In other words, don’t have sex with someone unless you’re prepared to fall in love with them. So casual sex is not casual: It can trigger these brain systems for romantic love and feelings of attachment. Something like one-third of people who’ve had a “friends with benefits” relationship have fallen madly in love with that person. So there are all these potential chemical triggers that can get activated when you have sex with someone, whether it’s “casual” or not. Those neurochemicals are linked with the attachment system in the brain. That can push you over the threshold into falling in love.Īnd when you orgasm, there’s a flood of oxytocin and vasopressin. It’s not casual because when you have sex with somebody, and it’s pleasurable, it drives up the dopamine system in the brain.
I’ve heard you say that “casual sex” isn’t as casual as we think. Which is why romantic love is a far more powerful brain system than the sex drive. So this part of the brain fires up in people who have recently fallen in love, and it really does function like an addiction. This part of the brain is activated in all forms of behavioral addiction - whether it’s drugs or gambling or food or kleptomania. You think about them all the time you become sexually possessive you get butterflies in the stomach you can read their emails and texts over and over again.īut I say it’s an addiction because we found that, in addition to the dopamine system being activated in the brains of people in love, we also found activity in another part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. You can think of love as an intense obsession, but it’s really an addiction. But the dopamine hits occur even when you’re not with the person. So being in love is like being hooked up to a perpetual dopamine drip, and you get a little hit every time you see the person or touch them or think about them? Helen Fisherĭopamine drip - I love that phrase! I haven’t heard that before it’s a great way to put it. The sex drive motivates you to look for a whole range of partners, but romantic love is about focusing your mating energy on one person at a time.Įver wonder how your mind works? Watch The Mind, Explained, our 5-part miniseries on the workings of the brain. I see romantic love as a basic drive that evolved millions of years ago to focus your mating energy on just one individual and start the mating process. The sex drive is largely orchestrated by testosterone in both men and women, but romantic love is orchestrated by the dopamine system. Sean IllingĪnd the experience of love, at the level of the brain, is different from the experience of sex or from feelings of attachment? Helen Fisher That’s what gives you the focus, the energy, the craving, and the motivation to win life’s greatest prize: a mating partner. It turns out that this brain system makes dopamine, which is a natural stimulant, and then sends that stimulant to many other brain regions. We found that in almost all cases there was activity in a tiny little part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (or VTA). My colleagues and I put over 100 people who had recently fallen in love into the brain scanner to understand what’s going on in their brains. What happens to our brains on love? Helen Fisher I also wanted to know what distinguishes love from attachment, and why she thinks there are three simple things you can to do maintain a happy relationship.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. So I reached out to her to find out what she has learned and how it undercuts a lot of our conventional ideas about sexuality and gender. Fisher, in other words, has spent a lot of time thinking about the role of sex and love in human life. She’s written six books about human sexuality, gender differences in the brain, and how cultural trends shape our views of sex, love, and attachment. These are a few of the questions I put to Helen Fisher in a recent interview.įisher is a biological anthropologist, the chief scientific adviser to the dating site, and the author of several books including Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. What happens to your brain on love? Is there such a thing as “casual sex”? What do we get wrong about male and female sexuality?
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