Cool facts about love from scientific research

People have been trying for centuries to understand how and why we fall in love. In the modern world, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists try to explain feelings with the help of science. We talk about curious facts about the nature of love and the peculiarities of human relationships.

Love is like drug addiction
Love can be seen as a true addiction. Researchers from Oxford came to this conclusion in 2017. According to modern scientific data, the hormone dopamine is produced in large quantities in lovers. In general, this substance is produced during any processes from which a person enjoys. And it also participates in the process of memorization. That is why we want to repeat those actions in which we were pleased.

Dopamine is involved in the formation of shopaholism, gambling, alcoholism and drug addiction. Dopamine does something similar to the brain of a lover. When a person sees the object of his passion, he is happy, feels a surge of strength and energy. And when he is forced to part with him, he experiences longing - a kind of analogue of "breaking".

Opposites don't attract
Psychologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collected relationship data from 174 couples over the course of a year. The researchers found that partners were more

satisfied with relationships when their personality characteristics and attachment styles matched. The researchers also relied on evidence from earlier work that shows that similarities promote love. People are more attracted as partners by those who are similar to them in terms of age, religion, political orientation, and intelligence indicators.

However, research on the relationship between partner similarity and relationship satisfaction has a problem. It lies in the fact that there are an infinite number of criteria by which people can differ from each other. Therefore, it is impossible to say exactly what exactly will affect the quality of a romantic relationship in a particular couple.

Romantic relationships cost at least two friends (but this is not accurate)
For most of us, a romantic partner comes at the price of two close friends. This conclusion was reached by a team of scientists from Oxford led by anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar.

According to the results of previous work by Robin Dunbar, the average person has five close and significant people. The kind of people he could turn to in times of emotional or financial trouble. In another study, scientists decided to check how people, having entered into a romantic relationship, allocate time between their loved ones.

Research has shown that when a person has a romantic partner, he takes away time that could be spent communicating with friends or family. As a result, on average, a person ceases to be close to two of their friends. And this applies to both women and men. “I suspect that your attention is so focused on a romantic partner that you do not see other people with whom you had a lot in common before. So some of these friendships start to deteriorate,” Dunbar explains this behavior.

However, other psychologists have criticized this study. For example, the American psychologist Bella DePaulo points out that the sample of respondents was not very representative. The researchers did not take into account the national and cultural characteristics of the participants, did not find out how many romantic partners a person had at the same time, and also did not evaluate how the respondents' behavior strategy changed after their relationship ended.

We like familiar faces more
Scientists from the University of Liverpool found that when choosing a romantic partner, his face plays an important role. Or rather, how familiar it seems to a person.

Scientists conducted an experiment and asked 200 participants for the first time to look at several photographs of faces. Then they showed the pictures again. Now among them were new faces, as well as edited photos of those who were shown initially. And among the completely new and changed images, the respondents more often liked the second ones. The researchers concluded that people find familiar faces more attractive.

Perhaps this fact is due to the fact that a familiar object seems clearer and safer. In addition, the existence of the so-called type when choosing a romantic partner could be explained by the peculiarity of the brain to choose the familiar.