What kind of love circuit does your brain have?

What kind of love circuit does your brain have?

In love, we are not all the same. I don’t mean to say that men and women come from different planets, (even if this thesis is defensible), but each human brain is unique and functions differently from all others. We see it around us in personality traits, tastes, and behaviors, including romantic behavior.

Let’s look at the different “strategies” in human love relationships: we all know faithful and unfaithful lovers, but there are also those who are addicted to the euphoria of passionate love, and who go from relationship to relationship to get high on the strong emotions of the first months. There are polyamorous people, homosexuals, bisexuals, those who are very committed, a little or not at all. There are cuckoos who have children and then leave them to others to bring up and also those for whom divorce should not exist because the commitment with a partner must last a lifetime.

In a large group, such as the human species, it is very useful to have variations in behavior between individuals because one day the survival of the species may depend on a particular type of behavior. The very strong bonds between members of the same gender, for example, have undoubtedly saved their lives in critical situations. In other circumstances, some sacrificed themselves to save children, or perhaps they had to be abandoned for the survival of the group. Consider that as a group, we have a wide variety of skills, tastes and know-how that must be maintained for the day when the survival of the species could depend on a very particular attribute. The wide variation in human brains is therefore an advantage, but it is also true that even small differences between the strategies of two romantic partners can make a love story difficult to maintain.

So, how can we optimize our chances of finding another brain well-suited to ours?

The differences in the wiring of our brains depend partly on our genes, and partly on the influences experienced during development; our brain can be permanently modified according to our life-experiences. Some “programming” is difficult to change – we now know that there are genes that are favorable to infidelity, for example. By talking to a potential partner about their past love affairs, you can learn to detect their behavioral preferences. The number of partners in someone’s life, the length of each relationship, the reasons for breaking up, their relationship with their mother, father, siblings, their career ambitions, and their views on the “ideal family” all need to be the subject of in-depth conversations.

By exploring these central topics together, we either find common ground, which can form the basis for building a future story together, or we realize over the course of the exchanges that the answers are not what we wanted to hear. We should not try to bury the differences, but on the contrary shine more light on them by asking about other important life-subjects for a couple like the desired number of children, education principles, money management, place to live and so on.

The better we know how each other’s brain works, the better we realize whether or not the two neural networks for love are compatible. It is not a question of judgement, but of investigating the existence of mutual common ground.