— I swore I'd stop thinking about him, — my friend said, stirring her tea. — I lasted three days. — And then? — And then I opened his profile and sat there looking at the last photo.
It's easy to call that weak willpower. But in 2005 a team led by Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron and Lucy Brown took pictures of the brain and saw something else entirely. They put seventeen people who were intensely in love into a scanner and showed them, one after the other, a photo of the person they loved and a photo of someone they merely knew. Around 2,500 scans were analysed.
The moment the beloved's face appeared, areas rich in dopamine lit up — the right ventral tegmental area and the right caudate nucleus. The acquaintance's face did nothing of the sort. And here's the part that stays with you: the more passion a person had reported on the questionnaire, the stronger those areas burned. Aron said at the time that this was one of the first results showing a direct link between what someone ticks on a form and a specific pattern of activity in the brain.
But the conclusion matters more than the pictures. The authors decided romantic love does not belong in the list of emotions at all. In their reading it is a motivation system — a drive. Put plainly: it has more in common with hunger and thirst than with joy or sadness.
A lot falls into place there. Sadness passes. Moods swap themselves out. Anger settles by evening. Thirst doesn't settle — it waits. Which is why telling someone in love to "forget it, pull yourself together" gets you nowhere. It is the same sentence as telling a thirsty person to stop thinking about water.
The same group noticed something else. In people who had been together a long time, regions tied to emotion lit up more strongly. So the brain of someone who fell in love last month and the brain of someone twenty years married do not look alike. The thirst doesn't stay where it was — it changes. And somebody measured that too.
If that thirst is in you as well, the person you're looking for on YOR YOR may be walking around with exactly the same intention.