Sex, they say, really happens in your head; and as it turns out, the same is true for love. In the last few years scientists have proved what men have long known and women have tried to deny – sex and love are quite separate things.

If you’re a romantic sort, who likes to believe in the transformative power of love and the magical mysteriousness of sex, you better skip this week’s column. It’s interesting, but not exactly cheerful – kind of like the Six One News.
For many years social scientists have argued that romantic love, at least in the way we understand it these days, is a modern invention. Some even go so far as to say that its importance to us is partly a response to that most unromantic of topics – capitalism. Essentially the argument is that as more and more of us left the rural areas where our families had lived for generations, and as the old certainties of religion and class melted away, we felt adrift in the world and needed something to cling to, sometime that made life seem worthwhile.
Romance filled the gap admirably – you might be slaving away in a factory or at a call centre, but as long as you believed that someday your existence would be made meaningful by a deep connection with another person it seemed to be worth all the trouble. Which is a nice idea, I’ll admit, although it does result in way too many movies starring the bouffanted nonentity known as Matthew McConaughey – and if that’s not enough to make anarchy seem an attractive alternative, I don’t know what is.
Love has always existed, of course, but it’s only in the last few hundred years that lifelong romance, fidelity and sexual excitement have been seen as a prerequisite for marriage.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were a lot more pragmatic about these things. They believed in the idea of erotic constancy, which was understood as long-term sexual attraction and love. But this certainly didn’t involve the onerous burden of monogamy, and what’s more it was seen as the proper way to feel about your mistress – wives got the house and the family name, lovers had to make do with the more ephemeral gift of romance.
While codifying relationships is the work of civilization, sex is one of our basic urges and scientists have known for ages that the mad, passionate sexual energy you feel towards a partner at the beginning of a relationship is nothing more than a powerful cocktail of drugs.
Here’s how it works:
You meet a man or a woman and feel a certain frisson of excitement – you go out on a date and at some point you end up between the sheets. You feel the urge to do it again, and again. You might reckon it’s because she’s sexy or he’s funny, but actually it’s a chemically induced high. Phenylethylamine, adrenaline, norepinephrine and dopamine start pumping. These are seriously mind-altering, making you feel elated, joyful and horny. Before you know it, you’re in love.
Unfortunately, these chemicals have a shelf life. Their best-before date is usually within three years. After that they gradually disappear and you’re left with the mother of all comedowns, and possibly, joint bank accounts. If you’re lucky and have compatible personalities, you’ll settle down happily enough instead of acting like characters straight from the script of a dodgy soap opera.
The question is: why does this happen only some of the time? After all, most of us are somewhat discriminating when choosing a sexual partner, even for a short fling or a one-night stand. We flirt and have sex with the people we find amusing, stimulating and physically appealing. That should mean that we’d fall in love with every decent sexual partner we have, but that’s not how it works.
Well, that’s where it gets interesting – and confusing. For the last couple of years neuroscientists have been able to use nifty sounding devices called functional magnetic resonance imagers (fMRIs) to study the brain. They’ve found that different parts of the brain are used for sexual desire, romantic attraction and long-term love.
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, who is at the forefront of this research, believes that fMRIs indicate that romantic love is biologically determined. According to her research, people have three separate emotion-motivation systems for mating, reproduction and parenting – lust, attraction and attachment or love. Lust kicks the whole thing off, attraction helps us chose a specific partner and love is supposed to keep the show on the road, at least until the kids are old enough to fend for themselves.
Fisher says romantic love is a part of the attraction motivation system, not an emotion itself and is distinct from the sex drive. She believes romance allows us to focus our energies on one person at a time, facilitating the greater likelihood that we’ll pop out a few sprogs.
We may indeed experience two or more of them at the same time, but it appears that lust, attraction and love operate independently of each other. On a basic level, this explains why sometimes we want to have sex with people we don’t care to see a second time, or why we can love someone we’re no longer particularly sexually passionate about.
The sad thing is that our brains are at odds with our expectations. From a young age, men and particularly women are reared to believe in the idea of true love, which would be fine I suppose, if we didn’t expect it to be some sort of all-encompassing transcendent connection (with extra juicy orgasms as a bonus) that lasts forever.
It’s no wonder that so many people are disappointed and that our relationships, particularly in the West, are a messy succession of serial monogamous encounters. If you’ve been expecting to win the lottery, you can’t help but feel at little short-changed to find you’ve been given a scratch card instead.
Now I know that many of you reading this will probably be a little perturbed and find it easier to write me off as a flint-hearted cynic than face the facts. But I’m not, and it’s not all bad. Honest.
Many different parts of the brain act together in complex combinations to produce the range of emotions we feel when we are in love, which means that it’s still pretty mysterious.
Besides which, the reason why we feel something doesn’t change our experience of it. Nor does all the knowledge in the world alter the fact that sex is incredibly pleasurable. Better still, if you have plenty of sex you get a regular fix of oxytocin, which makes you feel all warm and fuzzy towards your other half. Even if it is just all in your head, does it matter? I don’t think so.
Furthermore fMRIs have actually proved the existence of long-term love. The caudate nuclei is where your memory of how to do everyday tasks, such as riding a bicycle, is stored. Long-term love is stored here as well, which means it’s like a good habit. Fair enough really, because, frankly, who really wants to have their world rocked early on a Monday morning?