The Chemistry of Love

LOVE...
For the moment let's set aside meanings of the word denoting affection, compassion, extreme liking, etc. and focus only on the romantic or intimate use of the word. How many songs have been written about love? It's easily the number one subject of popular music. How many books, novels, short stories, self help books? The feeling of love is inextricably intertwined with sexuality. All of this is Mother Nature's little joke on us, since it carries us to extreme heights of passion and sublime inner peace, but can quickly become complicated beyond our ability to cope with it, and it's loss counts as among the most devastating experiences we can know. Here's the deal, you can have the wonder and joy of intimate companionship, but you must accept the inescapable separation that must one day occur. We do accept the deal, and we have 6.5 billion human beings to prove it.

We have puzzled over the mystery of to whom we are attracted, and with whom we fall in love, and explaining it as fate, or deity intervention in our lives, or sometimes we often said "It's chemistry". It should come as no suprpise as science teases out the secrets of our physiology to discover that indeed chemistry plays a big role. Internally, we are driven by hormones, this is nothing new, except for identifyiing the chemicals in our brain that cause the feelings of euphoria and bonding. What's new is learning that we are not different from other animals, but communicate our feelings to one another through chemicals called pheromones. We produce chemicals that sexually attract others. Pheromones don't create compulsions, but act more like the music in a love scene, enhancing the feelings of what is already happening. Lower mammals recognize about 1500 pheromones with the vomeronasal organ inside their nostrils, but we lack that organ. However, our olfactory epithelium has phermomone receptors for about 500. Whereas the sense of smell connects with the primitive brain stem, the pheromone sense connects with the amygdala, which is seat of emotions located behind our pre-frontal lobes. We feel pheromones, rather than smell them.

Whereas most pheromones are common among us, we have a personal pheromone we produce on our upper lips, that has encoded on it, the MHC of our DNA. MHC is our multihistocompatiblility complex, those genes that create our immune system. We are attracted to people whose MHC's are much different from our own, probably so that our offspring have a broader immune response. This is so specific that we can react to an MHC in the air from someone in a crowded room and find our way to them in spite of being in a virtual pheromone fog from everyone else. For a short while after child birth, a woman's MHC reverts to wanting to be with those similar to her own. A woman on birth control pills also has her attraction preference switched to similar MHC's rather than different. Some early research in fact has shown that relationships begun under the influence of the pill, tend be be shorter than otherwise. There is evidence that gay people produce and react to some of the same pheromones, but also some specific to homosexuals, which may help explain "gaydar".

Although human pheromones have been only recently identified, research has already begun in creating synthetic versions using recombinant DNArecombinant DNA splicing into common human gut bacteria. Perfumers are especially interested in more powerful human sexual attractors, and there are occasional rumors of secret government projects to determine if they have military value, not unlike the disastrous MK-Ultra experiments in the 1950's with LSD conducted by the CIA on American citizens. Government watch groups are especially concerned over leaked reports about a highly addictive synthetic human pheromone called on the streets "F9" by its unfortunate addicts.

As a country we are engaged in a debate over gay marriage. Somehow the idiotic voices spewing nonsense that gay people have an agenda to destroy marriage have been featured on news media as if they made sense. Actually, the Christian Church during the Middle Ages had marriage rites for same sex couples.
Contrary to foolish statements that gays don't have children, there are in fact a large and growing number of families with gay parents. If marriage is a sacrament, then it's a religious rite, rather than a legal right, and should not be part of of our laws. Let the states establish unions or domestic partnerships, and let religious organizations marry or refuse to marry whomever they please. "Why shouldn't I be able to marry my dog?" Now that's about as stupid an argument as I've ever heard.