What Does Love Feel Like?
“What does love feel like” is a question that most people ask at some point in their lives. No matter what other people claim or what brain scans show, the fact remains that love is simply a word that someone who lived a very long time ago selected to describe the way he felt.
There is no checklist or quiz or biological test that can determine love. When an individual chooses to assign that word to his or her emotions, it cannot be verified.
Since love can feel completely different to individuals, it is possible for the object of one person’s love not to feel loved, depending on what love means to each person.
Sound confusing? It’s understandable. To get a better idea of what love feels like, a lot of people want to know how others have defined the feeling of love.
The problem is that love not only seems to feel differently to different people, but it can feel differently to the same person depending on time and circumstance. Love has been said to make people feel on top of the world or completely miserable.
A commonly expressed symptom of new love is the world appearing differently. Do colors seem brighter when you’re in love? Tales of heightened sensory awareness go all the way back to Shakespeare’s day. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, he describes how each of the senses is improved. When he gets to touch, he says:
“Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.”
Others have darker impressions of love.
In 2008, The Guardian reporter Rosanna Greenstreet asked Slovene author Slavoj Žižek, “What does love feel like?” His cup-half-empty response was:
“Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”
Experience can change how someone views the feeling of love, but how is it that even after bad relationships, people can experience the euphoria of love again?
That brings us to a different view:
What Does Love Feel Like to Scientists?
Apparently, love feels like drugs. An anthropologist at Rutgers took self-described “madly in love” dating or married volunteers and hooked them up to fMRI machines (AKA super-duper brain scanners). When they were shown pictures or were otherwise reminded of their relationship partners, the brains of these people were active in the “ventral tegmentral area.” That’s the dopamine area. According to anthropologist/author Helen Fisher (Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love),
“It’s the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine.”
And guess what? According to the National Institutes of Health, dopamine can cause altered sensory perception, which could explain the brighter colors and antennae-like sense of touch when experiencing the excitement of love in a new relationship.
But Helen Fisher says that this initial dopamine-induced love feeling doesn’t last. It’s more of an infatuation period. So what about long-term relationships where sweet 90-year-old married couples are still holding hands?
Besides the snail antennae analogy, Shakespeare claimed that love inherently lasts forever. In Sonnet 116, he says,
“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
If Shakespeare isn’t your thing, Wesley from The Princess Bride puts eternal love more succinctly:
“Death cannot stop true love.”
And maybe love is timeless…
Or maybe it’s just Oxytocin.
A State University of New York (Stony Brook) study conducted brain studies of couples who declared they were still in loving relationships after 20 years. They showed activity in the dopamine part of the brain, but they also had increased Oxytocin levels. Oxytocin can increase dopamine. Dopamine is pleasure-centered while Oxytocin is the cuddling, bonding hormone. New-love Dopamine and old-love Oxytocin might explain how love relationships change over the years.
After more studies, scientists might have the EXACT answer, and they will be able to describe that feeling to you in the pharmacy pamphlet that accompanies your Love® tablets which your psychiatrist prescribed in order to artificially produce the chemical high that could save your relationship.
Related: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
For now, snail antennae supertouch, a monstrous parasite, Rodents of Unusual Size in a fire swamp, and chemical-induced highs will have to do as answers to the question, “what does love feel like.”