Why You Confuse Anxiety With Chemistry in Relationships

The experience that people often call chemistry in new relationships is produced in the body by elevated heart rate, heightened attention, preoccupation with the other person's responses, and a sense of urgency. These are also the features of mild to moderate anxiety. The physiological overlap between attraction and anxiety is not metaphorical. It is measurable, and it has been demonstrated experimentally. The brain does not receive attraction and anxiety as two distinct signals. It receives a state of physiological arousal and assigns it a label based on the available contextual information. When that contextual information includes someone who seems interesting, the label the brain assigns is chemistry. When it also includes a relational context that produces uncertainty and activation, the two states are effectively indistinguishable from the inside.

This is not a design flaw in the brain. It is the predictable consequence of how emotions are constructed. It has significant practical implications for who people fall for and why.

Dutton and Aron: The Bridge That Explained a Lot

In 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron at the University of British Columbia conducted an experiment that would become one of the most cited demonstrations of misattribution of arousal. Male participants were approached by an attractive female researcher on one of two bridges in British Columbia: a high, wobbly suspension bridge over a gorge, or a stable, low bridge over a small stream. The high bridge produced mild physiological arousal through fear: elevated heart rate, faster breathing, and increased alertness.

The researcher administered a short questionnaire and, at the end, gave each participant her phone number in case they wanted to discuss the research further. Men who had been approached on the fear-arousing high bridge were significantly more likely to call the researcher afterward, and they reported higher levels of attraction to her in their questionnaire responses.

The interpretation offered by Dutton and Aron, drawing on Schachter's two-factor theory of emotion, was that the participants on the high bridge had misattributed their fear-induced arousal to the researcher. The brain, encountering a state of physiological activation in the presence of an attractive person, assigned the label of romantic interest to that activation. The source of the arousal, the wobbling bridge, was not accessible to conscious awareness in the moment of labeling.

The experiment has been replicated and extended, and its core finding has held: physiological arousal from sources unrelated to the person being evaluated increases perceived attraction to that person when the context makes attraction a plausible interpretation.

Schachter's Two-Factor Theory

Stanley Schachter, a social psychologist at Columbia University, proposed the two-factor theory of emotion in 1962, building on earlier work by William James and Carl Lange. Schachter argued that emotion is not a raw signal that the brain receives; it is a construction. Two ingredients produce an emotion: a state of physiological arousal and a cognitive label that the brain assigns to that arousal based on context.

In Schachter and Jerome Singer's original experiments, participants were injected with adrenaline and placed in different social contexts. Those who did not know that their physical state had been chemically induced and who were exposed to an emotionally expressive confederate in their experimental condition labeled their arousal according to the confederate's emotional tone, becoming more euphoric when the confederate was euphoric and more angry when the confederate was irritable. The arousal provided the raw material; the context provided the label.

The relevance to relationships is direct. In a relational context where someone is intermittently available, emotionally unpredictable, or otherwise anxiety-producing, the nervous system is in a state of sympathetic activation. If that person is also attractive, the brain's labeling process will pull toward the most contextually plausible interpretation: this feeling is chemistry. The anxiety and the attraction share their physiological substrate, and the brain assigns the relational label rather than the threat label, because the context is relational.

Antonio Damasio and the Body's Role in Emotion

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has contributed an important nuance to this picture through his somatic marker hypothesis. Damasio's research, conducted with patients who had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (an area involved in integrating emotional signals into decision-making), demonstrates that the body's emotional responses carry real information and should not be dismissed as noise. His patients, who had lost access to their somatic emotional responses, became unable to make effective decisions, particularly social and relational ones, even when their cognitive reasoning capacities were intact.

Damasio's work means that the answer to the anxiety/chemistry confusion is not to distrust the body entirely. The body's signals carry information. The challenge is developing the literacy to read them accurately. An anxious bodily response in a relational context is information. The question is what it is information about: is the physiological state being generated by genuine attraction to a good-fit person, or by the threat-response to an unstable relational environment, or by the recognition of an old attachment template, or by some combination of all three?

Lisa Feldman Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotion

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Northeastern University, has developed the most comprehensive contemporary account of how emotions are constructed. Her theory, documented in her 2017 book How Emotions Are Made, proposes that the brain is fundamentally a prediction machine that continuously generates hypotheses about incoming physiological data based on prior experience and contextual information.

In Barrett's framework, the brain does not detect a pre-existing emotion called love or anxiety in the body's signals. It constructs an emotion by combining the current physiological state, what she calls core affect, with a conceptual category drawn from prior experience and shaped by the current context. The same core affect, a state of elevated arousal and heightened attention, can be constructed as excitement, anxiety, attraction, or dread depending on what concepts are available and which contextual information the brain treats as most relevant.

For people with histories of relational anxiety or anxious attachment, the conceptual categories most readily available in relational contexts will include the emotional experiences most frequently encountered in those contexts. If early relational experience was characterized by anxious urgency around attachment, that conceptual category will be applied readily to new relational arousal states. The anxiety will be labeled as chemistry because chemistry is the concept the brain reaches for when activated in a relational context.

The Waiting Is the Wound addresses the specific quality of this experience: the state of being organized around a feeling of intense relational activation that is sustained by uncertainty rather than by genuine connection.

The Role of Attachment History

The anxiety/chemistry confusion is particularly pronounced for people with anxious attachment histories. Philip Shaver, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, whose research with Mario Mikulincer has produced a substantial body of work on adult attachment, has found that anxiously attached individuals show heightened physiological and cognitive activation in relational contexts: they are more attuned to potential threats to the attachment bond, more preoccupied with the attachment figure's internal states, and they experience the state of relational uncertainty with higher intensity.

This hyperactivation of the attachment system in anxious individuals produces a physiological state that is high in arousal and high in urgency. In the context of Schachter's two-factor model and Barrett's constructed emotion framework, this state is highly susceptible to being labeled as intense romantic feeling. The intensity is real. The label may not be accurate.

The quiz at /becoming/ can help identify attachment patterns and the specific ways in which relational activation tends to be experienced and labeled in a particular person's case.

The Almost Relationship explores how this dynamic sustains ambiguous relationships: the anxiety-driven activation produced by an inconsistent partner is labeled as chemistry, which sustains engagement with someone who might otherwise be recognized as insufficiently available.

What the Research Suggests About "Good Chemistry"

Research by Helen Fisher and her collaborators at Rutgers, along with the growing literature on long-term relationship satisfaction, suggests some features that distinguish attraction rooted in genuine compatibility from attraction produced primarily by anxiety and misattribution.

Genuine compatibility-based attraction tends to coexist with a gradual increase in the capacity to rest in the relationship as it develops and becomes more certain. The intensity may be high early, but as the relationship becomes more stable, the intensity modulates into a form that coexists with ease rather than disappearing.

Anxiety-driven attraction, by contrast, tends to maintain its intensity through the maintenance of uncertainty. When the relationship becomes more stable and certain, the felt sense of chemistry diminishes, because the arousal that was being labeled as chemistry was primarily produced by the sympathetic activation of uncertainty. The person inside this pattern may interpret the diminishing activation as falling out of love, when what has actually changed is that the anxiety has reduced.

What This Means Practically

Building the capacity to distinguish anxiety from chemistry requires developing somatic literacy, the ability to notice and describe physiological states with more granularity than the broad emotional label allows.

Slowing down early relationship decisions gives the nervous system more time to gather data about whether the activation being experienced is produced by genuine connection or by the uncertainty of the relational situation. Many people who confuse anxiety with chemistry make significant relational commitments very quickly, partly because the urgency of the anxiety-as-chemistry state feels like evidence of something rare and important.

Noticing what happens when the relationship stabilizes is a useful data point: does the felt sense of connection remain, or does it diminish when the person becomes consistently available? The answer to this question carries information about the source of the initial activation.

Therapy, particularly somatic or body-focused approaches, builds the skill of distinguishing between different qualities of physiological activation in real time. The skill is learnable. It is not intuitive for people who have spent years labeling sympathetic activation as love. But it changes the quality of relational decision-making significantly over time.

The physiological overlap between anxiety and attraction is real and it is not the person's fault for being susceptible to it. It is one of the ways the brain's emotion-construction process, normally an efficient and adaptive feature, can produce misleading signals in relational contexts shaped by early anxiety. Understanding the mechanism makes it possible to work with it.