Have you ever wondered how love works, such as love at first sight or the law of attraction? Science can explain the pull of nature that causes one to swipe left or right. Science does not understand the attraction, but we have a few theories. There are a lot of hormones that race around in our bodies with stress and with different psychological experiences. The law of attraction breaks down into three essential experiences. The first experience is lust or initial attraction, which, in evolutionary terms, is to propagate the species. The second experience is falling in love. Love is felt in many ways, such as a parent for a child or a friend, but especially for someone with unique dating and mating interests. The last is the long haul, where we experience lifelong endurance and connection. All of these feelings are due to hormonal cycles in the brain. If you think about lust and an initial attraction, dopamine, and endorphins, play a massive role in the excitement and get us into strong sexual attraction. In the next stage, where we develop an attachment and more profound love, hormones like oxytocin take over. Oxytocin is the cuddle hormone. In the latter setting, when we are in the depths of marriage, where the newness wears off in the attraction seems to disappear, we must create experiences to increase dopamine and oxytocin again. As we age and lose our testosterone and estrogen, we also lose sexual drive in attachment, and this is why I love doing natural hormone replacement with my patients.
There are other biochemical and neurological theories, such as pheromones. Pheromones are hormones that don't have a noticeable scent like perfume but are different from person to person and subjectively signal people certain attractions. Maybe the explanation for why we are attracted to some people and not others is due to these scents. We also tend to re-create our relationships with our parents psychologically, like a parent we identified with, or maybe we re-create certain features of our personality that we like and identify in other people. We can see things in others, even when we are not in the same space and have never met or spoken to that new someone. That's why we can look at certain people on dating apps and feel an attraction or not.
The law of attraction and love is still a mystery, even in our technologically advanced age and time.
I hope you have an excellent Valentine's Day and have someone special to spend it with, and if you don't, remember, there is a special someone out there for everyone. Just turn your Spidey senses on and wait for the right moment. Your pheromones are on!