Put a Spare Bulb in My Hand

At one point, I determined I was going to have to get used to the fact that I wasn't going to feel the way books and movies told me I should feel.  On the basis that I'd lived 18 years on this earth and never experienced it, it followed that there was no such thing as fireworks and the other uncontrollable elements of love, attraction and passion.  I was a silly, romantic, dramatic teenaged girl to hope that it did work that way and I needed to get over it.

How better to practice this than with someone who I didn't really find attractive, but who seemed to be vaguely interested in me?  Because that friendship was getting difficult to have.  He wanted to be in a relationship with me, but he wanted to be friends with me, but...  Something had to be done.  I'd been carrying on a ridiculous long-distance, correspondence relationship with a guy from Chicago, and determined that I would rather have the bird in the hand just to see what would happen.  

What did he like about me?  He didn't know.  Sometimes he'd tell me he liked that I put up with him.  Now, I think it was just that I fulfilled his needs in a socially acceptable way.  He told me often enough that I wasn't attractive.  Which made sense; I didn't think I was and I saw the porn he liked and two previous girlfriends.  I was unable to compete, but I reasoned this was OK, because I didn't think all that much of him, either, though I didn't make it a point to tell him.  

This is what love and relationships were like when you were an actual adult and not a book character, I decided.  That you tolerated each other and that was enough to call it love.  I am probably wrong about this.

I have a few good friends.  I absolutely rely on them, appreciate them, respect the work they do and the people they are.  They represent the best social relationships of my entire life.  I was initially going to say, "I know they're there for me when I need them, and when I don't actually need them, which is more important."  And thought, "That's stupid."  Then started doing the research and discovered, no, it turns out that the knowledge that you have support from someone is actually just as strong as when they actually do help you.  That's not stupid, that's literally the difference between a stranger and a friend.  

I think about Harry Harlow's monkeys, though.  It doesn't take much to make a monkey socially well-adjusted, you basically just have to feed them and expose them to other monkeys sometimes and they come out OK.  And you can do a lot to screw with a monkey before you damage its social functioning irreparably.  Even male turkeys have been found to respond to a potential mate that's literally a stick with a turkey head on it.  They prefer it over a headless body, suggesting that while turkeys may want to tap that ass, they'd rather see her smile.

So what's the difference between love and friendship?  Studies about friendship generally focus on how these relationships are an extension of yourself- that you are extremely likely to imbue a friend with the same opinions and perspectives as you have, because it reinforces the process of becoming friends:  recognising that there's something in this person that is similar to you.  The study of friendship is relatively new, and the studies I could find generally include pairs in supportive sexual relationships because these studies also look at primates.  They include the animal versions of friends, friends with benefits, and family relationships.  One of the studies basically stressed that fuck buddies, pairs who interact solely for sex and not at other times or for any other reason, are not friends.  And allegedly that's true whether you're a bonobo or a human.

So love and friendship aren't a whole lot different as far as the brain is concerned, but the creation of friendship seems to rely in a larger part on *existing* levels of oxytocin.  Oxytocin's the chemical behind eye-contact, physical contact and empathy.

I read that love is initially related to the creation of dopamine in combination with oxytocin and is, essentially, part of our lizard brain.  This process related to the same processes as fear (actual fear, not low-lying every-day anxiety, but fight or flight terror), but it triggers the reward center of the brain, the same thing that allegedly happens when we eat or have sex:  "Good job, you're surviving, keep doing this."  That's mostly dopamine, and oxytocin kicks in to say, "Hey, yep, lizard brain is freaking out right now, but we're keeping an eye on things."  Trust and happiness.  The process also has the added side effect of decreasing seratonin, a neurotransmitter that normally regulates moods and keeps human beings basically calm, stable, and rational.

Apparently, fireworks are a thing.  Chemically.

According to researchers (I could do the citations, but, c'mon, really, what is this, wikipedia?), many couples move on to a level where they regain their seratonin levels, increase other chemicals that create security and attachment, but the dopamine generally decreases, too.  But not in all of them.  There seems to be some correlation between long-lasting, positive relationships and levels of dopamine that are the same as in the early stages of the relationship.  Oxytocin and vassopressin, which is the security and attachment chemical, seems to be related to the process- if those two are higher, dopamine is also higher.

All that's bio-neurology.  It's all very well to say, "OK, my task here is to try to increase production of dopamine which will help create oxytocin and vassopressin and figure out how to keep creating seratonin, all of which will mean that I've got this sorted out."  The day they make a FitBit with an MRI and an app to let you scan your brain whenever you want, I am buying one.  Until that time that I can actually figure out what lights up my own brain and receive certain proof that it's working the way it's supposed to, more crude experimentation is necessary.