DALLAS -- As Valentine’s Day approaches, love seems to be everywhere, sewn onto teddy bears and piped onto heart-shaped cakes. Some people can fall in love at first sight, or, according to Netflix’s "Love is Blind," without seeing each other at all.
What does science have to say about it?
It’s impossible to bottle meet-cute butterflies in a test tube or put that first-kiss feeling under a microscope. But by uncovering what love means to different people — scientists who study love on the brain and couples who know exactly what it feels like — it might be possible to understand it.
Love on the brain
Brittany and Edwin Engram first locked eyes at a Tyler, the Creator concert in 2012. Edwin thought Brittany was cute right from the start, but neither was brave enough to make the first move.
Two years later, they met again at a spoken word club at Dallas College’s El Centro Campus. They had their first kiss at a park across the street from the Omni Dallas Hotel and spent their first date at the top of Reunion Tower, gazing down on the city.
They have now been married for eight years and are parents to a 4-year-old son, Legacy.
Brittany and Edwin’s love for each other wasn’t instant, but grew over time as they deepened their connection.
“I definitely liked you from first sight,” Edwin said to Brittany.
When we meet someone cute at a concert or coffee shop, our brains release a cascade of chemicals called neurotransmitters, according to Erin Venza, a researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth.
These neurotransmitters include dopamine, which can cause feelings of pleasure, and norepinephrine, which relates to feelings of excitement and alertness.
“I think it speaks so much to that early, high-arousal, excitement phase of the butterfly period,” Venza said.
When it comes to love at first sight, Venza said there’s no brain chemistry to back it up. But initial physical attraction can lead to a bias in our brains called the “halo effect.”
“When you have that attraction to someone and you’re having those butterflies,” Venza said, “you’re more likely to see everything they do in a more positive light.”
The halo effect can make us love everything about someone, even if we barely know them. When couples recall the start of their relationship as love at first sight, it could be because they felt the halo effect from the moment they met.
We finish each other’s …
Is there a science to compatibility? Venza said that similar interests, values and backgrounds can bring a couple together at first.
Shehan and Bhargavi Jeyarajah met the day Bhargavi moved into her dorm at Baylor University, but they didn’t become friends until years later. They dated briefly in college, where Shehan wrote about Baylor sports for The Dallas Morning News and Bhargavi majored in biology, and later reconnected on the East Coast when Bhargavi went to graduate school at Duke University.
“I think we were both just at a point in our lives where we were ready for each other,” Shehan said.
Once similarities bring a couple together, Venza said, the next level of compatibility is driven by behavior: how partners communicate, connect and work with one another.
Shehan and Bhargavi started dating long distance in May 2017, with her in grad school and him working in Atlanta. They talked over video calls for one to two hours each night. Those long conversations built a solid foundation for their relationship.
“I just started noticing that I felt so secure and safe around this person,” Bhargavi said. “I just never doubted our care and love for each other.”
Shehan said dating Bhargavi in college felt like a bubble — an ideal situation where they didn’t have to stress about the future. When he reconnected with Bhargavi after graduation and worked through the challenges of long distance, his feelings only grew.
“I think that realizing the level of trust and security we had never went away, really made me ultimately feel like this was somebody … that I should feel comfortable with building my life around,” he said.
The couple married in June 2019, and now live in Irving.
What is love?
There are some possible explanations for what love could look like in the brain. One answer could lie in our brain waves.
Researchers are exploring whether our brain waves sync up in rhythm with our friends’ when we socialize. A 2017 study published in the journal Nature found that couples’ brain waves were more in sync while talking compared to perfect strangers’.
One cause of this could be oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone,” Venza said. It’s present in friendship and in early stages of attraction, but is linked more closely to bonds between romantic partners or a mother and child.
In a 2012 study, scientists had people look at photos of strangers and photos of their long-term partners. They found that people in healthy relationships had more brain activity in areas related to pleasure and bonding when they looked at photos of their partners.
“When you’re in that positive relationship of supportive well-being, that’s even reflected in those neural connections,” Venza said.
Of course, love gets more complicated outside the lab. Shehan sees love as a choice and a promise he continues to make.
“I think that it’s trust, I think that it’s reliability,” he said. “I think it’s understanding the promises and obligations that you made to someone else.”
For Bhargavi, love is about building a life with someone and bringing them into your world.
“I knew I was in love when I felt secure,” she said. “But I think, more than that, it’s the urge to be part of a community.”
Love’s effect on the brain is so intricate that science has yet to completely explain it. But D-FW couples, like the Engrams and Jeyarajahs, know exactly what it feels like. And for now, maybe that’s all we really need to know.
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Adithi Ramakrishnan is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.
