Something happens to the nervous system when it falls in love that has nothing to do with the romantic narrative the culture provides for the experience. The culture’s narrative says: you meet someone, something in you recognizes something in them, the recognition produces the feeling we call falling, and then the falling is the love. The neuroscience says: you meet someone, the attachment system activates with a force proportionate to the depth of the developmental hunger that person is triggering, the activation produces the feeling we call falling, and then the falling is the nervous system’s response to the specific person who has managed to slip past the monitoring program and touch the attachment need that the monitoring program has been protecting for years. The feeling is real. The love is real. What is also real is the terror that arrives alongside it. The terror is not an accident. It is the precise measure of how much the nervous system is at stake.
Helen Fisher’s neuroimaging research on romantic love identifies the specific neural circuits activated in the early stages of romantic attachment: the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus, which are dopaminergic circuits involved in reward, motivation, and goal-directed behavior. The brain in love is, at the neural level, doing what it does in any intense approach motivation: directing enormous resources toward the acquisition of the valued thing. The caudate nucleus, in particular, shows activity in early romantic love that Fisher describes as the same activity she would expect to see in a cocaine user who has just received cocaine. The comparison is not metaphorical. The attachment system, when activated by a specific and valued person, produces a neurochemical cascade that has the same urgency, the same motivated intensity, and the same profound discomfort in the absence of the thing that other forms of intense approach motivation produce. Falling in love is the attachment system at full deployment. And the attachment system, for the person who has been running the loop, has been in a state of managed suppression since childhood.
The specific experience of falling in love for the person with an anxious attachment adaptation is the experience of the monitoring program running at maximum intensity in the context of maximum vulnerability. The falling-in-love experience activates the attachment system’s full hunger: the hunger for the connection, the belonging, the co-regulation, the felt sense of being genuinely held by another nervous system. And simultaneously, the monitoring program activates at full intensity in response to the threat level of that hunger: because the attachment need is the original need, the one whose frustration produced the loop in the first place. The person who falls in love is therefore in the experience of the deepest possible longing and the deepest possible fear simultaneously. The longing is the attachment system. The fear is the monitoring program running its threat assessment of the attachment system’s activation.
The avoidantly adapted person’s experience of falling in love has a different but equally precise phenomenology. The avoidant adaptation produces a nervous system that suppresses the felt experience of attachment need while maintaining the physiological activation that the attachment need produces. The avoidantly adapted person who falls in love experiences the specific tension of a powerful approach motivation combined with a simultaneous, automatic impulse to create distance from the thing being approached. The drawing toward and the pulling away are not a contradiction. They are the two simultaneous responses of the avoidant nervous system to the activation of the attachment need. The person who most wants the connection is the person who most reliably creates the distance.
The specific way the loop hijacks the falling-in-love experience to confirm its predictions is worth tracing. The anxiously adapted person, whose working model says the full self is more than the relationship can hold, enters the new relationship with that prediction already running. The new relationship provides the evidence of the prediction’s inaccuracy: the other person is engaged, available, interested. But the anxious adaptation’s pattern is not deactivated by the counter-evidence. It is temporarily suppressed by the neurochemical cascade of early romantic love, waiting for the first sign that the counter-evidence is about to end. And in any real relationship, signs will arrive: the first time the other person is tired and less warm, the first time they express a need that makes them temporarily less available. These ordinary relational events are read by the anxious monitoring program as the first evidence that the prediction is correct.
The path through the nervous system’s falling-in-love experience, for the person running the loop, is not the suppression of the attachment system’s activation. The attachment need is real and the activation of it is appropriate. The path is the development of the capacity to be in the attachment activation without the monitoring program running its threat assessment at full intensity alongside it. This capacity is what secure attachment allows: the person with a secure attachment style can be fully in the wanting of the connection without the wanting being organized primarily around the fear of the connection’s loss. The development of this capacity, for the person without the secure early attachment, requires the accumulated experience of the attachment need being expressed and not producing the withdrawal the working model predicted. The love does not have to be afraid of itself. The fear and the love can coexist without the fear governing the love’s expression.