Love > Sex
At least in terms of happiness.
Welcome to the introductory post to Mari’s “Month of Lurve” series of posts. All February, Mari will be posting daily about love/sex. Mari will be talking about the scientific and emotional facets rather than any dirty stuff, so don’t be shy. These posts will be rated PG-13/non-squicky Health Class material at the worst. However, Mari’s site will probably be blocked on NetNanny-style filters just for the use of the word “sex”, so be warned, kids with nosy/overprotective parents.
Anyone who has a clearer idea of human reproduction than “and the angel left a diamond under a leaf in the cabbage patch, and the diamond turned into a baby”1 knows that romance and sex are strongly linked in our minds.
What you probably didn’t know is that when thinking about love and sex, we use totally different sections of our brains.
According to LiveScience.com in May 2005:
The study was small, however, involving 17 young men and women, all of whom had recently fallen madly in love. They filled out questionnaires while their brains were hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) system.
Romance seems to steep in parts of the brain that are rich in dopamine, a chemical known to affect emotions. These brain regions are also linked by other studies to the motivation for rewards.
“To our surprise, the activation regions associated with intense romantic love were mostly on the right side of the brain, while the activation regions associated with facial attractiveness were mostly on the left,” said Lucy Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
So, when we think about someone we truly love, we’re using the parts of the brain that release a lot of dopamine, also known as the happy chemical, in your brain. When we think about someone that we just think is attractive, we’re using a totally different part of our brain.
Additionally, love has a much stronger effect on our brains than sex does:
The processing of romantic feelings involves a “constellation of neural systems.” The researchers — neuroscientists, anthropologists and social psychologists — declare love the clear winner versus sex in terms of its power over the human mind.
“Romantic love is one of the most powerful of all human experiences,” said study member Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University. “It is definitely more powerful than the sex drive.”
For anyone with a mature mind, this is pretty obvious. True love is better for us in terms of happiness than any promiscuity. However, it’s very encouraging that scientists have found actual basis for this common knowledge.
- Anyone who gets where that quote is from wins…20 Maripoints. Spendable on nothing, nowhere. [↩]
Science 
1 February 2008, 23:40
Blog 365, dopamine, happiness, LiveScience, love, love wins, Month of Lurve, neurology, Science, sex, third personYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
That’s quite interesting. It’s good to know that we do know the difference between love and just a physical sexual attraction. At least, our brains know, we might not be able to interpret the signals correctly.
@Julie
If only drug stores offered brain MRIs so people who were confused could tell the difference for sure.
Love does have a stronger effect than sex, but also keep in mind even during sex, if one person already has a strong romantic affection toward the other person, the sex can give the first person a disillusioned feeling of love as well due to all the endorphins released.
Great post, truly interesting. I will do some research on Maria’s comment, it seems to be good.
@Nano,
I believe I read about it in the February 2006 issue of National Geographic from their main article about Love.
@Maria
Good point. And you’re probably dead on about the source.
[...] thinks the quoted article is the one that Maria was talking about in the comments on the first post this month. Too bad National Geographic thinks pay walls are [...]