By Denise Turney

Years ago I thought falling in love was something orchestrated only by heaven. Now, I wonder if that’s really the case. True. Little — if anything, feels as invigorating, as intoxicating and as all consuming as falling in love. Yet, as magical as falling in love feels, studies have revealed that the process of falling in love can be orchestrated, with intent, by everyday folk.

Power Feelings of Falling in Love

Your Amazing Brain says we fall in love in three stages. In the first stage, we feel lust (others might call it infatuation) for someone. Then, we move on to attraction and finally the third stage of attraction. The entire time we are moving through each of these stages, our brains are fast at work, causing the process to seem almost mechanical.

During the first stage estrogen (women) and testosterone (men) increases. It’s no wonder we feel so nervous and giddy during this stage. Hormones are rushing through our systems, including our brains, at heightened levels. It’s during the attraction stage that we can’t seem to stop thinking about a person. Adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin (the godmother of good feelings) take center stage during the attraction stage. We also tend to view the person we’re falling in love with as being perfect or damn near perfect. Some refer to this as wearing rose-colored glasses (of course, sooner or later, those glasses come off).

After we’ve been in a relationship with someone for several weeks or months, we may start to enter the attachment stage. This is when we start producing an increase of oxytocin and vasopressin. However, should our brains start producing or secreting lower levels of these hormones, we might start feeling less in-love with a person.

Growing Into Deeper Love With Someone

Studies have shown that the process of falling in love can be orchestrated if couples spend enough time together to allow their brains to move through the stages. There’s also still more research being done to discover what happens to our brains and our bodies during the early, middle and late stages of being in love. Perhaps we’ll never fully know what happens to us during the time in our lives when we can feel so out of control as we start feeling incredibly strong emotions when we meet and/or think about someone. What we do know is that the feelings generally don’t last.

If we run away from relationship challenges and don’t have conviction about a loving relationship, we may never reach deep commitment, we may never enter the deepest and sweetest places of a relationship. It’s what Raymond and Brenda learn in Love Pour Over Me as they try to understand why they feel so drawn to each other, almost as if heaven is pushing them together, so soon after they meet at college.

Falling and staying in love would be easy if all we had to do was focus on the one we felt a strong emotional and psychological connection to. But, that’s not the way it goes. As happens with Brenda and Raymond in the book Love Pour Over Me, other events of our lives seem to get in the way. There are jobs to go to, children to care for, houses to keep up, friends to hang out with . . . the list goes on and on and on . . .

Before you know it, we’re not feeling so in love anymore. Maybe it’s because our minds and our brains get cluttered with too many other things to focus on. Who knows? What remains sure is that, whether studied or not, little beats or compares to the feelings of falling in love. It’s an exhilarating time, and when it’s right, when a relationship can and does stand the test of time (and any other test thrown its way), being in love is right – perfect.

Thank you for reading my blog. Please return often and read more blog posts. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You!

Sources:

Love Pour Over Me – http://www.ebookit.com/books/0000001582/Love-Pour-Over-Me.html

Your Amazing Brain: The Science of Love – http://www.youramazingbrain.org/lovesex/sciencelove.htm

Psychology Today: The Early Stages of Falling in Love – http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/get-hardy/201203/the-early-stages-falling-in-love