Susan Kuchinskas - The Chemistry of Connection: How the Oxytocin Response Can Help You Find Trust, Intimacy, and Love

the Inuit dont really have twenty-eight words for snow (despite popular belief), but we humans could use twenty-eight different words for lovein any language. We employ this single inadequate term, love, to describe a multitude of states, from the way a strangers touch sends fire across our skin to the crazed period when we cant stand to be away from our lover to the delight we feel in our grandchildren.

This book talks about one kind of love: the deep, enduring bond of committed love, the kind of bond forged by oxytocin. Oxytocin floods our bodies with feelings of connection, trust, and contentment. This neurochemical is released during orgasm, creating that lovely afterglow. It travels through the bloodstream as it rouses the pleasure center of the brain when were stroked, when were physically close with loved ones, and even when we share time with close friends. Oxytocin is the secret to forming committed relationships, turning lust into long-lasting love. The oxytocin bond is the basis for lifelong relationships of all kinds: between parent and child, two siblings, or even two close friends. Oxytocin lets you live happily with a life partner. It keeps you up all night with a colicky baby. It makes you glad to donate a kidney to your sister.

It may seem unbelievable that love, one of the most complex and intense experiences of life, could depend on a single chemical. And, in fact, oxytocin doesnt make its magic in a vacuum. Human biology being the incredibly complex system that it is, oxytocin cooperates with several other neurochemicals to make it feel good to be with friends and lovers, to make it feel better than almost anything else. It interacts with the neurochemicals of pleasure to make sex and love rewarding. It stimulates the release of prolactin, the hormone that readies the female body and brain for childbirth and mothering.

We humans are hardwired for love and connection. Because of the way our brains respond to the mix of oxytocin and dopamine, humans are among the estimated 3 percent of mammals that are monogamous (Insel 1997). Now, biologists define monogamy a bit differently from the way we think of it in the context of marriage. They see monogamy not as about sexual exclusivity but, rather, as a way of life. Socially monogamous animals live together in stable family units consisting of a mated pair and their offspring. Males and females cooperate in gathering food and caring for their young. They do mate for life, although both mates may occasionally copulate outside the pair.

The difference between a socially monogamous animal and a promiscuous one seems to be the way oxytocin receptorsthe cellular structures that take in specific moleculesare distributed. Monogamous mammals have more oxytocin receptors in the parts of the brain that handle social interactions and reward. Because of this, the monogamous mammal not only remembers the pleasure of sex and interaction but also ties that memory to his or her partner.