Well to put it bluntly I didn't see anyone I would be remotely interested in destined or not...so any and all visions of a future together were quickly led to a 'crash & burn' scenario mostly for my evil glee.
This might be because I am already married and I don't see myself with anyone else besides 'him.' Though I will say when we were 'just' friends I was dating someone else and whenever I was with my future husband I would wonder if I was passing by a 'destined opportunity.' He and I were both going to be leaving the community college where we met and heading off to separate schools, him up north to a fancy pants liberal school and myself mindlessly following my current boyfriend to his school of choice because I had no real opinion of where I wanted to go at the time.
Needless to say this all didn't go the way it was planned... and for that I am extremely grateful.
The big point I'm trying to make is even when I was with my other boyfriend, who I was quite content with at the time, I still had this attraction to this other boy that would eventually be my husband, on a personal and physical level. Now I will say I don't cheat, I don't play the field, and I don't respect people that do (no offense) so the fact that I liked this other boy was very troublesome to me, I just couldn't help myself, I beat myself up over it, was in complete denial over my feelings until finally I just caved and admitted it to myself, but even then I decided to ignore it, there was nothing wrong with the boy I was currently dating, he was nice attentive and sweet...he just didn't give me fire.
And I sensed this 'fire' in my husband, when we first met I did, I'm not saying it was 'love at first sight' but there was definitely something there.
This got me wondering: 'Why?' What was that 'fire' I felt, and why was it so strong between me and him? This is what I have decided to find out.
Well after doing some research I discovered an Anthropologist named Helen Fisher. Fisher's career has been mainly devoted to studying the biochemical pathways of love in all it's stages: lust, romance, attachment, and even as it fades. Fisher quote: "A woman unconsciously uses orgasms as a way of deciding whether or not a man is good for her. If he's impatient and rough, and she doesn't have the orgasm, she may instinctively feel he's less likely to be a good husband and father, Scientist think the fickle female orgasm may have evolved to help women distinguish Mr. Right from Mr. Wrong." (National Geographic 06 'Love the chemical reaction'). Hmmm Well I will say that this didn't have a factor into the 'fire,' I have only made love to one man in my life and that was my husband but it definitely didn't occur on our first meeting lol.
Fisher and her crew have dedicated themselves to studying love, in fact one study found that when the subjects looked at his or her loved one, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasure would light up. Fisher concluded that Love lights up these particular locations because it is home to a large spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine.
Dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention and motivation to win rewards. These are reasons why those new couples that are lovey and gooey can stay up all night just talking, watching the sunrise and holding hands constantly (even while eating dinner). Love makes you bold, makes you bright, and makes you take risks.
What about that 'love sickness?' Those times when you are dealing with gut-wrenching want for that other person who you just know you are destined to be with, but they don't seem to share your views(been there my friend)? Well Donatella Marazziti, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pisa in Italy studies the biochemistry of love sickness.
Marazziti became interested in actually studying the similarities between being in love and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In one experiment, she and her colleagues measure serotonin level in the blood of 24 subjects who had fallen love within the past six months and obsessed about this love object for at least four hours every day.
Serotonin BTW is a star neurotransmitter. When you are given prozac or zoloft, it's this that the medication balances out, the drugs seem to increase the amount of this neurotransmitter availability at the juncture between neurons basically means that if you are depressed there's a good chance your serotonin is out of whack, and might be blocked, the prozac basically unclogs the area from my understanding.
Marazziti compared the serotonin levels with people suffering from 'love sickness,' to people who were suffering from O.C.D. and people who were free of both ailments. Levels of serotonin in both the obsessives blood and the lovers blood were 40 percent lower than those in her normal subjects. Translation: OCD and Love sickness could easily have a similar chemical profile. Another Translation: Mental illness and love ...a lot a like.
But Why are we attracted to the people we are attracted too?
Evolutionary psychology has hypothesized that we tend to see 'healthy' as attractive. And health says that woman with a 70 percent wait-to-hip ratio and men with a rugged features that suggest a strong supply of testosterone in their blood is healthy. Waist to hip ratio is important in females for successful births and shows a higher percentage of fertility. A man with high levels of testosterone suggest a high immune system and so is more likely to offer healthy children. We also tend to see certain body types that would be a good match for our genetics as healthy as well.
A study by Claus Wedekind of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland was an interesting experiment with sweaty T-shirts.
49 women were asked to smell the shirts previously worn by unidentified men with a variety of genotypes that influenced both body odor and immune systems. The women were asked to rate the shirts, which smell did they like the best to the least. Wedekind found that women preferred the scent of a shirt worn by a man whose genotype was most different from hers. A genotype that might have linked to immune system, and possessed something hers might not have bringing forth new variety to the gene pool and making the offspring more diverse giving it better chances of survival.
Most research I have found tend to focus that the reason we fall in love are these couple of traits:
Attraction: Unconscious body language proclaims their readiness to mate; an open mouth smile, arched back, avid eyes, these are all settle hints of attraction towards someone else.
Romance: Chance instances where a romantic action or atmosphere happens that will cause 'infatuation.' Biochemists say that these feverish stages of love between two people will typically burn out after a few years. Why? many think it's because the brain can't maintain the intense neural activity of infatuation.
Bonding: experiences interest, opinions and emotions you share together with you and no one else that bring you closer and create a bond between you.
The last one isn't necessarily needed for the initial 'love' feelings but is a good thing to have:
Attachment: Thought to be the calming affect of oxytocin, a chemical that is a lot of times plentiful in long-term couples.
So maybe it was the testosterone levels, the pheromones in his shirt that led to the 'fire' and all the rest led to 'love.'
I encourage you out there to do this exercise whether you are looking out over strangers and opening your mind to possibility between you, or looking at your already loved one and being glad you didn't pass this destined moment up forever.
Also don't forget to check out Kersley Coles new book Contest!!
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