Falling in love is not a metaphysical phenomenon,
but rather a series of chemical reactions in our brain.
–Alonso Martinez, “What Happens To Your Brain When You Fall Out Of Love
With Your Soulmate?”
I. When I look at my husband sitting across the kitchen table from me, I see what other women surely must see when, for instance, spotting him at the grocery store as he compares flavored yogurts. Or, as he gets down on one knee and hugs our daughter before kindergarten. Or, as he walks through their front doors dressed in Carhartt work Dungarees with his five-gallon drywall bucket swinging from his hand, a sign that he is ready to repair the holes in their walls (and in their middle-aged hearts). Here is a fit man, mid-forties, with thick black hair (some grey), an angular nose, dark eyes that communicate equal parts compassion and mischief, and lean legs built for long-distance running but which he lately uses for indoor ice skating and paddle boarding on Nebraska rivers. I wonder if some of these other women, looking at Jon and recognizing a few of his attributes, experience a slight increase in dopamine, one of the feel-good chemical neurotransmitters. Brain scientists say that dopamine assumes several key roles, including its role in traveling along the neural pathways that lead to arousal.
Maybe a few of these women experience the larger dopamine wave that is generated when one person is attracted to another. Maybe they allow themselves to fantasize that here is also the kind of man who would’ve cried when his only child crowned (and gets sappy whenever she reaches major milestones), a man who would’ve helped his sixty-nine-year-old father to the bathroom and then into bed when his father fell ill from cancer, a man whose secret passion must be drawing and who sets out fancy pens and paper on the kitchen table and draws the musculoskeletal system from many different angles and on many different bodies. A man who I used to have dreams about, dreams that strangely occurred at summer camp with my dream-self as a teenager, even though I never attended summer camp and Jon and I met when I was thirty-two-years-old and he was thirty-five. Now I sometimes dream about faceless bodies, anonymous men walking with me on dirt trails under canopies of trees in full bloom and near olive-colored lakes, always desiring more than the walking even while sleeping.
As Jon makes return trips to their homes for drywall patches, maybe their production of dopamine (and other feel-good chemical neurotransmitters) continues to increase and bumps into new receptors, creating new neural pathways deep in their brains. While he jokes with one or two of them that he is good with his handheld cordless drill—drill posed mid-air and buzzing—their adrenal glands produce the hormone adrenaline and their hearts start thumping faster, louder. Breath catches in their throats. They go a tiny bit weak in the knees from the release of the hormones norepinephrine and epinephrine. They feel lust, or at the very least, feel the deep pleasure of the moment, the noticing of him; exactly what I experienced when I first saw him and continued to experience when we dated for the next two years, but the opposite of what I worry I’m experiencing lately. I see his attributes, too, and observe these qualities and store our shared memories, but it’s as if the woman participating in the present moment of this nearly ten-year love story isn’t me, not my blood or bones, and I’m no longer having these chemical reactions in my brain.
At our kitchen table, Jon furrows his eyebrows. He says, “Do you still love me? I’m afraid that you don’t.”
It isn’t the first time we’ve questioned the strength of our relationship, but it’s the first time it feels so dire. Behind him on the wall hangs a two-foot tall, hand-painted lizard sculpture we bought when we eloped to Mexico over eight years ago (or was it from the hiking trip we took two years later to the Grand Canyon when I was a couple of months pregnant with our daughter?) Troubled memories crowd out romantic ones. Below the lizard, a ponytail plant droops nearby the patio door. Jon bought the plant for his small house in Omaha, Nebraska, when we first met, when I was a graduate student in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when we used to lie naked and entangled in his sheets in his bedroom talking for hours, our neurons firing love signals but never using the particular neural pathways leading to the right prefrontal cortex where our negative emotions—our criticisms and judgments of the other—lay dormant, as yet undiscovered. These parts of our brains are fully alive now. I wonder: Is our love affair now like the ponytail plant, limp and devoid of something? I’ve been keeping most of my thoughts about us to myself lately. Are we normal? Am I normal? Or is something wrong with us, our love? Instead, I’ve started searching for answers in basic neurobiology.
“Of course I love you.” I reach across the table and touch his hand, calloused from the years he’s spent working in construction. Sometimes his is literally a tough hand to hold. “I always will.” I withdraw my hand. But it doesn’t mean I will always be in love with you.
Once upon a time (just like in the beginning of a fairytale), we would enter a room and other people would call us lovebirds. As in, Oh, look, the lovebirds have arrived, sometimes with genuine affection toward us and other times with a smirk that I’ve recently began to interpret as, Just wait. In a few years, things will change. Now, we are more likely to be the only couple at the dinner party not touching one another or, later, bickering in the claustrophobic car on the way home, irritated but not fully understanding why. Where is the all-consuming love that drew us to each other and had the two of us boarding planes to and from our states every third weekend so we could fall into each other’s arms? Where have those passionate feelings—our chemistry—gone? I fear that our love affair is over.
I love my husband more than I love my children.
—Ayelet Waldman, “Truly, Madly, Guiltily”
2. The real trouble with Jon began when I fell in love with our daughter, a deep and endless, bottom-of-the-well love that I’ve since read was triggered in my brain when her cells began splitting in my womb and intensified the moment after she was born as the nurse put her to my breast and I wept. Even before Lily and I first saw each other, my amygdala—the two almond-shaped clusters of neurons in my brain responsible for my experience of emotions—grew and neural activity intensified. Production of oxytocin, the love hormone, swelled. These and other maternal brain changes motivated me to be more attentive to my newborn (and less attentive to my lover). Men are hormonally affected after the birth of their children, too, though to a lesser extent. Their testosterone plunges and their estrogen increases, fluctuations thought to prepare new fathers to be more nurturing toward their offspring and less interested in sex. Changes in both men and women promote the survival of the human species, or so the theory goes, and utter disinterest in one’s spouse supposedly lasts for only the first few months of baby’s life. It had lasted longer for me—two years, to be precise.
In my head, I hear the chants from the marital advice columns on the internet, in magazines, and from the mouths of married women: “Why I Put My Husband Before Our Kids.” “The Marriage First Household.” “4 Key Reasons Why It Matters To Put Your Spouse Before Your Children.” “Happy Parents, Happy Kids.” All of the advice that I’ve ignored for the past five years. I put her first. Women who write about loving their partner more than they love their children astound me. When I comfort my daughter from a nightmare or a minor sleep disturbance, I receive a hit of oxytocin. Simply looking at her sleeping face rewards the feel-good parts of my brain and stimulates my urge to protect her. My brain doesn’t reward me anymore just for looking at my husband like it did early on.
Cleanse all the demons
That were killing my freedom
—Florida Georgia Line, “H.O.L.Y.”
3. I arrive for a casual work meeting at an older man’s condo near the university where we teach, and while everyone else eventually leaves for their Friday night plans, I stay put. At home everything is the same and Lily will already be sleeping. What would I do? Read a book while Jon watches TV? Fold laundry? Turn in early? When the same neural pathways are used over and over again, the reward centers stop lighting up. Same old, same old. Love can’t overcome the dull passage of time. Complacency sets in. What did Jon and I last talk about that morning? A domestic negotiation, no doubt. Unloading the dishwasher? Putting air into the front, passenger-side tire of my station wagon? Cutting the apple for Lily’s lunch box? The man is divorced, older than my husband by more than a decade, somewhere in his sixties, with a daughter off at college. He pours me another glass of wine, pulls his chair closer to where I sit on his leather couch so that our knees almost touch and stares at me through his bifocals. We’ve also always been just friends, and I trust this unspoken understanding because there’s never been a reason not to. Nonetheless, the unfamiliarity of our conversations (minus the risk of infidelity) lights up the reward centers in my brain.
We’ve been talking for some time, enjoying each other’s company when the man says, smiling, looking at me through the bottom window of his bifocals, “I knew there was something between us when we first met”—pausing as if searching for the right description, with his hands open, palms up—“this attraction, this chemistry.” So, we don’t have an unspoken understanding.
What does the man see when he looks at me? Possibilities? Unknowns? Intrigue? Surely not what Jon and I see when we look at each other. Love is blind—but only for so long. During the early stage of love, couples experience a decrease in the production of the neurotransmitter serotonin and obsess about their loved ones. Activity in the area of the brain associated with fear and aversive learning is reduced. These and other brain variations, like an increase in the production of the hormone vasopressin, cause couples like Jon and me to overlook faults in our lovers as we’re getting to know them—only to see those faults very clearly a few years later. His impatience. My self-righteousness. His laid-back approach to parenting. My hyper-vigilance. His temper. My knee-jerk reaction to his expressions of anger. The question is: can you accept those faults or will they break your relationship (and your heart)?
At the word “chemistry,” my body becomes rigid, my skin pulls tight like shrink wrap. I grab my purse and fumble for my phone, offering the excuse that my husband needs me at home. At his door, he leans in close for a sloppy kiss on my cheek. (How moist that kiss! How hot his breath near my ear!) Drunk, he wobbles and giggles. I take the stairs outside of his condo two at a time, feeling his eyes on my back. He calls out, “See you later, sweetheart!” I roll my eyes and chide myself. Idiot. Don’t be the last woman to leave a single man’s dinner party unless you are ready to ruin your relationship. I’m not. I want to find “chemistry” again with Jon, not someone new. But how?
How much you love somebody does not depend on that somebody; it depends on you —
your genes and brain chemicals and how much you have of them.
—Fred Nour, “When it comes to love, just follow your…brain?”
4. Come back. Come back to your life, Jody, I think to myself while my friend, a colleague at the university, speaks about her frustrating morning rounding up two young children with her husband already at the office. “He doesn’t understand how difficult it is!” she laments. My lunch of leftover stir-fried vegetables sits untouched on the table between us, my appetite gone (maybe a symptom of lost-love sickness). In between bites of her apple, she talks about domestic compromises, a subject we have worn thin, and I try to ignore the fantasy of single life that’s shaping up in my mind. But married life is the life you know. This is the life you want. Right? I don’t know anymore, and the chance that I might not terrifies me.
On our best days, which have happened less and less over the past two years, Jon and I see through to each other, past years of lingering hurts and endless compromises, past the moody disenchantment of daily domesticity to the possibilities we once saw in the other. The brief movie montage of our life together plays in my head: us sitting in a friend’s backyard in Omaha while Jon brings my bare foot to his lap and traces it with his finger, and I smile shyly and with the initial pleasure of new touch; groping at each other under a blanket in a park in Kalamazoo; me crying at the airport in Grand Rapids when he flew back home; him proposing on a pontoon boat on Hanson Lake (my favorite childhood lake); him consoling me after my miscarriage; us hiking down into the Grand Canyon with hydration packs on our shoulders and the secret of another pregnancy; our family of three together in San Diego, Spokane, Orlando, and elsewhere, together on various bike rides, swimming and hiking outings. Always holding hands. Always touching.
So why, late at night, do I sometimes sink to my knees in the kitchen and put my face into my hands and weep silently so that Jon and Lily won’t hear? It has taken me a while to recognize these moments on the kitchen floor for what they are. Expressions of grief. Of loss. Of fear. Our relationship is changing. The “true love” stage is over and I mourn it. I hope for something else in its place, but what? And when? How long should I wait? I don’t have answers to these questions. Few of the married women I know talk openly about them, and the divorcees I know mostly talk about the bliss of independence and dating again.
I tune back into the present moment and hear my friend expresses her surprise at the recent disintegration of decades-long marriages of a few of our colleagues and friends. “I know marriage is hard, but I wouldn’t divorce my husband. We’re glad to have our friendship with you and Jon,” she confides, leaving me to guess at what she means. How do you see Jon and me? I wonder. Stable? Happy? Nice? I’m not so nice, not if you really get to know me. Ask my husband. He knows me. Maybe I’m like one of the women I’ve read about who has fewer oxytocin-receptors in their brains or who produces less oxytocin than other people when touching or talking with their partners.
Darker images appear in my mind, not a different truth, but a private truth between two people. The trash can Jon kicks around the backyard of the house when his painting project exasperates him; the hundreds of cobwebs and spindly water spiders on the underside of the pontoon roof where Jon proposes; my depression after the miscarriage and secondary infertility after Lily’s birth; the separate bedrooms we sleep in after Lily is born so that he can rest and I can breastfeed (an arrangement that outlasted the breastfeeding). Our fights over money, methods of parenting, growing our family, where we should live, uses for our free time, my coldness, his unhappiness with his job. Our marriage story isn’t unlike others. Scientists theorize that the most notable brain changes during a new romance last around two to four years, and then one of two things happen: the brain stops responding to the love-induced neural activity or the activity itself stops. Time plus love equals ordinary disappointments, which as it turns out, has been enough to harm the good feelings and brain reactions Jon and I used to have for one another.
…all members of the human species may come equipped with the mental hardware for
both falling in love as well as for ending a relationship.
—Brian Boutwell, J.C. Barnes, & Kevin M. Beaver, “When Love Dies: Further
Elucidating the Existence of a Mate Ejection Module”
5. All couples eventually fall out of love as our culture understands this early euphoric phase. Love is initially based on a chemical reaction in the brain that is not sustainable: parts of our brains shut-off so we can consume ourselves with thoughts of our loved ones. We’re flooded with feel-good chemicals. We can’t wait for our next “hit.” Humans wouldn’t be productive in other areas of our lives if we walked around in a euphoric cloud of love all the time, so early love has a shelf life. After the initial phase (two to four years), then comes a deeper attraction and trust (the next five to ten years), a time when our brains return mostly to normal though we still experience an increase in oxytocin and vasopressin when we’re intimate with our lovers, and finally, around the “7 Year Itch,” a third phase, for the lucky 50% or so of couples who make it: “compassionate, routine” love. This last stage is also the most long-lasting and enduring, and brain chemicals and activity mostly return to baseline except during sex, when couples continue to experience an uptick in oxytocin, which in turn, increases estrogen and testosterone production.
When I was leaving the first and then second stage of love with Jon—two stages that brought a natural “high” and with them, a feeling of excitement but also peace (I had found the elusive “true love” everyone always talks about!), the world suddenly seemed more uncertain and unforgiving. A sense of foreboding set in. What was wrong with us? With me?
One afternoon, Lily and I hold hands on the downhill walk from her elementary school, and she breaks away from me and skips into the fading white stripes of a crosswalk. As she vanishes from my side, an SUV speeds downhill on a parallel trajectory from where she skips. My brain processes a rush of unrelated images: the van suddenly turning left toward her; the brown grass, leafless trees, and warm, almost-spring air; me, at fourteen, wearing a red-and-white tank and shorts for a high school track meet; and me and Jon packing our belongings into separate boxes for separate homes. I am afraid. I picture myself lonely and uncertain, bent over with my fingertips on the thin white line, my feet pressed into starting blocks—the way I felt at the start of every track meet, the way I’d feel if I messed up my family. I’ve gotten a glimpse of the emotional reality of starting over. Alone. Without Jon.
“Be careful!” I shout. Am I talking to my daughter, who skips across the street and safely onto the cracked concrete sidewalk, just like I know that she would, or to myself? Be careful.
I wish that I could mute the desire-seeking parts of my brain, which are the same pathways that establish pleasure and reward in response to love and also to drugs like cocaine, so that I can live, as my mother once advised, satisfied with the way things are instead of pursuing more. More. More. More. If I can learn to accept enough, like my mother has done in her fifty-year-plus marriage to my father, I, too, can hold my tongue if, for instance, my partner donates my only eyeglasses to charity by mistake. (What good would it do, my mother asked, to tell him now? Annoyed, I replied: But it upset you; how else will he learn how to treat you? And my mother, as always, said, Let some things be in a marriage, Jody. Let some things be enough. My mother’s acceptance of “enoughness” was ultimately too much: praising his strong work ethic while forgiving his bullish, daily temper tantrums.) I’ve read that the practice of being grateful, even if it’s just for one small thing each day, can light up neural circuits, increasing dopamine and serotonin production, similar to a response from taking an antidepressant. I can’t undo the damage already done to my relationship, but perhaps I can reduce its power.
Passion is but a prelude to
Years of gradual unfolding.
—Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao
6. Jon and I are talking at the kitchen table by the wall lizard and the drooping ponytail plant when I realize: it isn’t drooping. It’s reaching for the sunlight. After the night of our “Do You Still Love Me?” conversation, I read a love experiment that involves pairs of strangers looking into each other’s eyes for four minutes and asking each other personal questions. At the conclusion of the experiment, many participants report feeling close to and even attracted to the stranger they’ve been partnered with. Six months later, two of the participants marry. I told Jon about the experiment; we both wondered when we’d last taken the time to stare into each other’s eyes and ask questions that were unrelated to childrearing and household management. It’d been a long while. So for the past several months we’ve been setting aside time to ask each other personal questions, if only for four minutes. Are we heading toward our compassionate, routine love? It’s too early to tell, but we both enjoy these moments where we’re willing to be vulnerable with each other.
This evening, I stare into Jon’s eyes. “What would you like from a marriage?” I ask. It isn’t the first time we’ve considered the question, but like our relationship, our answers are changing, evolving, and adapting.
“I want my wife and me to be able to stand side by side in this kitchen, wash our pots and pans, and put our child to bed, together, afterward. Every night,” Jon says, a sad smile forming at the corner of his lips. “What about you?”
I want this simple (yet complicated) image of harmony too and, as usual, more: “I want my husband and me to have adventures together. I want us to be interested in each other—like you and I used to be.” It feels good to say aloud what I’ve been thinking.
“Yes,” Jon says. “I am interested in you. I’m sorry if I wasn’t showing it.”
“I’m interested in you,” I say. I mean it. I start to cry. His eyes soften. Having calm, honest conversations about our relationship releases a pressure valve.
“I can see this is hard for you,” Jon says. “We’re in a transitional stage.” He reaches out to touch my arm. He takes my hand.
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s hard for me, too.”
When Jon holds my hand, the physical sensation of him interlacing his fingers with my own causes what scientists would say is a predictable reaction in my brain. Information travels from one neuron to the next, the stuff of synapses, of electrical and chemical signals, of muscle memory and associations. Of hundreds of hand-holdings and hundreds of moments like this one where we sought each other out in the most basic human way. How much of staying in love is the result of brain chemistry? Of willpower? Of accepting disappointments? Of learning gratitude? Of touch? Of having courage? There are some questions that scientists can’t answer, so I pay attention to the sensation of his warm fingers. I like it. I smile. He smiles back. Simple. And yet complicated. Somewhere within the lumpy, grey matter in my skull a new neural pathway is being forged.
Jody Keisner's essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Cimarron Review, Post Road, Brevity, VIDA Review, Threepenny Review and many other literary journals and magazines. She has recently completed Under My Bed and Other Essays, a memoir-in-essays that traces the origins of violence and fear that afflict women. You can read more of her work at jodykeisner.com or follow her @JodyKeisner.
Photo by PHOTOPHANATIC1 on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA