What Is love,Baby Don’t hurt me

Loving the Dopamine kick wholeheartedly.

Now that we have that very reminiscent 90s jam out of the way…you know you are still singing it as you read this and you are welcome. My beautiful pineapples it is time to talk about that string quartet, hammer over the head, claws down a chalkboard anomaly that is..Love. Note that I didn’t call it an emotion, and thats because..well simply..I don’t think it is one. I think it is a product of what we share with another individual, which is why, I personally think that love takes on many forms and is different in each situation. Do you have any idea how many months I have tried to write this post for?!..well no because you don’t all follow me around…which is your loss really, I am fascinating. But jokes aside, this article was a 2 parter,then it was about science, then I just sort of started at it and wondered whether to make it into a love story. Then, today, it suddenly came to me…It’s personal….so why not make it that way.

BUT FIRST, sit with me you spiky bunch as we go through the chemical and psychological reasons we turn into piles of mush and panic when it comes to love…STOP STOP, I know you freak out every time you think a scientific study is coming but please stay seated because it could explain why you are staring gooey eyed out of the window right now, but also, why, deep down there is a fear of it all dramatically burning to the ground and sinking along with all your other disappointments….a bit dramatic? yea…but so is love. We will get to the juicy stuff about my own life that I know you are here for in just a moment.

For now let us talk drugs..no no not those ones…we are talking the good old fashioned natural highs our bodies give us from our friends Dopamine and similar acquaintance called Norepinephrine. Dopamine is that friend that comes to dance with us when we do something for ourselves that feels good, it is ready to laugh ecstatically with us, grin like an absolute idiot, and jump up and down on the bed with us. It makes us high, sometimes only for moments and sometimes for extended periods of time.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher holds that romantic love is never an emotion or feeling. It’s a drive, just like sex and attachment. Fisher’s argument is that romantic love is associated with increased activation of neurons in the midbrain that secrete dopamine, and since the dopamine system is a more primitive system than the emotional brain and the cortical system, romantic love is not an emotion.-Psychology Today

Now I am not sure I entirely agree with old Helen Fisher over here, but I do think that sex and attachment have a lot to do with romantic love. At least, it did for me, and actually I think a part of that is because I am a woman. But we will get to that in just one second, there is still a little more I want to say here about the science…I know I know!! Will you just sit down! So, we got all this Dopamine running around our body in its primitive, just not giving any kind of fucks, way. Now, as if that wasn’t potent enough, lets add some Norepinephrine to the mix, shall we?

Now, listen..I am far from a scientist and the research on this is extensive so I am going to simplify it, flair it with some of my own thoughts, and maybe…just maybe… we will be able to see why, at least in a chemical way, we react to love the way we do. Norepinephrine, along with its wild friends with benefits, adrenaline, is responsible for the increase in heart rate and has a hand in our “fight or flight” mode…I recently learnt there is also a freeze mode! which is definitely me and indecisive people everywhere..but I digress. So essentially what happens is our Dopamine is triggered by the brain expecting a reward, so when you get real happy about a bagel or, in this case a human, our dopamine level rises and our brain fires an existential possession kind of light…imagine it like when Beast turns human in Disney.

Are you all still awake? I hope so…I need you to never leave. Please see my attachment issue blog posts…If you are still with me, congratulations! You waited around long enough for me to tell you about my relationship with love. With guest appearances from Dop and Nore (my new shortened friends) so I guess now all that is left to do…is tell you about my relationship with love…and I think it has taken me 4 paragraphs because, honestly, it is something more than simple and even in this very moment I pause.

I have been in love a lot in my life, or so I have thought, some of it was romantic love, platonic love and some of it has just been a super dopamine hit straight to the veins. What I am trying to work out?….well…clearly I am trying to work out what the hell love is! but more significantly, why it seems so much more important than anything else…and maybe not for everyone…but it is for me.

When I was younger, I hinged my happiness to whatever man was paying me attention at that particular moment. Usually in the hopes that he would reassure me I was worthwhile, that he would see something “special” in me. And whenever I would sleep with a man I would get a dopamine hit, mix it with my need to love and boom!…was this my prince charming? no? not this time? oh…he left…and never spoke to me again. I started to equate my dopamine hits with a love I could never achieve, another love letter that was burnt away at the ends because there was nowhere for me to put this ever burning need…..a need to be seen…and to be seen…was to be loved. All of a sudden, every male gaze became the possibility of love. My self-esteem was so dependent on my relationships that I just kept storing each dopamine hit. So that each mistaken love was more intense than the last.

My first ever proper relationship lasted 6 years, and probably should have only lasted 3, we were young and grew into different people. But I remembered when it ended, I wondered why I wasn’t crying. Why was I not particularly sad that it had ended? And now I wonder if the dopamine hit had just run its course. Did I still love him? perhaps, but not in the same way I once had. After him, none of my relationships lasted more than 2 years, and I am starting to wonder if that was because I was just forever chasing that high. Because subconsciously that meant “real” love, true passionate sex, an all-encompassing obsession.

OK ok, we can take a breather, that was a lot, and a look at an old version of myself. Not that remnants of that don’t still happen, but now when it rears its head, I whistle at it and tell it to relax…we got this. You know what we have to talk about now right? ohhhhh that’s right, attachment issues…stop that! you love it! Earlier I brought up love being equated to attachment and I am only going to talk about my own experience here because attachment theory is like 12 more paragraphs and I am running out of port.

When I was 14 or so there was a narrative in my head that went a little something like this…brace yourself…he looked at me, I must be pretty, I shall show him my boobs at some point, then he will really really like me, then we will have great conversation and sex…then we will be in love…..ohhh lad. That was hard to type. Now I am starting to get the distinct feeling that my feelings of being very ugly when I was a kid meant that any kind of compliment made my brain feel like it needed a reward…queue dopamine…and actually, what I was attached to…were those hits. It wasn’t attachment, it was addiction. And as the addiction grew, so did my reliance on what I thought was love.

My beautiful pineapples, this is where we take a bit of an unexpected turn. AGAIN?!…hey now! I never said this was going to be an easy skip down linear lane. Love is complex, and the reason I have been thinking about it a lot for the past 6 months is because of a workshop I went to.

Back a few months when we couldn’t leave the house and we were eyeball to eyeball with our laptop cameras and Zoom were giving the finger to Skype. I did a workshop with The Revolting Arts Club on smutty letter writing and it was glorious…to start with. We wrote 1 smutty, dirty letter to nobody, then to any one of our choosing and then shared them in breakout rooms. It was a wonderful, warm and inclusive space and I scribbled my little heart out, writing all the awful metawhores and dirty similes. Then they asked us to write a love letter, dirty or non…to ourselves. And I sat there, my pen to paper, and, nothing came out…I addressed it to myself, Dear Aine….then nothing, until I realised there was water dripping from my face into the page. I turned my camera off and sobbed a deep deep sadness (I’m Irish, deep sadness comes naturally) but I wept for the girl turned woman who realised, that for all the love she tried to give to others in the hopes she would receive it back, and therefore be a real person….she didn’t love herself.

Now, something happens when you realise you don’t love yourself; it is like a bizarre outer body experience. I flashed back on all the love I gave to the men from the past and the things I did in the hopes they would love me in the same way…and all of sudden my inner child…for the first time in years started to stir…like she was waiting for me to realise…and change it. Almost like the person that was trying to love me all this time didn’t want anything back, they just wanted me to notice.

So, pineapples, I spent the next months working with my therapist, my inner child and the many many baths to turn my dopamine addiction to love around, to face..well…myself.

So, I end Part 1 of What is love? with this.

Dear Aine….I love you, wholeheartedly, in your beauty and relentless empathy, Now and always, I got you kid.