love and relationships

“Around the world, people love. They sing for love, they dance for love; they compose poems and stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love.” Of all the societies that anthropologists have studied they have not found one that didn’t have evidence of romantic love. But what is love anyways? Or better yet… how does love work?

According to John Money, professor emeritus of medical psychology and pediatrics at John Hopkins University, what he calls our “love map” is what causes us to romantically pursue another person in the first place. A “love map” is a group of messages encoded in our brains that describe what we prefer and/or like about a potential mate. The first part of this map is about appearance. Many researches have found that we tend to be attracted to those who remind us of ourselves! In fact, Cognitive psychologist David Perrett, performed an experiment in which he morphed a photo of the subject’s own face into a face of the opposite sex. He then had the subject select from a series of photos which one he or she found most attractive. According to Dr. Perrett, each and every subject was most attracted to his or her own morphed photo! Researchers have also found that we tend to be attracted to those people who remind us of our parents.

The second part of this “love map” is made up of what we like about someone’s personality. Oddly enough, this aspect of attraction is also connected to our parents and we look for personality traits in a partner that remind us of both our parents, but mostly who remind us of our mothers. This is because when we are young our mother is the center of our attention, and we are the cente...

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... person, but there is a much more extensive background behind love than we all realize. Love comes in stages and although those stages can lead to a successful relationship, they dont always match up, which leaves many people confused or heartbroken. What i’ve learned about love has actually even changed my whole outlook on the feelings of it. I used to feel that there was only one person out there for everyone and we would find that person based upon fate, but knowing that there are so many scientific factors present in the reasoning of why we fall in love to being with leaves me feeling like there are plenty of options for everyone. I now feel like if everyone just keeps an open mind and allows themselves to open up to new people then the game of love would be much more successful, and each and every one of us could be able to feel the sting of the addiction.