Love???

One of the topics present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is love. On it, Lysander’s love for Hermia appears to be real and authentic, contrasting the love Helena shows for Demetrius, which appears to be an obsession rather than “true“ love. As the novel transpires, however, Oberon shows us an object capable of making anybody falling in love with anyone or anything:

“…a Little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,

 and maiden’s call it love-in-iddleness…

[whose juice] on sleeping eye-lids laid

 will make or man or woman madly dote

 upon the next live creature that it sees “ (II. i. 16)

After Oberon eavesdrops the conversation between Demetrius  and Helena where Demetrius clearly states he doesn’t love her—“You do impeach your modesty too much/, To leave the city and commit yourself/Into the hands of one that loves you not”— he decides to help Helena by having his servant Puck use love-in-iddleness on her beloved Demetrius:

“A sweet Athenian lady is in love

With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes;

But do it when the next thing he spies

May be the Lady: though shalt know the man

By the Athenian garments he hath on” (II. i. 19)

However, the hint Oberon provided for Puck to recognize Demetrius was too vague, and, thus, Puck ends up using the love-in-iddleness on Lysander, who  ,as a result, ends up falling in love with Helena. This shows how fragile “real” love really is, and that love may even be compared to a drug. This led me to ask myself whether love is real or not, and whether there’s a point in making a difference between love and obsession, between love and addiction, between love and sexual arousal, and so on.

In order to find an answer for that, I did a bit of research on what love is and how it actually works in chemical terms, and the findings were eye opening, yet a bit discouraging.

To begin with, according to Dina Kudasheva, PhD in Biochemistry with Minor in Polymer Chemistry and BS with Honors in Chemical Engineering, three main chemicals—phenylethylamine, norepinephrine and dopamine—are responsible for first attraction and its sparks and for falling in love.

Norepinephrine, also known as Noradrenaline, is responsible for triggering the release of adrenaline, which increases heart beats and makes our palms sweat. According to her, If you have high levels of noradrenaline in your brain, you experience joy, and your appetite decreases, symptoms commonly associated with falling in love. (It seems legit, doesn’t it?)

Dopamine is a neurochemical responsible for feeling pleasure. According to her, “it makes people more ‘talkative’ and excitable.”

Phenylethylamine, by contrast, “acts as a releasing agent of norepinephrine and dopamine,” and it also makes you feel more energetic.

The other two sources I checked quote a renowned anthropologist and love researcher from Rutgers University whose name is Helen Fisher, who has used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to monitor people’s brains when they are looking at a picture of whom they love, thus showing that the parts of the brain containing a huge number of dopamine receptors— “associated with states of euphoria, craving and addiction” (Fisher)— undergo escalating blood flow. She also explains that both norepinephrine and dopamine work together to “produce elation, intense energy, sleeplessness, craving, loss of appetite and focused attention.” I think that whenever we think we have been in love (at this point I’m doubting everything!), we have experienced all or most of those symptoms, which as you can see here weren’t caused by love but by neurochemicals.

The third source I checked mentions nearly the same, but what really caught my attention from it was that it mentions an experiment conducted by psychologist and professor Arthur Arun in which he applied a three-step plan to fall in love, thus finding out that it was very successful. As a matter of fact, 2 marriages resulted from this mini experiment. The steps are as follows:

“(1) Find a complete stranger, (2) reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour, and (3) stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes” (Arun).

As all the symptoms one usually associates with love can be explained chemically, love appears to be nothing more than a chemical reaction. You may allude to family love as in a mother and her son to counter this argument, but as you can check in the third source I used, even that kind of love can be explained by chemical reactions—check or find out about the effects of suppressing oxytocin in sheep and rats, which resulted in mothers rejecting their own sons.

Even after taking into account all these evidence, I refuse to believe that there’s nothing spiritual in loving someone. Still, we cannot deny the fact that many reactions we attribute to love are really caused by neurochemicals. So I leave you classmates with the following questions: Do you agree or disagree with all these evidence? Why? Do you think Shakespiare was aware of the fragile nature of love after reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and after reading this? Why? I’m looking forward to reading your answers.

Works Cited:

Kudasheva, Dina. “Chemistry of Love”. Asdn.net. http://www.asdn.net/asdn/chemistry/chemistry_of_love.shtml. 07 October 2014.

Obringer, Lee Ann. “How love works” 12 february 2005. HowStuffWorks.com. http://people.howstuffworks.com/love.htm  07 October 2014.

Youramazingbrain.org contributor. “The science of love”. Youramazingbrain.org. http://www.youramazingbrain.org/lovesex/sciencelove.htm  07 October 2014.