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A study recently published on the Journal of Neurophysiology investigated a group of 15 people recently abandoned by their partners to understand the process of unreciprocated love and romantic rejection. The researchers “used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study 10 women and 5 men who had recently been rejected by a partner but reported they were still intensely "in love." Participants alternately viewed a photograph of their rejecting beloved and a photograph of a familiar, individual, interspersed with a distraction-attention task. Their responses while looking at their rejecter included love, despair, good, and bad memories, and wondering why this happened”.
The study was aimed to test four predictions 1) rejection activates subcortical reward systems that mediate motivation and reward 2) romantic rejection activates subcortical and cortical areas associated with drug craving 3) romantic rejection engages forebrain areas activated by losses and gains and gain anticipation 4) romantic rejection activates brain regions associated with the autonomic nervous system because the subjects show a range of intense emotions.
Romantic love has been already proved to be an addiction as for instance previous studies showed that romantic love and cocaine addiction behaviours share survival activation in the brain, explaining the strength of the obsession.
Most of us experienced themselves the obsession and the excruciating pain when rejected and abandoned, together with feelings of despair, anxiety, loss, love and hate. Some of the sentences the subjects of the study pronounced were “I think about him constantly” (and all the subjects declared to think of their loved ones for more than the 85% of the day) or “I want a letter from him, or a phone call; I want some respect” (all the subjects showed anger as well as the need to understand why the relationship didn’t work) or another one, to explain his pain, said “It hurts so much. I crumble. I just start crying”. And maybe the subjects couldn’t explain their contradictive feelings in such a beautiful way as the Latin poet Catullus (“odi et amo, quare id faciam fortasse requiris: nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior[1]) but they surely meant exactly the same thing when they declared “I hate what he did to me, but I still love him” or “ I kept thinking, I love you, I hate you; how could you do this”.
Have you ever tried to pay attention to songs lyrics after a bad break-up? If so, you have surely had the feeling that the most of them were written by people who were in pain and that somehow they could express perfectly how you were feeling at the moment identifying yourself with the artist (for a similar process reading poems or novels cfr. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence).
Unfortunately just sometimes the “side-effect” of a break up is something beautiful as a song or a poem, but in many other cases it brings tragic effects. For instance in 2009 in Italy 119 women have been killed by their ex-mates and some of them committed a suicide soon after the homicide. Even If we want to leave aside these extreme cases we anyway need to consider people who experienced deep sadness and severe depression because of romantic rejection. At the end of the study the authors write “The perspective that rejection in love involves subcortical reward gain/loss systems critical to survival helps to explain why feelings and behaviors related to romantic rejection are difficult to control and lends insight into the high cross-cultural rates of stalking, homicide, suicide, and clinical depression associated with rejection in love”.
We now have several studies that prove the similarity between romantic love and drug addiction and we know very well the effects of dependence/withdrawal from drugs. We need to take more seriously the pain of broken hearts and develop strategies to speed the process of recovering. Some people have the ability to use their pain to learn from the past, to become stronger and to even produce something artistically valuable, but many others are overcome by pain and suffer in a way that prevent them to live their lives and to move on to a better relationship. Studies like this one I shortly summed up help to understand these mechanisms. Moreover they give us the hope that one day we will able to delete painful memories of ex mate like in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” or to find technologies or pills that will help us to skip all the pain that follows the break up.
Some people are concerned about the side effects of “too much happiness” as for instance a lot of artists produced their masterpieces while suffering. I agree that a happy Catullus would have never written those beautiful poems. But I also think that most of the time we need masterpieces to compensate the intrinsic sadness of our lives, to understand that other people feel exactly as we feel and that broken hearts eventually recover (I explain this way the success of a song as “I will survive”, a hymn for every one who has been left). If at some point, hopefully, our lives will be always happy and we will be able to recover from a broken heart as fast as we recover from a broken tooth, we will not need anymore to find in artistic creations a mirror of our own pain. I think we need to free love from pain, as well as we need to free human lives (artists' ones included) from pain. Hopefully hymns from the future will celebrate happiness and not the mere fact that we “will survive”.
[1] I do love and I do hate, you maybe ask how I can do this: I don’t know. But I feel it is happening and it is an excruciating pain (the translation is mine).
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