[transcript] Dr. Guy Winch, "Just a Psychologist, Not a Real Doctor [audience laughs]":
• Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood (high blood pressure, high cholesterol) of an early death by 14 percent. Chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your long-term health and longevity as cigarette smoking.
• Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids.

By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self- esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive.

[transcript] Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist, chief scientific advisor to Match.com, the dating service:
[We] have put 37 people who were madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner, 17 who were happily in love, 15 who had just been dumped.

[W]e found activity in a tiny, little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. We found activity in some cells called the A10 cells, cells that actually make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and spray it to many brain regions. Indeed this part, the VTA, is part of the brain's reward system. It's part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain associated with wanting, with motivation, with focus and with craving. In fact, the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine.
[...]
As you grow up, you begin to build what I call an unconscious list of what you're looking for in a partner, which I call your love map: Too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too old, too young, too scruffy - they're out. Wrong accent - they're out. They smile at you, they don't have any teeth - they're out. [RAZ: And if that person makes the cut, your brain...] Is becoming active, is giving you that pleasing sensation, is pumping out the dopamine to make you feel more optimistic, energetic. You feel that intense rush.

Ppsychologists can tell you, we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background, the same general level of intelligence, the same general level of good looks. And that's about it. That's all they know. They have never found the way two personalities fit together to make a good relationship. So it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another. And I have concocted a questionnaire to see to what degree you express dopamine, serotonin, estrogen and testosterone. I think we've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain. And on this dating site that I've created called Chemistry.com, I ask you first a series of questions to see to what degree you express these chemicals. And I'm watching who chooses who to love. And over 13 million people have now have taken that questionnaire. About 30,000 take it every month on Chemistry.com. So, you know, it's big data. I mean, Match.com enabled me to really collect a lot of big data.

As it turns out,
1. [P]eople who are very high on the dopamine system - curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic - they go for people like themselves.
2. People who are traditional - the serotonin system - they also go for people like themselves.
In the other two cases, opposites attract.
3. People with the traits linked with the testosterone system - the analytical, logical, direct, decisive, tough-minded - they go for their opposite.
4. People who are very expressive of the estrogen system - imaginative, intuitive, good verbal skills, good people skills - they also go for their opposite.

People who've been rejected in love show activity in brain regions linked with pain. In fact, one of the brain regions is a brain region that also becomes active when you feel tooth pain[/b]. So it's a really powerfully, painful - literally painful experience when you've been rejected in love.
[...]
Foremost, I've come to think that romantic love is a drive - a basic mating drive, not the sex drive. The sex drive gets you out there for a whole range of partners. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy and start the mating process with a single individual. What sums it up best is something that is said by Plato over 2000 years ago. He said the God of love lives in the state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out.
Arthur Aron's 36 questions to trigger "falling in love" (the "love map"):
Spoiler!

https://www.npr.org/2014/04/25/30182...-we-re-in-love