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The Jewish Home | JULY 21, 2022
Dr. Deb
Focus on the Positive in Your Spouse By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
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pparently, the feeling of being “in” love is not merely a state of mind. There’s chemistry behind it: Adrenaline (norepinephrine) and dopamine are increased, and serotonin goes down. You are most likely familiar with the word “serotonin” as part of the chemical process in anti-depressants. What you may not know is that serotonin is not an upper. It is not a make-you-feel-good neurotransmitter. Rather, its job is to keep a person’s feelings blunted. When a person is seriously depressed, then keeping depression at bay and neutralizing all feelings may be a good temporary measure. But serotonin is taken back into the system from the bloodstream – uptake – for a good reason: The healthy person is meant to feel and experience all kinds of feelings, good and bad. That is what makes a person feel alive. So an uptake inhibitor keeps the serotonin swirling around and taking the edge off of their sadness. All well and good in depression, but in normal love, the excitement is not meant to be tamped down – or else how would two strangers ever get through the difficulties and challenges of connecting? So Hashem made it so that serotonin must decrease when this “falling” process occurs. There’s another chemical reason for that, too. Maybe you’ve heard the term “dopamine” associated with the cravings for street drugs that addicts have. Dopamine is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter that alerts the brain to take note of situations that produce pleasure so that it can repeat that action in the future. If studying hard for a test leads to a
good grade, the dopamine released lets the brain know, “Hey, studying is exciting!” What happens to your mind when the chemicals are doing their job? Now, as it happens, one of the jobs of serotonin is to decrease dopamine. That is because dopamine’s message to the brain, “This is good!” can go too far, becoming a craving or an addiction. (That is why street drugs will, indeed, raise dopamine levels.) Serotonin’s job is to level off feelings – bad and good. But wouldn’t you know it, researcher Helen Fisher found that people of all ages who feel “in” love have very low serotonin and high dopamine levels, which, sure enough, leads them to be obsessed with thinking about the object of their affections day and night. Why would that be? Well, let’s look at the “in” love experience. If someone is just a tad interested in us, that piques our interest. Timing is important for this to happen. We have to
be “looking” to meet someone, hopefully a special someone. But the next thing that happens is we ignore any negatives in the object of our interest. Helen Fisher, the researcher, notes that this corresponds to the amygdala deactivating. The amygdala is the brain’s smoke alarm system. So, on the one hand, we overlook the bad, and on the other, we magnify the good. And what exactly is this good that we magnify? It is none other than the wonderful feeling we get when someone pays us enormous attention. The truth is that this falling in love experience caters to the narcissist in all of us. Not only do we enjoy the person’s fabulous qualities, but most importantly, this fabulous person enjoys us. You can see what a major boost to our emotions that is. We wouldn’t want to lose such a wonderful thing; it’s pure gold. So of course we’re going to overlook elements of this situation that we don’t like and of course we will make up
whatever seems good to fill in the empty spaces that we overlook. So what happens when the chemicals wear off? That is a natural process, and it is replaced with oxytocin and vasopressin, the attachment hormones. After all, being obsessed with the person you love will definitely interfere with childcare and other adult responsibilities. In spite of this, I hear from people all the time that they “fell out of love” for the person they’re with. Then they tell me they’re unhappy, which they think explains the whole thing. It doesn’t. When reality sets in, we see all the things we chose to “miss,” and we see that what we made up about our beloved was not so accurate. Next, one of two things happens: Either, we try to dismiss what bothers us about the other person – and that doesn’t work – or we quit the whole problem by rushing for divorce with the famous words, “I don’t have any feelings anymore.” Neither of these approaches is terribly helpful. After all, why quit a relationship in which you were once invested when you have nothing at all to lose by seeing if the things that became bothersome can be fixed? And for sure, if something is really bothering you, then by holding back, you’re not giving your partner a chance to rise to the occasion to fix it. Losing hope doesn’t help; what might help instead? Step 1: Just like newly smitten people, you must ignore, overlook, diminish. We are all humans here. The greatest of people were human. Moshe Rabbeinu
