Love=Oxytocin

Love is a funny thing. Even funnier is that scientists can now reduce love to chemical interactions in the body. The equation above is actually inaccurate. Love is more like "Dopamine + Oxytocin - Serotonin". I'm going to be lazy and just focus on oxytocin, since it is the key hormone to long lasting love.

Oxytocin recently has been dubbed the "trust in a bottle"( here ). Experiments have shown that oxytocin increases people's ability to trust one another. And as we all know, trust is the foundation of love. What's more, intercourse, especially ones that result in orgasm, releases oxytocin in both men and women. That's where that sense of emotional intimacy after physical intimacy comes from. Hence, happy marriages include happy sex lives.

Another study shows that oxytocin is key to monogamy. There are two species of voles that are in almost all ways identical except one species is monogamous and the other promiscuous. The cause? The promiscuous species lack the gene to produce oxytocin. Does that make humans genetically disposed to having one mate? Well no, not quite...we do have a healthy dose of testosterone that may sway a person from the "one mate" idea (we meaning men and women).

I always knew physical intimacy and emotional intimacy were closely tied together (duh!), but now I have an explanation why. Damn those hormones.