Many people when they fall out of love fall into a dreadful melancholy. Bars fill regularly with patrons who go there to drink away the pain of lost loves and to find a partner for the night. I have seen and heard people talk about how they're in a relationship with alcohol, and some of them reach a point where they cannot function without it. I know the feeling of loss, when something you love is taken from you, and I know the confusion that results when suddenly part of you vanishes. I think that these two phenomenon, drugs and love, are related, because I know a little about chemistry. I think there is a scientific basis for substance abuse when our affections are abused by people who claim to love us only to vanish and redact their representations.
Our bodies don't really recognize anything other than matter and light. Our eyes pick up on light, and our cells pick up on compatible chemistry. I sometimes joke with my students that it's actually true when you say "there was no chemistry between us", because we know that taste and smell are chemistry and a matter of preference. Our type might be nothing more than the pheromones another person produces being highly compatible with the receptors on our own cells. This would account for and literally justify the term taste, because it shows that based on chirality or other kinds of isomerism one person likes different things than you do. I believe there is a chemical basis for relationships. It would explain some couples that make no other sense to me. They are literally chemically compatible, and that's all there is to it.
The trouble with chemistry and receptors is that we eventually build up tolerance for exposure. To maintain the response, we require more and more in order to elicit the same response or the same degree of response. This might be why people turn to affairs and fantasy as a way to restore the heightened sensations. It certainly is why people turn to drugs- to get high. In fact, I suspect most people get into drugs as a compensatory mechanism for a lack of love in their lives. Years ago, I told my students that you don't really enjoy anything that you do. You like those things because they lead to an increase in dopamine and serotonin, which are perceived by brain receptors as "pleasurable". Falling in love causes biochemical changes affecting the levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is also increased from a dose of cocaine, an exciting sporting event, eating a food you really enjoy, or a myriad of other experiences, and our brains get addicted to it. The difference is that love does it without harmful side effects. What you feel when you're in love is the sensation of euphoria.
When relationships end, our brain still craves the euphoria. So, we binge eat on "comfort foods" that create the dopamine release, and we desperately engage in activities to include rebound relationships to selfishly "get a fix" of "love". Some people turn to drugs, because they know that some of them as aforementioned can give them the high that they seek without the pain of a lost love. Others continue to seek opportunities to "couple" because it simulates the chemical release. They must go from stranger to stranger, damaging them in their wake too, in order to slake their lusts. We are addicted, and we don't know how to handle it.
In my experience this is most common when the relationship ends unilaterally. Although the other person took time to wean themselves off you, they have not given you the opportunity to walk yourself back from the chemical connection. In fact, this is probably why God advises man and women to cleave to each other, because the physical association between a couple strengthens their bond until it finally grows enough strength to sever the bonds between one spouse and their parents. We build a new chemical association, and when our significant other suddenly cuts off the supply we go into the same type of withdrawal as we might coming off any other drug because we are addicted to them.
Perhaps it is intended this way to keep people together. This tends to create a stable environment for kids, a consistent environment for finances, and a place of comfort for each member of the couple, finding comfort in each other during times of trial and exponential increases in euphoria when we have good news. We make a new chemical connection, and if it remains strong, nurtured, and consistent, we are supplied with the stimulus our cells demand and continue striving with one another. Almost every couple I know that failed as a couple failed when they stepped back intimacy in one way or another and switched it to another person. We are supposed to get attached to one another because that stabilizes the basic unit of society- the family, husband and wife, chemically, legally, and lawfully together and regularly so. I know there is experimental evidence for attraction. I suspect that's how we stay in love too, by consistent chemical reactions that reaffirm our physiological need for one another as well as the esoteric. We are addicted to love. May we learn to look for it in the right places- the places or persons rather to whom we commit ourselves when we admit to them and to ourselves that we love another person enough to be with them always and in all ways.
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