By: Amira ElSayed

It’s all basic psychology; our human brains can actually ‘get high’ on the idea of love or being in love. Sometimes we’re not actually in love with the person in front of us, we just like the idea of them.

Why We Love?

The first thing that happens when you start to fall in love is a person begins to take on a “special meaning.” We then begin to, subconsciously, place all our focus on this person. Not only that, we aggrandise them, staying up all night either talking to them or thinking about them. There is an intense elation when things are going well; mood swings make us kind of despair when things are going bad. There arises a sort of sexual possessiveness. The moment we fall in love, we tend to become extremely sexually possessive of our partners. There is also an intense craving to be with them emotionally.

“Love has the same rush as cocaine”

Romantic love is not really an emotion. It’s a type of drive that comes from the wanting or craving part of the mind. And this kind of drive is inherently more powerful than sex drive. People who are rejected in love will kill for it. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths and legends all about love. It’s one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Why We Cheat?

These three brain systems; lust, romantic love and attachment don’t always go together. We can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while still feeling intense romantic love for somebody else, and also feeling sexual attraction for people unrelated to these other partners. Therefore, we are capable of loving more than one person at a time. In fact, we can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else.

Why we cheat, why we don’t love who we cheat with and why we can love more than one person at a time is all psychological and so is the mere concept of love. Because as much as it’s one of the most powerful forces in the world, I like to believe that love is more psychological than really emotional. All those emotions that we feel are produced by the mind as a reaction to certain stimuli; some of which we are not consciously aware of.