It's probably a combination of all three, plus ineffable qualities that even matchmaking services can't perfectly nail down. It's nature and nurture," Nicole Prause, a sexual psychophysiologist and neuroscientist, tells Mental Floss. She is the founder of Liberos, a Los Angeles-based independent research center that works in collaboration with the University of Georgia and the University of Pittsburgh to study human sexual behavior and develop sexuality-related biotechnology.
Scientists who study attraction take into consideration everything from genetics, psychology, and family history to traumas, which have been shown to impact a person's ability to bond or feel desire.
When You Feel "Chemistry" With Someone, What's Actually Going On?
Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, Match. In each stage, your body chemistry behaves differently. It turns out that "chemistry" is, at least in part, actual chemistry. In the lust and attraction phases, your body is directing the show, as people can feel desire without knowing anything personal about the object of that desire.
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Lust, Fisher asserts in a seminal paper [ PDF ], is nothing more than the existence of a sex drive, or "the craving for sexual gratification," she writes. It's a sensation driven by estrogens and androgens, the female and male sex hormones, based in the biological drive to reproduce. Attraction may be influenced less than lust by physiological factors—the appeal of someone's features, or the way they make you laugh—but your body is still calling the shots at this stage, pumping you full of the hormones cortisol, adrenaline, and dopamine, effecting your brain in a way that's not unlike the way illicit substances do.
Fisher has collaborated multiple times on the science of attraction with social psychologist Arthur Aron , a research professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
The Truth About Chemistry Between Two People - mindbodygreen
Aron and his wife Elaine , who is also a psychologist, are known for studying what makes relationships begin—and last. In a study in Frontiers in Psychology , the researchers proposed that "romantic love is a natural and often positive addiction that evolved from mammalian antecedents by 4 million years ago as a survival mechanism to encourage hominin pair-bonding and reproduction, seen cross-culturally today. In the attraction phase, your body produces increased amounts of dopamine, the feel-good chemical that is also responsible for pain relief. Using fMRI brain imaging, Aron's studies have shown that "if you're thinking about a person you're intensely in love with, your brain activates the dopamine reward system, which is the same system that responds to cocaine," he tells Mental Floss.
Earlier, Fisher's paper found that new couples often show "increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship. The attachment phase is characterized by increases in oxytocin and vasopressin; these hormones are thought to promote bonding and positive social behaviors to sustain connections over time in order to fulfill parental duties.
There is no hard and fast timeline for how long each phase lasts, as it can vary widely due to gender, age, and other environmental factors, Fisher writes. Additionally, while oxytocin has long gotten the credit for being the love hormone, Prause says that scientists are now "kind of over oxytocin," because it has broader functions than simply bonding.
It also plays a role in the contraction of the uterus to stimulate birth, instigating lactation, and sexual arousal; low levels have been linked to autism spectrum disorders. Now they're focusing on a charmingly named hormone known as kisspeptin no, really. Produced in the hypothalamus, kisspeptin plays a role in the onset of puberty, and may increase libido, regulate the gonadal steroids that fuel the sex drive, and help the body maintain pregnancy. But Prause says there is a lot more study about the role kisspeptin plays in attraction.
Biology may explain our initial attraction and the "honeymoon" phase of a relationship, but it doesn't necessarily explain why a person's love of obscure movies or joy of hiking tickles your fancy, or what makes you want to settle down. The Arons' numerous studies on this subject have found connection boils down to something quite simple: In the process of doing research for her book How To Fall in Love With Anyone , writer Mandy Len Catron of Vancouver became her own test subject when she came across the research the Arons are most well-known for: The questions were originally designed to "generate intimacy, a sense of feeling similar, and the sense that the other person likes you," Aron explains.
Romantic love wasn't the goal. The Arons first tested their questions by pairing up students during a regular class section of a large psychology course, as they related in a paper in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Some students were paired with someone of the same sex, while others were matched with someone of the opposite sex.
Each partner then answered a series of 36 increasingly personal questions, which took about 45 minutes each. In another version of the study, heterosexual, opposite-sex pairs follow the question session with four minutes of staring deeply into each other's eyes. Catron decided to test these methods out with a casual acquaintance, Mark, over beers at a local bar one night.
They were both dating other people at the time, and no one exclusively. As she answered the questions and listened to Mark's answers, "I felt totally absorbed by the conversation in a way that was unlike any of the other first dates I was having at the time with people I met online," Catron tells Mental Floss. This is how we grow. Don't bypass or downplay the chemistry you feel; remember that it exists for a reason. The people you're most attracted to are your greatest teachers in love.
Show up for the lessons they have for you. Please leave a comment below about what you've learned from your relationships with the most chemistry. I look forward to hearing from you.
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This electric-like love energy transfixes you on your only goal: We all are unconsciously attracted to what is familiar -- until we choose something different. When dating, you want to make sure you are falling for a healthy partner, and not recreating old dysfunctional patterns. According to author Ross Rosenberg, all too often we fall in love with the same person, but with a "different face.
She came back for at tune-up session a year or so later. She said she knew she needed to see me again when the first guy she dated was essentially her ex-husband "with a different name and an Australian accent. Over nearly 20 years of counseling individuals and couples, one of the most prevalent and under-discussed issues is the powerful and dysfunctional attraction between codependents "givers" and pathological narcissists "takers". Rosenberg brilliantly addresses this powerful dynamic in his highly recommended book, The Human Magnet Syndrome.
The book explains why patient, giving and selfless individuals -- codependents -- are predictably attracted to selfish, self-centered and controlling partners -- emotionally manipulators. Like clockwork, codependents and emotional manipulators find themselves habitually and irresistibly drawn into a relationship that begins with emotional and sexual highs, but later transforms into a painful and disappointing dysfunctional "relationship dance.