ROMANTIC LOVE IS A NEURO CHEMICAL CON JOB

Most people would never have “fallen in love” if culture had not bothered to coin the term and market it as a grand cosmic event rather than a particularly clingy bout of brain chemistry.

Let us not pretend the urge to fornicate is anything loftier than a mechanism for getting the species to reproduce. Desire is testosterone firing libido upward, dopamine lighting the reward circuits like a fruit machine on a winning streak. Oxytocin and vasopressin follow close behind. Without that basic itch, humans would not copulate; intercourse is about as random as sticking your finger in someone’s ear. The feelings are evolution’s blunt instrument for gene propagation and the care of the young.

Humans are altricial. Our babies arrive as helpless, shrieking bundles demanding years of feeding, wiping, and general supervision. Fish broadcast spawn and depart because their offspring are born complete; no social services required. Female cats are the ultimate single mothers; raising kittens does not require Toms. Prairie voles, by contrast, are the rodent world’s tragic romantics, glued together by oxytocin and vasopressin. We are similar: capable of a brief encounter and swift exit, yet biologically wired to find serial abandonment taxing, not least because two adults generally offer greater protection and provisioning than one.

So the brain runs its scheme. During sex, touch, and prolonged eye contact, it floods the system with oxytocin and vasopressin, converting a fleeting surge into something more adhesive: pair bonding, mate guarding, the irrational tolerance required to keep two primates aligned long enough to shepherd a wrinkled potato through teething and tantrums.

Strip away the word “love” and its mythology and nothing mystical remains. There is desire, attachment, habit, and cohabitation — neurochemistry doing precisely what it was selected to do. The butterflies, the fixation, the willingness to reorganise one’s life around another mammal are not cultural hallucinations but endocrine incentives.

We are not tragic romantics. We are a species uniquely inclined to narrate its hormonal negotiations as transcendence, while evolution watches with professional satisfaction.

So if you “fall out of love” after two years, nothing supernatural has collapsed. The dopamine spike has stabilised, the oxytocin has done its initial adhesive work, and the brain has recalibrated. What remains is not destiny but decision: whether to convert a chemical overture into durable cooperation, or to seek the next neurochemical crescendo.