The myth of Falling in Love

Often we speak in favor of a different approach in the gladiatorial arena of love. After all, what we have come to find familiar is no longer effective. Maybe there was a time in which a poem and a serenade would have worked magically, in which women fainted at the mere uttering of an obscene word. A time of knights in shiny armor and enchanted princesses trapped in the highest towers waiting to be rescued. Yes, there must have been a time in which girls were willing to kiss a few frogs in order to find the cursed prince hidden under that most unfortunate condition. But then there were unspeakable evil, two devastating world wars, famine, technological advances, Kinsey, the sixties, feminism, the Internet and all of a sudden the ideal world of fairy tales came to a stall. The struggle between what is real and fiction still goes on. The notion of “romance” still has its appeal, and as the times go, things never quite disappear, they transcend and evolve. A few decades ago, it was formal that girls would only see guys who their parents approved of, life was then too much a serious business to be fooling around, and a girl without innocence (mainly said, her virginity) was never as marketable. Nowadays, we may make fun of other stricter cultures and you may also find that in many lands not only would my writings –simple trickeries designed to kill time –may not only offend but be generally banned and meet my end hanged by the testicles. Yes, in many countries around the globe is a capital crime to speak in such a libertine manner. But the reality is that as a culture, we are not very far from ridiculing ourselves. We foment ideas that are downright silly. One such idea propagated at a large scale is falling in love. So, without further ado, as Voltaire would put it: let’s crush the infamous.
Sadly, all of us have fallen to this deplorable state. Falling in love is more of a common phenomenon than the common cold. We do not have a remedy against it and surely there won’t be a vaccine in the horizon anytime soon. So, the best solution is to brace ourselves and recognize its symptoms before it is too late. Falling in love can be best described as incapacity to reason. It can be said that the ability to reason is partially, if not permanently for the duration of the ailment, affected. The chemicals in the brain that induce us to fall in love are among the most potent in nature. Falling in love, after all, is a high no one can rationally substain once found under its spell. Initially, this chemistry cocktail party relies on our sex hormones, testosterone (for males) and estrogen (for women); a study once pointed at the possibility of males' levels of testosterone dropping and at the same time the opposite effect was observed on the female, as her levels of testosterone actually rising. This may explain why males' overtly exhibition of femenine traits in their encounter with the opposite sex and at the same time throw some light into women's aggressiveness in the rituals of attraction. In other words, men and women, whenever attracted to one another, become more like each other. Other chemicals involved fall in the category of monoamines, mainly speaking, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. Our resistance to such potent chemistry comes with age. Maybe that is why the phenomenon tends to be more severe in the early years of our formation. Although many never quite grow out of the pleasant feeling induced by the mating instinct, and seemed proned to be love junkies. Approximately three percent of mammals are monogamous (mating with one partner for the rest of their natural lives), and one such prodigious creature, the prairie vole, has an active chemical, vasopressin, believed to be responsible for the animal's proclivity to monogamy; if deprived of such vital chemical, this most faithful of animals loses its interest in his partner and goes looking for adventure elsewhere. Us humans, too, have our milder but no less potent version of such "love chemical", called Oxytocin. Its effect, unlike the menacing long-term induced on the male vole by vasopressin, is felt in the afterwards of having sex and the more sex we have, the more of it we are able to produce. The phenylethylamine molecule, particularily, is directly involved in the natural high of falling in love, and chemists are already developing drugs based on it in order to mimic or better yet reproduce the effect. In the near future, the literature on this matter will be made obsolete, authors like myself will most probably be put out of business for good, and love will be, like so many other things, a matter of taking a pill.