Romantic Love and Addiction
In the comments of this blog, people have accused me of being “cruel,” “heartless,” and “the kind of guy who would repeatedly pound a burlap bag full of cute and fuzzy puppies with a rubber mallet” on account my opinions about romantic love, especially how it relates to marriage redefinition.
Rather than bask in the warm glow of such heartfelt and fulsome praise, I’m going to set out to earn it still further by pointing out some recent scientific findings.
If my posts have a general theme it is this: love is not what you think it is. Happiness is not what you think it is. Without knowing the nature of love and happiness, we cannot have a meaningful discussion about love, marriage, and marriage redefinition. To discuss these things without this knowledge is to fail to engage the real world. Unfortunately, the real world is a lot less enchanting than and the movies that populate the “” section of Netflix.
So, what’s romantic love? Essentially, it’s an addiction. (I guess was on to something).
The team of researchers, which included Arthur Aron, Ph.D., professor of social and health psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University, and former graduate students Greg Strong and Debra Mashek looked at subjects who had a recent break-up and found that the pain and anguish they were experiencing may be linked to activation of parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings. The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology.
“This brain imaging study of individuals who were still ‘in love’ with their rejecter supplies further evidence that the passion of ‘romantic love’ is a goal-oriented motivation state rather than a specific emotion” the researchers concluded, noting that brain imaging showed some similarities between romantic rejection and cocaine craving. “The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that romantic love is a specific form of addiction.”
Like all addictions, the warm glow of its effects fades over time. Also like addictions, the feelings of withdrawal also fade over time.
So, this is what we’re really arguing over. A drug of addiction. Not some whose desirable effects we heartlessly want to deny to people we hate. And like so many drugs of addiction, everybody would be better off attributing much less importance to it.
Only when we realize this will we set ourselves on the path to true happiness.
Loading ...
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1039
Last Panel.
Nerdygirl,
Whew! I thought it was going to be that old video of me pounding a burlap bag full of…
Ha. In hindsight, I can see who the domain name can give one that impression.
Well, if you do see that video, just don’t tell anybody it’s me.