Why Love Doesn’t Last
Happy chemicals turn on in shorts spurts to reward action, not to be on all the time
Love feels spectacular because it sparks all four happy chemicals at once. But these chemicals always droop after they spurt, so if you expect them to last, you end up disappointed. This episode of the Happy Brain helps you build realistic expectations about love to relieve your disappointment.
It’s hard to think of love as primal chemistry because it seems so meaningful when you’re in it. The meaning comes from the verbal part of your brain. It recites love poems and debates sexual politics as it struggles to understand the big chemical surges we call love. But your verbal brain doesn’t control the love chemicals. They’re controlled by the limbic brain we’ve inherited from earlier mammals. Animals can’t talk, so your mammal brain can’t tell you why it’s releasing a feeling. But simple biology can tell us why.
Our brain evolved to motivate reproduction. Even if you’re not interested in reproducing, your brain rewards you with good feelings when you do things that help spread your genes. That includes competing for mates and protecting the young, which are the difficult parts of reproduction. Happy chemicals reward you for successfully competing for a mate who has the potential to protect the young, even if you don’t intend to have children or your children grew up long ago.
A quick look at love in chimpanzees can help us make sense of our mammalian impulses. Biologists have observed a chimpanzee behavior that they call “love.” Most of the time, chimpanzee sex is transactional, meaning each chimp does whatever promotes their genes. Fertile females seek attention from the most powerful males to give their offspring more protection and better genes. Male chimps strive to build muscle in order to compete with rivals who guard fertile females. But occasionally, field researchers see a couple sneak away and hide for the length of a female’s fertility. Typically, it’s a lower-ranking male who ordinarily would have been blocked from access. If the couple is caught, they are likely to get beaten, so they’re obviously quite motivated. This may sound like a bad soap opera or a country western song, but it explains feelings we know so well.
Chimpanzees also show us why losing love feels so bad. Imagine a chimpanzee pursuing a potential mate who completely ignores them. Their genes won’t survive unless they let go and find another target for their affection. The brain has an effective way to do that. It releases cortisol when you get rejected, which makes it feel like a survival threat. Repeated rejection builds a cortisol pathway that turns on bad feelings fast when you see the one who rejects you. The cortisol pathway lasts, so anything that reminds you of the rejection will turn on your cortisol. The mammal brain creates life-or-death feelings about love because it’s a matter of life or death to your genes.
We humans have a lot more neurons than chimpanzees, and that adds a lot more complications. Your cortex can imagine a rejection that’s not actually happening, and it feels real enough to trigger your cortisol. You can even feel rejected by someone who has married you.
Your cortisol is triggered when a person does something that fits a pattern wired in from your past cortisol experience. We’re not aware of our pathways, so we think the bad feeling was caused by the person we’re with. No wonder love doesn’t last.
Each brain sees the world through the lens of the worst moments of its past. We don’t intend to do this, but the electricity in the brain flows so easily into pathways developed by past activation. This old wiring can fill your life with fear and defensiveness, which is why happy chemicals have such an important job to do. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin reward you with a good feeling when you find a safe way to let down your guard. Let’s see how each chemical contributes to your sentimental journey, and why these chemicals don’t last.
Oxytocin is released when you feel protected. We are motivated to find protection because oxytocin makes it feel good. You may not think protection is what you’re looking for, but we’re all born weak and vulnerable, so we all learn to seek support to survive. Each brain defines protection with neural pathways built from its own past oxytocin. We often get disappointed in our quest for oxytocin, and cortisol wires you to avoid things linked to a past disappointment. When you do manage to spark some oxytocin, it doesn’t last because happy chemicals are released short spurts. Our brain habituates to the rewards it has, so it take a new moment of protection to get a new oxytocin spurt. This is why people are always seeking reassurance and feeling disappointed if they don’t get it.
Serotonin is released when you think “look who I’m with!” We can’t admit that we care about status, but the mammal brain rewards you with serotonin when you feel stronger than the mammal next to you. Pride in your beloved sparks your serotonin. It’s easier to see this in others. Notice how quickly people fall in love with someone who raises their status. Our brain is inherited from mammals whose mating opportunity depended on their social status. You feel good when you gain status and bad when you lose status, even if you don’t admit it. Each brain defines status with pathways built from its own past serotonin. Consider the popular meme of a rich boy falling in love with a showgirl. He raises his status by opposing his parents because he already has socio-economic status. But our brain quickly habituates to any status we have and the serotonin is quickly metabolized, so we are always on the lookout for another little status boost.
Dopamine is released when you see a way to meet your needs. The excitement you feel when you anticipate a reward is a release of dopamine. Rewards are hard to predict in the real world, and our energy is limited, so our brain is always making predictions and rewarding you with dopamine when you find evidence that you’re right. When you go to a party, for example, you decide who to smile at by making a prediction about who will smile back. Dopamine motivates your first step toward a person, and more dopamine is released with each bit of encouragement. Dopamine stops once you get what you seek, so we have to keep seeking to keep stimulating it. This may sound crude or cynical, so let’s take a non-sexual example. A person who wants to get married enjoys dopamine with each step closer to the goal, but the dopamine stops when the goal is reached. Once the honeymoon is over, you need to find a new goal or your dopamine will droop. If you don’t understand your brain, you may blame your partner for your dopamine droop. On the positive side, dopamine wires in fond memories of your courtship days that can last a lifetime. But memories don’t trigger as much dopamine as new rewards do.
Endorphin is released when you laugh. There are few healthy ways to spark endorphin, so a partner who makes you laugh is quite valuable. You don’t know why they make you feel so good unless you understand endorphin. Once you know the facts, you can help yourself after a break-up or a bereavement by listening to comedy.
Getting all four happy chemicals at once is rare in life, and that’s why love is so motivating. But avoiding cortisol is motivating too. So our brain urgently seeks the good feeling of love, while urgently avoiding rejection. That sound impossible, doesn’t it? It’s not easy being a big-brained mammal!
To make matters worse, it seems like other people got it going on all the time. You see happy couples everywhere and it seems like you’re missing out. You can relieve this stress by remembering the biological facts. No one is getting happy chemicals all the time because these chemicals evolved to do a job. They would lose their motivating power if they were always on.
To really understand this, imagine that you get lost in the woods while you’re on a camping trip, and you don’t eat the whole day. When you finally find that stale peanut butter sandwich you left at your campsite, you feel a surge of joy. But peanut butter will not bring you joy the next day, so if you expect it, you will be disappointed. I am not saying that your partner is like a stale sandwich. I’m saying that unrealistic expectations lead to cortisol. Realistic expectations can help us feel good.
What is realistic?
It’s realistic to expect happy chemicals to turn off soon after they turn on. And it’s realistic to expect your happy chemicals to be wired by your own past experience. So the formula for getting more love is simple:
Stop blaming your partner for the droops in your happy chemicals and find other ways to stimulate them.
Accept your early wiring and accept the early wiring of the people you know, so you don’t equate these feelings with reality.
Your life will improve if you do this, whether or not you’re in a relationship.
Anyone can do this. But you won’t do it if you blame your partner and society for your heartache. It’s hard to stop blaming, however, because we hear this thought loop all around us. This is why people end up with heartache despite their sincere urge for love. Let’s look closer at the blame habit so you can disentangle yourself from it.
You have surely heard that “our society” is the cause of romantic disappointments. You can probably list the evils of “our society” that have caused your relationship failures. But life before today’s culture was harsher than you realize. People were expected to stay with a partner for life whether or not they were in love. Young people were pressured to accept mates chosen by their parents, and parents looked for mates who raised their own status. When people found someone who sparked their chemicals, they could only dream of being with them. They felt sure they’d be happy forever if that could happen. Today, you are free to choose your special someone, yet it has not made you happy forever. You are even free to try again, but that doesn’t make you happy either.
It’s true that the movies and social media feed unrealistic expectations about love, but before modern technology, unrealistic fantasies were fed in other ways. I discovered this in Jane Austen’s bedroom, literally. I was touring the author’s home in the UK and the tour-guide said that Jane never found love or married. I was shocked by this fact because Jane’s novels are practically the template of romantic love as we know it.
Jane Austen’s books suggest that true love will be yours if you resist socially acceptable matches that don’t spark your chemicals. The books were condemned as obscene at the time, even though they never mentioned sex or showed a bare ankle. They were said to “inflame the passions” of young women, and that was basically true.
But if Jane couldn’t find love for herself, I wondered how much disappointment her books produced in others. Her story reminded me of the Hollywood screenwriters who create idealized romances while their own lives are just a string of divorces and hookups. This motivated me to find out what went wrong with Jane Austen’s love life. I know that feminists would say nothing went wrong and she just preferred being single, but after all those pages on love, I didn’t believe that. Then I found the smoking gun.
Jane’s mother had severe status anxiety. Both of Jane’s parents were younger siblings of upper class families that passed all their wealth to the eldest son. Jane’s father was a country parson, so he had a bit of status but his income was so low that the family had to grow their own food and sew their own dresses. Jane grew up on the fringes of high society, visiting the homes of rich cousins but without the dowry needed to snag a place in that world. Jane’s mother was always plotting to find her a high status match, and there’s evidence that Jane herself did not want the kind of love that would leave her in genteel poverty. So she bided her time in the spare bedrooms of rich relatives. She gambled and lost. I tell the whole story in my book Status Games: Why We Play and How to Stop.
I had never read Jane’s books, so I started watching the movies. I was expecting to find the kind of “follow your heart” message that we are used to hearing today. But I found something very different. Jane’s heroines always win a rich, hot guy after they refuse a rich, old, ugly guy. And her heroines are always too proud to pursue the hot guy, so the fictional hottie always pursues them. The unrealistic expectations are obvious.
Jane’s books had a huge impact for a simple reason. They were published around the time when the price of paperbacks fell to a penny. Before the 1800s, books were too expensive for average people, but suddenly, young ladies were as addicted to novels as today’s generation is to social media.
You may think today’s society is worse. Today’s pornography certainly builds horrible false expectations and it’s so aggressively promoted that it reaches young people who don’t seek it out. This problem is starting to get the attention it deserves. But another source of unrealistic expectations is still overlooked: therapy. If you tell a therapist that your partner is a jerk, they will “validate” these feelings in order to bond with you. This can build the unrealistic expectation it’s always their fault, and others must validate your feelings. Therapy may train you to call people “narcissists” if they don’t meet your expectations. This may not be the intent of the therapist, but it’s often the result.
Therapy teaches you that you deserve unconditional support from others. Even if you’re not in therapy, our therapeutic culture tells us that we’re entitled to unconditional support. You will surely be disappointed if you believe this because it’s just not realistic. Infants are entitled to unconditional support. After that, we still long for unconditional support, but we have to accept the painful fact that other people’s needs count too. If you must have everything your way, you make it hard for others to interact with you. But the therapeutic culture makes it seem like everyone else is getting unconditional support and you are unfairly deprived. These unrealistic expectations make you feel like a powerless victim of other people’s flaws instead of finding your power over your mammalians emotions.
I’m not saying you should stay with a person who abuses you. But the definition of abuse has expanded to the point where you may think you’re abused when your expectations are disappointed. It feels true because the cortisol of disappointment triggers your early cortisol experiences. It’s more realistic to tell yourself that your partner cannot support every one of your ups and downs because they have their own ups and downs. It’s natural to want unconditional support, but it’s not reasonable to expect it. Your therapist may say that you deserve it, but if you gamble on that, you may lose.
It’s not easy to manage this brain we’ve inherited. When you’re in love, you have the illusion that your partner agrees with you on everything; but once you buy the package and unwrap it, you start to feel like your partner is crazy. You may say that your exes are obviously crazy, and you can back it up with terminology blessed by your therapist. But it’s useful to remember that we all look crazy to each other because we’re all wired by our unique past. When you judge someone against the do’s and don’ts that were drummed into you long ago, they will fail. You ignore this at first because you urgently want someone to come home to. But once you have someone to come home to, you start judging them the way you were judged during your years of neuroplasticity.
They may say you are the crazy one, of course. It’s hard for two human beings to coexist because we’re all wired by unique experiences. Couplehood is a complex skill. You don’t learn the skill in health class or night clubs or dating apps. You don’t learn the skill when you have unrealistic expectations. But you can build couplehood skills by taking responsibility for your own mammal brain instead of assuming that your partner caused your emotions. This may not be the romantic fantasy you were hoping for, so here are some animal stories that may lead to a happy ending.
I got to watch turtles mating when I worked at the zoo. They were giant tortoises about a hundred years old. It was a big deal because zoos prevent reproduction unless they have permission from the agency that prevents inbreeding. When permission finally came, the tortoises were not interested in each other. It took a bit of experimentation to find that separating them for three months did the trick. Apparently, male reptiles are motivated by smell, and this male tortoise had habituated to the smell of the female in its enclosure. The separation prepared his nose to process the all-important input.
I was in France when I stumbled on the facts of life for monkeys. France has all-primate zoos with fabulous lectures throughout the day. At one of these lectures, I heard that a low-ranking male baboon will never have sex. I wondered if I misunderstood, since my French was limited. So I asked the speaker afterwards, and she said: “He can have sex, but he won’t be a father.” (…il ne sera pas père.) What did that mean? My French was not good enough for this conversation, so I decided to research when I got home.
That’s when I learned the inconvenient truth about the mammal brain. Stronger male primates try to prevent weaker males from mating, but they don’t risk a fight unless the female is actively fertile. A mature male of experience can distinguish active fertility from pre-fertility signals. So he only gets involved when it counts for his genes, and that’s how the weaker gentlemen get their chance. Of course they’re not aware of their genes; they just do what feels good with a brain built by natural selection.
My research led to the amazing fact that female chimpanzees only have sex every five years. That’s because they nurse each newborn for four years, which blocks fertility. Male chimps are not interested in sex unless there are fertility signals, and they spend the long waiting time campaigning to be at the top of the social hierarchy when the big moment comes. But the job is not done yet, because chimp sperm is literally designed to fight another male’s sperm en route to the egg. May the best sperm win.
You may have heard of bonobos – the ape species claimed to be hyper sexual. You may have also heard that they are female-dominated. But are they happy? I discovered a few unhappy habits. Bonobos spend a lot of energy competing to mate with high-status individuals. The males vie for high-status females, and the females vie for the sons of high-status females. In addition, female bonobos often bully the males. Any two females can overpower a male if they stick together because the males are only 10% bigger than the females, while in most species they’re around 25% bigger. People who tell you that the females cooperate are not telling you the whole story. Each brain does what promotes its genes because that sparks happy chemicals.
Gorillas are one of the strongest of all animals, yet they are vegetarian. Why do they need all that strength if they don’t hunt? They use it to fight each other over mating opportunity. We like to think peace and love are the state of nature, but the facts help us understand the craziness of our own emotions.
You can dream of perfect love, but living in a dream world may leave you disappointed. It’s better to know that love is a struggle for everyone because the happy chemicals don’t last. Get the facts on this in my book I, Mammal: How to Make Peace With the Animal Urge for Social Power.