by Ann Regentin
(09/08/04)
Why, when we are most desperate to make a good impression, do we often end up behaving like idiots?
I know it's not just me. Everyone has a story of some gross faux pas committed on a first date or on first meeting someone who has just knocked them off their feet. The exact details vary, but at best, it seems to involve a case of foot-in-mouth disease that should be terminal. At worst, there is damage to life or limb. But somehow lust stumbles on, even though Mother Nature seems to stack the odds against it, by rendering us bumbling, babbling fools when we're in the throes of it.
Arousal. Normally we think of it in terms of turgid genitals, but it actually starts much earlier than that. You meet someone totally cool and all of a sudden you're shaky, nervous. Men stand taller to make their chests look bigger, brag to make themselves look bigger, sit with their knees spread wide enough to berth the Titanic. Women fidget, cross and re-cross their legs, expose a bit of neck or wrist. Eyebrows go up, pupils dilate, lips darken, all subconscious indicators of sexual interest. Hey, the body starts saying, wanna swap DNA?
It's weird how this process short-circuits the brain. Falling in love has been compared, chemically and behaviorally, to insanity, and for good reason. Attraction drops serotonin levels, which makes us unusually aggressive, a trifle obsessive-compulsive, and a lot more interested in sex. At the same time, there is decreased brain activity in areas linked with depression, and increased activity in areas associated with intuition, interpreting visual input, and addiction to certain drugs -- and as if this weren't enough, the system also floods with adrenaline and dopamine. Come to think of it, maybe it isn't all that surprising that you dropped your drink in his lap. Infatuation has about the same effect as simultaneous hits of speed and narcotics.
I have not been caught by it often, but when it hits me, it hits full steam, scaring the hell out of me in the process. Either I clam up and say nothing at all, or I behave like an aggressive toddler, stopping barely short -- usually! -- of physical violence. I spew very, very personal information like a volcano while becoming strangely amnesiac about basic social courtesy. In other words, by the next morning, I'm wishing I'd been drunk because then I'd at least have an excuse.
I suspect that the culprit is the adrenaline. Adrenaline raises blood pressure and helps convert glycogen to glucose, in turn raising blood sugar levels and triggering what is known as the fight or flight response, a heightened state of awareness and readiness. It also affects a part of the brain called the amygdala, which strengthens our memory of the event. In an actual emergency, this is a useful thing. We are primed for action and in a better position to learn from whatever is happening, but in flirting, it can be a disaster. The increased blood pressure and general arousal can turn us into blithering idiots, what a friend of mine calls "too loud, too much, too fast, too drunk," and it can also make us overconfident, with potentially disastrous consequences. Joe describes it like this: "In an attempt to impress a new girlfriend, I accelerated away after picking her up and promptly overtook a police car at 50mph in a 40mph zone...they found a fault in a tire and refused to let me drive the car till I got a replacement tire on it. We had to walk miles back into town to get public transport."
The increased activity in the amygdala also means that we clearly remember every miserable, humiliating second.
Dopamine is associated with good feelings, a sort of natural opiate, and it's strongly implicated in thrill-seeking and addiction. A number of recreational drugs stimulate dopamine receptors, and too much of that can cause symptoms that are indistinguishable from those of schizophrenia.
What does this mean for lovebirds? Well, for a start, the association of pleasure with the object of our affections makes us want to be around them, no matter what kind of fool we make of ourselves when we are. So we continue to seek out this person's company, sometimes while being treated in a manner that would ordinarily make us blow them off completely.
Janice's husband is a classic example: "My husband came out to the summer camp I worked at. His father was my boss. The first morning he was there, he came walking across to the mess hall, and I offered him coffee. He didn't realize I was talking to him and kept walking, making me absolutely furious that he was such a (insert whatever your favorite curses are here...I used them all). Keep in mind that his father was my best friend, so his son being a jerk wasn't what I expected, and this good-looking guy with attitude ignoring me was a sore spot. Note: Hubby didn't realize he'd done this for a few weeks...until we were in bed together and I explained why I was so hostile when we met next.
"Skip six days later. Hubby is back at the camp with a friend, since he enjoyed it so much the first time around. They decide to come to the Friday night dance we hold, and he comes in looking for Anna (his father's assistant...for what reason, I don't know). At any rate, someone points me out to him. Again, no idea why. Maybe they confused me with Anna in the dark hall? We were the same height and weight and both had long hair in a braid down our back. From the back, someone could confuse us, I guess.
"He strides up (admitting to me later that he wanted to make a good impression on me) and calls me Anna. Now, he has already insulted me once. I go off on him, very sweetly. By the time I was done, I had insulted his intelligence, eyesight, ability to read...poor Dan was standing there, getting more aroused by this spitfire who had the vocabulary to tell him off without making a true scene for the kids. After all, none of them knew what the words I chose meant. At the same time, he had absolutely no idea why I wanted him dead on the spot. He spent the next two hours trying desperately to get me to say more than one civil word to him in a row, while his buddy was urging him on.
"Finally, he got me to dance with him, got me to relax and actually like him a little. Then, he almost blew it by getting insanely jealous when his best buddy asked me to dance while he was off in the restroom. Keep in mind that best buddy was gorgeous, rich, a real love 'em and leave 'em type, and in a wheelchair, which meant that dancing consisted of me sitting on Troy's lap and being wheeled around while we talked. Oh, Dan was NOT ready to lose me to Troy. Guess that had happened before. It took a while for me to bring him back out of the jerk column again after that one. Overall, everything he did for the first few nights seemed to backfire on him."
Obviously a man in the grip of something powerful, because under any other circumstances, he wouldn't have given her the time of day after the first dressing-down.
Two other hormones might help explain this kind of lunacy: oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is actually known as "the bonding hormone" and it is released in large quantities in nursing mothers, but it's also racing around in the brains of lovers, improving visual memory and urging us to attach ourselves to the object of our affection.
Vasopressin has been making the news lately for its ability to domesticate a particularly promiscuous species of vole. Meadow voles are the type to screw anything that holds still long enough and usually have the paternal instincts of a doorknob, but when their vasopressin receptors are tweaked, they become doting husbands and fathers. Although the vasopressin receptors in humans are not a precise match to those of rodents, we do have them and the amount of vasopressin in our bloodstream increases with sexual interest.
Oxytocin is associated more with women and vasopressin with men, but both sexes produce and are sensitive to both. The combined effect, where infatuation is concerned, is to make us cozy persistently up to someone who thinks that a village somewhere is missing its idiot.
Even age does not seem to offer much hope of immunity. Karen describes what happened to her sister, then in her early 40s, when a serious crush on a man she frequently worked with took over. This married, deeply religious woman regressed by a few decades. "The first year of this crush she was in an utter tailspin...it was a roller coaster, and I heard all about it. She, a well-poised woman, would become a blithering idiot in this man's presence. She actually flirted, blushed, did and said stupid things...and could hardly believe her own behavior. She was very much like a teenager all of a sudden, to the point where she could talk for an hour on the phone to her sister (me!) about it. Very unlike her. Even though she was conscious of her behavior, she couldn't stop it." Only during the second year did Karen's sister start to get a grip on herself, but it wasn't until he changed jobs that the symptoms started to ease, at least somewhat, into a combination of relief and regret.
No matter how stupid we look in the throes of it, infatuation feels very, very good and what is to me the strangest thing of all is how profound the grief can be when it goes awry. This whole process can kick in within seconds of meeting someone, creating an astonishingly powerful attachment to a person we hardly know, and any threat to it can hurt in a way quite similar to the threat of losing a long-time lover. Telling ourselves that it's only a series of chemical reactions does nothing to dull the wonder of it, or the pain.
I guess that's why, in spite of everything, we keep coming back for more.
