What Does It Mean to Be in Love?

Content:

1. What Does It Mean to Love: a Chemical Component
2. What Does It Mean to Fall in Love: a Psychological Aspect
3. What Does It Mean to Be in Love with Someone?

It would be nice to start an article with a couple of sweet cliché songs, but does it really mirror something so deep, emotional and spiritual as this topic? Love comes in all entities: it can be a love for your local barista who always guesses a perfect ratio of milk and coffee, it also can be a love for your grandparents who always give you a nice sum of money for the holidays even though you are almost forty. However, let’s talk about love in a classic way between a man and a woman. You can say, “She is an absolute working bee, I love her lots.” But what does falling in love mean? What exactly stands behind this meaningful process? You know, it doesn’t happen in a day (I'm sorry if you believe in love at first sight).

An impact of inner beliefs, as well as physical and psychological predisposition, presuppose this complicated phenomenon. Yet some of the scientists deny that “being in love” exists at all, explaining it as a chemical reaction for a certain person. True, love is something you can hardly get a grasp of. So today we won’t explain love because it’s impossible and highly individual for all human beings, but we will try to show you what this feeling looks and feels like.

What Does It Mean to Love: a Chemical Component

You know that a lot of people describe being in love as if being under the influence of a highly addictive drug. The first month of being in love with a new person feels heavenly in most people: they tend to be almost absolutely unrealistic about themselves and their significant partners, the world seems to look as if someone has artificially saturated it in Photoshop. They look all blooming and reborn like a spring bush after a long winter season, flourishing and shining. If you ever been in love seriously, you wouldn’t notice a thing. That’s just human nature. All you think about is just whether you can have at least five spare minutes to spend with your love interest together. But if you have ever had a friend (a co-worker, a neighbor, etc.) who has been in love, then you can guess, this person could be quite a pain in the ass (wasn’t intended to rhyme, but OK).

A serious businessman who is a man of his word suddenly becomes easy, forgetful and straight stupid, irritating less romantically occupied co-workers with his clumsiness. An insufferable hag from your dormitory can become a sweet middle-aged lady who suddenly gifts free passes for all the students. Yes, love changes us drastically. But what’s the logic behind this? What does it mean to love someone?

When we develop an interest for a new person, a substance called phenylethylamine (or, as they call it “a love substance”) is chemically produced in your brain. The similar effect would be if you took some molly or ecstasy in the club or experimented with some other amphetamine drug. It’s literally the same chemical component that makes people feel invincible and unstoppable at times. For the first time in life, a brain-dead clerk (no offense to office workers) handles things like a true boss, following people with instructions and working overtime while performing twice as much paperwork. He seems to be the king of the hill.

An immature and modest teenager girl flourishes and turns into a sexy lady in a speck of time, and no one understands what has caused this drastic change. That’s the good-old phenylethylamine which poor people have to snort or swallow in order to feel alright. Not everyone remembers that love is pretty much free. It also happens because this chemical affects the logic centers of your consciousness, therefore all the actions you do will deny all the logical rules. In simple words, people start thinking outside the box. Probably every person in the world who was madly in love at least once can share a story of causing trouble or doing a majorly embarrassing thing in the name of love. The same stupid thing we get to do while being drunk with our fellows after work.

Scientists, who were studying the topic of depressions and remedies (or psychological recoveries), have come up with astonishing discoveries, concerning chemical substances called neurotransmitters. And phenylethylamine, or simply PEA, is a parent of all neurotransmitters. The PEA is located at the “tail” of a nerve cell and helps the impulses move around each other, transmitting the signal. When a person is in a critical condition (some of them might be dangerous for their lives), and he or she has given up all the hope and motivation, this substance overwhelms the capacity of their brains, so they start grasping for life like crazy, sometimes even doing irrational things. Love, as well as every amphetamine, switch on the “eye of the tiger” mode, so no wonder your boss acts like a total phony as of later. They are just irrational due to love. Or they are taking drugs.

What Does It Mean to Fall in Love: a Psychological Aspect

A psychological aspect of love will be inevitably interlinked with the overabundance of phenylethylamine and dopamine in the brain. Since we've figured out about neurotransmitters, and dopamine just makes you happy and satisfied, you could only guess how love reflects on every aspect of human life, especially a psychological one.

Love seems like such an easy topic, but even the most famous psychologists struggle to give it a definition. There is no certain thing that can define love. For some people, it can be self-sacrifice, for others, it’s about lust and physical attraction. Somebody would say that love is complete readiness to give your life for the sake of a beloved person. But psychologists don’t agree that an individual, who’s in love, is expected to behave a certain way.

The only common thing that unites loving hearts all around the world is irrationality and ultimate stupidity. They are led by some incredible forces (by the adrenalin, actually), and only God knows what may come into their heads. Driven by the mystic adrenalin, people start behaving in a strange way because they simply can’t adjust to the way of behavior a loved person might like. They are like blind lambs, trying to climb through the woods. Suddenly, all the things become of great importance. If a person is in love, he or she begins to care about their appearance. If your husband or wife had been okay to be overweight before you started dating, you might hear some stories about them losing weight just to impress you or look good in bed. Women start applying a generous amount of makeup (even though they were never into it), men might clean their shoes more thoroughly, just to appear tidier.

So what makes us think that immaculate appearance and good manners will be appreciated by a beloved person in the first place? Suddenly, we believe in superstitions, karma, horoscope, and generally, look and behave like animals in the mating season. That happens just because your adrenalin gives you hints from the back row because all the animals seek for the healthiest and most attractive mate.

You start doing bizarre things because adrenaline throws you in the decisions you’ve never made before, dopamine makes you dumb happy, and phenylethylamine just makes you straight high.

What does love mean in a relationship? Psychologically, love can be subdivided into seven stages.

1. Falling in love is a short period when two people suffer from this neurotransmitter cocktail, they are extremely happy and positive about their beloved ones, they notice only ups, and all the world seems to be paradise.
2. Calming down is the process where lovers begin to see love from a different perspective, they try to either coexist and learn habits and peculiarities of each other, or they simply break up.
3. Disgust is a real test for lovers, they become more selfish and start seeing annoying sides to their partners, it’s also a true test for two people.
4. Humility is a stage where lovers begin to live with all the downs and shortcomings of their SO, and this is a period of self-improvement and mutual understanding.
5. Service comes when people fully support each other in any endeavors.
6. Friendship is when a couple becomes more fun, easy and quarrels almost disappear, they are not afraid or embarrassed to show their hairy rears or idiotic pajamas or skip brushing their teeth without no more pretending to be cool.
7. Love happens when partners have come a long way, they have learned to appreciate and love truly, now they perceive each other as a unity, without cheating or lying, without judging or making the other feel bad.

You can see that falling in love is just the first stage and love needs to come a long way. Also, a person in love is highly individual, so not every person in love becomes honest, reliable or upbeat. Liars and cheaters, as well as mean people, love too, it’s just the way an individual shows it.

What Does It Mean to Be in Love with Someone?

What does it mean to have a love for someone? Just look at a person’s behavior. Psychology can explain a lot about love, starting with the resemblance of your closest relatives to finding a missing spot in your life that hurts or even finding a tormentor to resemble a person who abused you in the childhood. Internal patterns drop hints on why this person is worthy of your attention, even if some people might find him or her disgusting or utterly laid(e). But this is how it looks from the inner perspective.

What does it mean to be in love and how you can spot a person in love, only judging by his or her behavior?

1. A person becomes neurotic and forgetful, especially when the subject of their dreams is near.
2. A person is weirdly fixing their clothes, hair, and doing strange moves with hands, legs, fingers etc.
3. A person in love rarely admits him or her having a crush (yes, even adults start acting childish!).
4. An individual in love suddenly shakes their personality and starts acting cool (mature, sexy, smart) in front of the beloved person. You can easily tell who that is.
5. A person in love falls into a weird romantic mood and changes his/ her sphere of interests.
6. Such a person loses the connection with the outside world, or, on the contrary, becomes hyper-communicative and bothers about everyone or everything around, even though he/ she used to be quite a loner.

As we can see, love has a strong resemblance with schizophrenia, starting with physical symptoms like dilated pupils, trembling shaky hands, sweating and itching, to emotional or psychological symptoms like swearing, laughing or crying, total isolation or hypomania. It really changes us for better or for worse. So, the next time somebody comes up to you and asks the dumb question, “What does being in love mean?”, answer that being in love is like being high or sick but in a good way, a very, very good way.