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Love chemicals and how they affect your relationships

By the time we reach our 40s, most of us have gone through the whole gamut of the love experience. From the wild, leave-home-for-love phase to the more measured, thought-out responses of our late 30s, the way we experience love over the most important two decades of our lives reflects our personal growth and mirrors certain physical and emotional changes that take place in us as we age. 

“All our emotions are regulated by many different neurochemicals and hormones. Love is a very complex emotion that has elements of care, compassion and lust and our experience of it is also governed by factors like genes, the environment, temperament, individual personality profiles and life experiences. There are also different kinds love that we experience, hence it cannot be called a homogenous emotion,” says Dr Sameer Malhotra, Head, Department of Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences. 
From changes brought about by circumstances, new roles and responsibilities to those caused by chemical and hormonal changes in our brains, there is no doubt that love is a truly complex thing that is as mysterious as it is irresistible. We spoke to the love experts and went through much research to try and decode how love affects us in our 20s and 30s and this is what we found.

The chemistry of love
The science of falling and remaining in love is a complicated affair that has more to do with the neurochemicals that are formed in our brain than romance and roses. Here are some of the main ones that make you a little loco in love, no matter what age you are. 
The first rush of heady attraction to a partner is caused by norepinephrine and dopamine. While Norepinephrine stimulates the production of adrenaline, which makes our hearts race, make us happy and less hungry (now you know why you eat less around a new boyfriend!), Dopamine is the feel-good chemical that floods your brain when you meet a new hottie. “It is this feel-good factor that makes love such an addictive, pleasurable experience that keeps you craving for more,” says Dr Malhotra. “Serotonin also plays a role when we fall in love. It has been seen that love leads to low serotonin levels which in turn leads to obsessive-compulsive behaviours like constantly thinking about the object of desire.” 
According to Dr Gitanjali Sharma, marriage and relationship counsellor, DGS Counselling Solutions, Delhi and Gurgaon, “Serotonin is the chemical that tends to distort reality and make you ‘blind in love’. It makes you unable to see the grey side of a person and causes you to get addicted to the person you are attracted to.” 
One of the other major neurochemicals associated with love is Oxytocin, also called the “the cuddle chemical,” or the “love hormone” because it gives rise to feelings of bonding and love with a partner, says Dr Malhotra. “This hormone helps us make attachments to people and is activated by intimate behavior that need not be sexual.” Incidentally, Oxytocin levels also rise in new mothers when they are breast-feeding. This is the chemical that leads couples to form long-term bonds with each other long after the first dopamine-induced first flush of love has reduced. 

Love in our 20s and 30s 
The way we experience love in or 20s and 30s has a lot to do with these neurochemicals and hormones that cause us to fall in love in the first place. 

The turbulent twenties
While individual experiences will differ, many of us will recall our 20s as a time when love was impulsive, intense, all-consuming and often irrational—a time when passion overrode practicality. Well, according to science, this has a lot to do with the fact that our brains are not fully developed and mature till we reach our mid-twenties, which affects our abilities to make rational decisions. According to the Harvard Mental Health Letter, July 2005 (http://www.health.harvard.edu/), “Recent research has shown that human brain circuitry is not mature until the early 20s (some would add, “if ever”). Among the last connections to be fully established are the links between the prefrontal cortex, seat of judgment and problem-solving, and the emotional centers in the limbic system, especially the amygdala. These links are critical for emotional learning and high-level self-regulation.” 
The early to mid-twenties are also a time when our bodies are still going through hormonal changes and the brain is flushed with stress, growth and sex hormones which lead us to experience love and attraction more acutely. “In our 20s, we have less control on our impulses as our minds school us into thinking that we can take risks. Attraction is often instant and high levels of endorphins, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin makes love an intense experience. While lust and attraction is followed by attachment in relationships of people in both their 20s and 30s, people in their 20s tend to give more emphasis to physical attributes and sexual attraction that someone in their 30s,” says Dr Sharma. “And as far as priorities in relationships go, for a person in her 20s, the things that would matter most are 
love, communication, trust, attraction and compatibility in that order.”

Sexy and stable 30s
By the time we reach our 30s, our brains have developed fully and we are almost set in our ways as far as our personalities are concerned. Therefore, quite naturally, the way we love in our 30s tends to differ significant from how we were in our 20s. The difference, however, is not such much in how we fall in love but in how we react when we do. “Even in your 30’s you will still be first getting attracted to a guy’s physical attributes and it will still be the cocktail of noradrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin that will make you desire him. However, since you are now no longer ruled by your raging hormones and neuro-chemicals and hampered by a still-developing brain, logic and rational reasoning will stop you from rushing headlong into a relationship,” say Dr Sharma. “At this stage, what will matter to you is honesty, communication, companionship, respect and a positive attitude.” 
In our 30, life experiences shape how we experience love almost as much as the love chemicals do. Honesty ranks high because life would have taught you that a dishonest relationship can be very painful. Companionship is right up there as well, because this is the stage when you want to nest and build long term bonds and you’d rather do it with someone you get along with; and positive attitude gets a look in because, let’s face it, life with a grump sucks even if he’s the hottest thing you have ever set eyes on! 
“Both cognitive and emotional maturity levels differ drastically as we move from our 20s to 30s. You know exactly what you want from a partner. You’re concerned with working through struggles together, building a family, making each other happy and sharing your dreams. The superficial fades away as you realize what’s really important in love and life,” says Dr Rachna Khanna Singh, Psychologist and Lifestyle Expert, Artemis Hospital, Gurgaon.

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