Hey forum,
I have come across this article about LOVE, SEX, & HEARTBREAK in neurological way with hormones like dopamine, serotonin etc., I think this might help some people to understand themselves and to get rid of the old unwanted feelings that they have for the one they want to forget & Move on
Abandoned lovers are generally dedicated to winning their sweetheart back. They obsessively dissect the relationship, trying to establish what went wrong; and they doggedly strategize about how to rekindle the romance. Disappointed lovers often make dramatic, humiliating, or even dangerous entrances into a beloved’s home or place of work, then storm out, only to return and plead anew. They visit mutual haunts and shared friends. And they phone, e-mail and write letters, pleading, accusing and/or trying to seduce their abandoner.
At the neurobiological level, the protest stage is characterized by unusually heightened, even frantic activity of dopamine and norepinephrine receptors in the brain, which has the effect of pronounced alertness similar to what is found in young animals abandoned by their mothers. This impassioned protest stage—if it proves unsuccessful in re-establishing the romantic relationship—slowly disintegrates into the second stage of heartbreak, what Fisher refers to as “resignation/despair”:
With time the spurned individual gives up pursuit of the abandoning partner. Then he or she must deal with intensified feelings of helplessness, resignation and despair. Drugged by sorrow, most cry, lie in bed, stare into space, drink too much, or hole up and watch TV. Feelings of protest and anger resurface intermittently, but rejected lovers mostly just feel profound melancholy … Some people in the despair phase of rejection kill themselves. Some die of a broken heart. Broken-hearted lovers expire from heart attacks or strokes caused by their depression … As the abandoned partner realizes that [reunion] will never come, dopamine-making cells in the midbrain decrease their activity [causing] lethargy, despondency and depression.
It’s depressing to even read about, I know, but for most people, those all-important chemicals eventually begin pulsating again when a new love affair begins. Let me note, however, that one of the more fascinating things about the resignation/despair stage, and one that no one doesn’t really touch on, is the possibility that it actually serves an adaptive signalling function that may help salvage the doomed relationship, especially for an empathetic species such as our own. As I mentioned earlier, heartbreak is not easily experienced at either end, and when your actions have produced such a sad and lamentable reaction in another person, when you watch someone you care about (but no longer feel any real long-term or sexual desire to be with) suffer in such ways, it can be difficult to fully extricate yourself from a withered romance. If I had to guess—and this is just a hunch, in the absence of any studies that I’m aware of to support this claim—I’d say that a considerable amount of genes have replicated in our species solely because, with our damnable social cognitive abilities, we just don’t have the heart to break other people’s hearts.
In any event, we may not be a sexually exclusive species, but we do form deep romantic attachments, and the emotional scaffolding on which these attachments are built is extraordinarily sensitive to our partners’ sexual indiscretions. But if you’d explained that to me as I was screaming invectives at one of my partners following my discovery that he was cheating on me, curled up in the fetal position in the corner of my kitchen and rocking myself into self-pitying oblivion, or as I was vomiting my guts out over the toilet for much of the next two weeks, I would have nodded in rational Darwinian ascension while still trembling like a wounded animal.
Jealousy in homosexual couples is an interesting thing. One of the most frequently cited findings in evolutionary psychology is the fact that men tend to become more jealous when their female partners have sex with other men, whereas women are more jealous when their male partners show signs of “emotional infidelity” with other women.
So when it comes to homosexual affairs, a same-sex infidelity does not entail the asymmetrical threats of mistaken paternity and of resources being diverted to another woman’s children, suggesting both that the sexes may be similar in their jealous responses and that such responses may be less intense than in the case of opposite-sex infidelities. In fact, in studies designed to test this basic hypothesis, the researchers indeed found that jealousy was less intense when straight participants were asked how they would feel, hypothetically, if their partners had a homosexual fling than if they were to become involved with someone from the opposite sex. Personally, I think the participants would have other things to worry about besides jealousy if their partners were on the down-low, but these data do clearly show that reproductive-related concerns indeed moderate jealousy feelings in human romantic relationships.
But bisexuality aside, as any gay person with a past knows, homosexual relationships certainly aren’t without their fair share of jealousy. Although as a general rule gay men are indeed less distressed by sexual infidelity than are straight men, there are meaningful individual differences in this regard—and, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say this, most of us gay men certainly aren’t completely okay with the idea of our partners having sex with whomever they please, nor are most lesbians comfortable with their partners committing emotional infidelity with other women. Now perhaps I’m in a minority in caring so much about my partner’s same-sex behaviors—at least, the ones not including me.
So to me, and because fatal sexually transmitted infections for which gay men are unusually vulnerable, such as HIV, were not present in the ancestral past and could not have produced any special adaptive psychological defenses, sexual jealousy in gay men can only be explained by some sort of pseudo-heterosexuality mindset simulating straight men’s hypervigilance to being cuckolded by their female partners. All this is to say that I reacted the way I did because, at an unconscious level, I didn’t want my testiculared partner getting impregnated by another man. I don’t consciously think of him as a woman, mind you; in fact, if I did, I assure you I wouldn’t be with him. I would imagine the same is largely true for lesbian relationships; at an unconscious level, a lesbian’s bonding with another woman may trigger concerns in her partner about her “male” spouse’s disinvestment in real or prospective offspring.
And that’s this once-heartbroken gay evolutionary psychologist’s musics for the day.
