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An Affair Of the Head
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I HAVE LEFT FOR YOU BEHIND!
Freddy throws his arm around your brain and joins in:
FOR YOU DON'T BELONG TO ME!
YOUR HEART BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE!
Your brain can spend entire days doing this.
This is because your brain has kicked into reverse, and love is long gone.
O!
Rejection, rage, despair!
Dopamine leaves the scene of the affair, now running off into the nucleus accumbens, the insular cortex, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, research by Fisher and others shows. Jilted lovers' brains now light up in these areas when they look at pictures of their former flames -- this brain matter is associated with taking big risks, addiction, physical pain and obsessive-compulsive disorders. This is why, researchers theorize, people become obsessed with lost love, and are driven, in extreme cases, to stalking, suicide, homicide, rubber tubing.
Regan, the California researcher, notes that such cases are rare, and may have more to do with existing mental issues than simple unrequited love. Still, she says, passion is destined to end, whether mellowing into long-term love or blowing up on the freeway at 4 a.m. Given this, she wonders if "we do our self a disservice by glorifying passionate love so much."
"The search for eternal passion is very misguided," she says. "It's the search for the perfect high that keeps people discarding relationships right and left . You don't feel the same way you did; people want to break up, instead of seeing it as normal."
And so, alas. Even neurologists, to go with Shakespeare's priest, now tell us passion is true love's fool's gold, a flamboyant dead end on the evolutionary chain of primate happiness.
The only problem with this insight is that no one pays it any mind. Doomed passion may not make us right, and it may not even make us very happy.
It only makes us human. It only makes us who we are.
