meaningful discussion about love, marriage, and marriage redefinition. To discuss these things without this knowledge is to fail to engage the real world. Unfortunately, the real world is a lot less enchanting than sappy love songs and the movies that populate the “Romantic Comedy” section of Netflix.
So, what’s romantic love? Essentially, it’s an addiction. (I guess Huey Lewis was on to something).
The team of researchers, which included Arthur Aron, Ph.D., professor of social and health psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University, and former graduate students Greg Strong and Debra Mashek looked at subjects who had a recent break-up and found that the pain and anguish they were experiencing may be linked to activation of parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings. The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. Read more…
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