Falling in Love

Why do they call it "falling in love"? Surely love is something we should rise up into, climb toward, or at least meet in an elevator that is not going down. Falling — off a chair, down the stairs, or into the black hole at the center of myself — is something most people try to avoid. Why should we want to fall now ? And what, exactly, is this thing in which we are supposed to to want to fall?

The dictionary has mostly good things to say about love: attraction based on common interests, sexual desire, admiration, benevolence and devotion; affection for your country, your beloved, your God and baseball. The only not-positive meaning is found on the tennis court, where love equals zero. Everywhere else, she's a cheerful, flexible, good-hearted girl who just wants to fuck and be your friend.

But listen to a history of recorded music and you get a very different picture. She's a drug, a disease, an addiction, a curse. A sea in which we're likely to drown. A tainted, tarty, heartless four-letter word who will (despite assurances to have and hold and hang around) tear us apart. Again.

How do we reconcile this femme fatale with the high school sweetheart in the dictionary? Attraction or addiction? Affection or obsession? A rose blossom? Or a cancerous tumour that needs to be cut out?

Shakespeare only adds to the confusion. Though he uses the word 2,228 times in the plays and sonnets, his opinions about it are all over the place. Depending on who's doing the talking, love is:

Holy;
An evil angel;
Immaculate white and red and;
Black as ebony ;

All truth or lies;
A fire sparkling in lover's eyes;
A figure trenched in ice;

An ever fixed mark;
Skipping and vain; and
blind and precious and perjured and...

By the time you get to "My love is love to love but to disgrace it" you begin to wonder if using this word in a sentence is really such a good idea (even if you are the greatest writer in the English language). Love is "life in death"? In the same breath? There are too many faces to this Eve, and while she obviously has many good qualities, she's into some pretty weird shit as well: sadomasochism, Satanism, iambic pentameter.

Anyone who has fallen, stumbled or been pushed into this vortex knows that falling in love not a rational act — or even a voluntary one. Some scientists claim to have the drug tests and brain scans to explain why. Choosing to fall, or with whom to fall, are not the questions. The questions are: what drugs are involved; who gives them to us; and what part of the brain kicks into action when the juices start to flow?

Professor Semir Zeki and his team of researchers at University College London have scanned the brains of 17 young men and women in love to see what changes in brain activity occur when the lovebirds ogle the photos of their loved ones. "What we have found really is extremely exciting because we have discovered that this overwhelming state of love — which mobilises your whole life — is actually controlled by four small areas of the brain." And four very powerful drugs.

There's phenylethylamine (think cocaine) which kicks in with dopamine (think more cocaine) and reduced levels of seratonin (think obsessive, compulsive, disordered, horny bastard on cocaine). Throw in a little anxiety, fear and paranoia (Norepinephrine, also known as adrenaline) and you begin to understand why Glenn Close boiled that rabbit in Fatal Attraction — love is your brain on drugs.

So it's hardly surprising that scientists (such as Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and neuroscientist (who's been shoving her own loved-up students into brain scanners at SUNY Stonybrook in Long Island) make a connection between love-sick lovers, drug addiction and mental illness. According to , falling madly in love is a crazy business. If my own informal experiments with Class A drugs and dating psychotic women is anything to go by, she is right.

Finally, there are striking similarities between fools in love and patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder — a mental illness characterised by uncontrollable thoughts, actions and impulses. It's no wonder, considering what cupid is crop-dusting across the synapses. The rush of contradictory thoughts, feelings and emotions makes you think having and holding the one you're with, forever, is a not only possible, but a good idea.

It is not. Dr. Zeki's brain scans show an increased activity in four very primitive areas (responsible for pleasure, intuition, and buying the new Kylie Minogue record), there is a spooky silence on the prefrontal cortex — that part of the brain responsible for reason, comprehension, self-restraint and realizing that Kylie is crap.

For those of you who have never fallen in love, it is possible in theory, though clearly not recommended in practice, to get a quick-fix of the love potion while driving your date home, drunk, from the pub.

All you have to do is adjust your diet (get a Whopper at the drive-thru window — animal protein reduces seratonin), get some amphetamines in you (Dextroamphetamine, Benzedrine and Ritilan are available with prescription —you don't need a prescription for cocaine) and up the adrenaline pumping through your veins. (If driving drunk on drugs doesn't give you a rush, try shifting onto the wrong side of the road and driving — really fast.)

Or you can wait for the Real Thing.

— Cary Parker (mediumkool@hotmail.com)