#7 - On love as the most addictive drug
A long note on loving the romance, being the romance, and therefore, changing the romance.
The main dish...
You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality. You. You. You. As in, me. Me. Me. Me. - Jud Brewer
After a recent and 100% avoidable heartbreak that everyone and their autocorrect could anticipate, my mom said to me (in exasperation), “Uno, you are the romance. You make it up. In your brain. It’s not them.” Ouch. I’ve been occupied with this ever since - that the romance is, mostly, my making. Who I decide to open up to, look into the eyes and share a vulnerable moment with. The actions of the potential paramour matter but much of their desirability, i.e. whether I find their game attractive, is my decision. For instance, I could interpret our messaging throughout the day, sharing memes and long phone conversations as a sign that we are using each other as a source of entertainment to pass time in an otherwise boring life. Or, this could be a once in a lifetime, instant and soul-sparking connection. We seem compatible on every marker and the things we don’t agree “make life more interesting”. This make-believe is rarely adjusted for the reality of who the beloved is and what they are doing. When they say love is blind, they mean that it is literally altering your brain chemistry in the initial few months to leave you wanting your beloved more, no matter the red flags. 1 2
Neuroscience agrees. Stanford kids experience this brain-altering phenomenon called love too.
Neuroscientists and psychologists have been trying to unpack the components of romantic love for decades. Early stages of it have been associated with euphoria, intense focus on and obsessive thinking about the romantic partner, emotional dependency, and even “craving for emotional union with this beloved… Noting that all this sounds a lot like addiction..researchers to specifically test whether romantic love activated the same brain regions as drugs like alcohol, cocaine, and heroin, including what is called the ventral tegmental area, the source of dopamine in the reward circuit.. Once subjects were determined to really be in love, the researchers put them in an fMRI scanner and had them view pictures of their romantic partner (the “active” condition) as well as a friend of the same sex (the “comparison” condition) while their brain activity was being measured…
Perhaps not surprisingly, the research team found increased activation in the dopamine-producing part of the brain (the ventral tegmental area) in response to feelings of romantic love. The more attractive the subjects had rated their partner, the more activated the area was. This result supported predictions that romantic love activates our brain’s reward circuitry, as the endless stream of expressions of love—poems, art, songs—sent throughout the world would seem to suggest. As Fisher quipped, “Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.”
Excerpt from The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits, Judson Brewer
This took me back to a poem by Sylvia Plath I read years ago:
Mad Girl’s Love Song
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I can’t stop obsessing over every line in this poem. The repetition, like desperate reminders, that she made up the romance in her head. Reminders to whom? To herself? To me? The hyberbole of the entire ‘world’ dropping dead because ‘she’ shuts her eyes - we get so absorbed in our story that we forget that this romance - seemingly our entire world - is just a tiny cog in the actual world’s uncaring wheel. Notice how she never gives up her agency, even when she wishes she didn’t have to take the blame. She wishes (‘dreams’) he bewitched her but she’s sincere and self-aware (and also not mad) to acknowledge making it all up in her mind. That she titles the poem a mad girl’s love song because .. well, this is madness! Who doesn’t want their brain to return to normalcy when days feel like days and not your favourite love song playing over your life?
Well, I don’t. Off the record, I love living inside my head! It’s the best! I can make myself feel all these lovely ways and I don’t even have to move out of my bed? Sign me up. Unfortunately, begrudgingly and, disastrously, this sucks. It’s so unsustainable. Falling in love in these escapist ways mean that, eventually, when the brain chemistry normalizes, you come to terms with the relationship being a routine part of your life, as in the life you can’t escape forever. This means actually meeting and confronting your beloved’s entire personhood - the good, bad, and unknown. It’s like you gambled in the dark but you can only find out if you won or lost months later.3 Also, why does love only seem possible when I escape my life? The wholesome life I’ve crafted, which has some beautiful people who offer me love, honesty and reliability? Note to self: Do better.
The more I think about it, the less depressing it feels. If I am making up the romance, I can also.. kill it? I can also.. choose differently? What if we find romance in the actual loving exchanged as opposed to in the thrill of ‘will he / won’t he’. Because, he mostly won’t and you shouldn’t celebrate someone loving you sparingly even if exceptionally when they treat you meanly as the norm. Love should not feel self-annihilating no matter what our cultural scripts of heteronormativity make us believe. Women, especially, must reckon with this ambition. We’ve been raised to normalise altering and ‘fixing’ ourselves to appeal to men who will believe us to be these binary, straightjacket ideas they can put on a pedestal only to knock off to indignity when they don’t like what we do. No person should feel obligated to absolutist notions of themselves, no matter who the notion belong to.4
“Romantic love,
in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.”From Andrea Dworkin's Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (strikethrough is mine5)
This is exciting stuff. I am 25 and, thus, sheepishly young. Still, I expected myself to have ‘figured out’ love by now. I’m currently reconsidering and parking many ambitions I expected to have achieved by this age - grad school, the partner I would marry, marriage itself, kids, working and traveling as both my parents comfortably retire, etc. I am swimming through the grief of acknowledging, “I may never experience some of these things in the traditional way or at all”. On the other side, I feel excited in the un-knowing of what else could be in store. I feel immensely grateful to be entitled to carve my own way and choose for myself. I have a special liberty that women before me could not afford - I want romance and I want for it to feel deepening, joyful and expansive. I want to never settle for a romance that can grow only if I make myself small, that parks parts of me in spaces with shame and loneliness as co-residents; or a man who makes me act out in insecure and anxious ways just to feel connected to him. All this hard work is made easier in the community of friends and family - places I first found and learnt unconditional love - who will settle for nothing less when it comes to me. Having the space to choose romance has meant acknowledging that there is a life out there without it. This realization feels frightening and expansive at the same time. Approaching romance as a choice has made me break it into its parts and inspect where my own desire lies for validation, physical intimacy, emotional vulnerability, parenting, financial partnerships, solitude, and so much more.
Boys I’ve loved have told me that I over-analyze love to a fault and end up complicating experiences that should be straight-forward. They’re not wrong. But romance has never felt easy for me. It’s felt wonderful, heartening, ecstatic and really really lovely but it’s never been easy. I’ve always wanted to love with certainty in my mind. And, sure, duration is no testimony to the greatness of love and neither are the negative feelings that fill us up when we are in conflict, but I still resist using vague language when describing love. For me, vagueness brings up doubt and I have neither patience, nor space, nor the emotional complexity in my body to practice an uncertain kind of love. Love you (/me), love you (/me) well, and love you (/me) whole. Let’s not waste our precious times.
..romantic love used to mean sizzling attraction and butterflies, though it has morphed in front of me over the last few years. now, it means feeling free, safe, and comfortable with each other, without feeling the anxiety of maintaining gendered performances. it’s still exciting, although now the foundation is stronger. i never thought this could happen, but with the friends i have dated, even though our romantic relationships have shifted, we still remain friends today. i want to dedicate this year to melting down the hard protective barriers i have made in compartmentalizing love, romance, friendship, intimacy and sex. what i thought impossible in my lonely teenage years feels like second nature to me now. love, in all of its many myriading forms, cannot be categorized nor even defined. it is constantly imagining and imagined, and there is so much more to learn.
by Mimi Zhu on Romance as Deep Presence
Onward.
The sides…
Recommended reading:
We resort to describing ourselves as victims to stay at the centre of a conversation, especially when we are about to be held accountable for our own complicity in oppression. Aubrey Gordon on ‘it’s fatphobia, not internalized fatphobia'. “What you are feeling — that compulsion to object — might be a sign of what happens when your sense of centrality is challenged.” More highlights:
If you don’t experience a particular kind of oppression, it isn’t yours to internalize. And despite the pain endured by many straight-size people (that is, people who don’t wear plus sizes), that pain isn’t internalized oppression… when thin people come to believe terrible, judgmental things about fat people and weight gain, even when they extend those judgments to themselves, that isn’t “internalized fatphobia” or “internalized anti-fatness.” It’s just anti-fatness.
..You may yearn to stay thin or get thinner, at least in part to avoid the discriminatory attitudes and actions that are so commonly leveled against fat people. You haven’t internalized our oppression. You’ve learned to keep yourself out of the line of fire. And instead of making the world safer for all of us, regardless of size, you focus on keeping yourself small — and maintaining the dominance you’ve been taught you earned.
..Learning about these concepts and learning to see your own complicity in oppression may make you uncomfortable. It should. All of us should be uncomfortable when we realize the ways we’ve asserted our power over others. And we should use that discomfort to power our own growth — not to push painful realizations aside but to grow through them, to become better, to make new mistakes, and to grow through them too.
Kindly, do not text your ex, you stupid beetle. Follow BreakUpBestie’s four things you could do instead. I’ll admit I followed these and also recorded an 11 minute voice note with all the things I would say to my bad beloved and sent it to my “Uno self” chat. I do not have the courage to EVER listen to that.
Life and Beth by Amy Schumer on Hulu. I saw this many months ago but was reminded of it because I’m in a fight with someone that’s now lasted months and, yes, somehow all of this is related. The show is touching, funny, self-aware, so cute and so very awkward. I loved loved loved it.
On Jainism, animal consciousness, Delhi’s bird hospital and the wisdom of the crows, bees, octupuses, and all animals. A journey into the animal mind by Ross Anderson. My highlights:
..Either consciousness evolved twice, at least, across the long course of evolutionary history, or it evolved sometime before birds and mammals went on their separate evolutionary journeys. Both scenarios would give us reason to believe that nature can knit molecules into waking minds more easily than previously guessed. This would mean that all across the planet, animals large and small are constantly generating vivid experiences that bear some relationship to our own.
.. The notion that we are kin across this expanse of time has proved too radical for some, which is one reason the ever-changing universe described by Darwin has been slow to lodge in the collective human consciousness. And yet, our hands are converted fins, our hiccups the relics of gill-breathing.
When we pull a less cognitively blessed fish up from the pressured depths too quickly, and barometric trauma fills its bloodstream with tissue-burning acid, its on-deck thrashing might be a silent scream, born of the fish’s belief that it has entered a permanent state of extreme suffering.Establishing why zero sum games suck via probability from this cool thread on the gambler’s ruin.
On why mosques don’t (usually) have representational art, how their beautiful blue and mathematical symmetry came to be, and the context behind the word ‘iconoclast’ - by The Culture Tutor.
On platonic polyamory and how state-capitalism puts up barriers against living in community with your friends even when it’s the efficient outcome. This episode on the Mistakes Were Made podcast.
Questionnable screenshots (which are very wholesome today)
Lena Dunham’s very loving note to self as we descend into another year we will hate to live through.
Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System:
Thank you for making it this far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨Thoughts✨, let me know. If it didn’t impress you, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.
~
Hunched over my laptop, wearing three thick socks, mindlessly eating an orange,
Uno
On a separate note, I don’t think we should describe this initial stage of falling as love at all but my vocabulary to describe it differently is limited. Words such as a crush feel too trivialising. These are big emotions and they need grand, heavy and big words to be described. Until then.. falling in love it is.
After the first few months, when your brain chemistry normalizes, you should probably practice blindness in love so you can keep the relationship afloat.
Early stage investing, anyone? ;)
Talking about you here, honey.
I respect Andrea Dworkin’s feminist activism and analyses a lot even if I don’t agree with all the positions she held, such as her position against pornography.