MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE

Our bodies react to danger and love in very similar ways, so Trevor Cole relied on both to inform the science of his latest novel

Love is all chemistry. I knew that going in. And several years ago, when I decided to write a novel about love, I knew the science behind the emotion would be a big part of it. I wanted the story to be about more than romance. It had to be about pain too, because love — or more specifically, losing love — is about the most painful thing I’ve experienced. I was intrigued by the idea of someone trying to soothe that pain by trying to recreate love, trying to make it happen, using brain chemistry.

What I didn’t realize, before I started my research, is how similar the neurological processes of love are to those of fear. When I figured that out (I mean, to the degree that I, a non-brain-scientist, could), I knew I had my theme.

Fear made sense to me. A lot of what we feel in relation to love has to do with fear — the fear of rejection; the fear of opening ourselves up, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable; the fear of losing someone we love, and being left with an aching cavity where our heart used to be; the fear of not being good enough; the fear of losing control, over our lives, over our thoughts and emotions.

And then there’s the matter of how weirdly similar the physical and mental reactions to love are to those of fear, the reactions that are caused by chemicals in the brain.

For example, when we’re romantically interested in someone, we become alert. We become hyper-sensitized to the sounds and smells and visible cues around us. We’re on edge, wanting to be impressive, wanting to say the right thing, and wanting to see and learn everything we can about that person, to really figure out if this is someone who might be The One.

All of those hyper-alert reactions also happen when we sense danger. It comes down to the neurochemical phenylethylamine, or PeA. It’s a chemical similar to adrenalin, and it’s triggered by interest to help us zero in on the details of the person of interest, the same way that, when we’re out in a forest after dark, we become hyper-alert to the snap of a twig behind us.

And when interest leads to infatuation, the chemicals produce different reactions. Now our pulse picks up when we anticipate seeing that special person. We feel euphoric when they’re in the same room. And when they lean in close to whisper in our ear or kiss us, our heart starts to pound, our blood pressure rises, our skin tingles and the little hairs on our arms lift.

The same thing happens when we need to run for our lives.

It has a lot to do with epinephrine and norepinephrine, the excitatory neurotransmitters that trigger an adrenalin rush. The chemicals that evolved to help us escape or fight off the things that would kill us are pretty much the same chemicals that tell us we’re falling in love.

There are other chemicals too — neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin — which we associate with the reward centres of the brain, that tell us what feels good when we have it and what feels bad when we don’t. They’re part of the neurological system that gets us to obsess about the person we love, and miss them when they’re not around. While they don’t get triggered in fearful situations, their interplay works to tell us how good it feels to escape the fear, and they get us to obsessively replay fearful moments in our minds so that maybe we can avoid them in the future.

Love and fear — in many ways they’re two sides to the same chemical coin. And so I explored that idea in writing the story of Hope Makes Love.

Hope riopelle is a neuro-researcher who lives in fear of many things, because of something that happened in her past. One of the things she fears is falling in love. Her fear of love may not be rational, but many people who have experienced the kind of trauma Hope has can find their emotional lives damaged. So she goes through most of her adult life avoiding emotional entanglements, and shutting out of her mind the non-scientific possibility that love is, in part, something magical, something that can heal. She shuts it out — even when it seems she might have a chance at it — because if she believes it, and it turns out not to be true, or not true for her, then all is lost.

but when a former baseball player named Zep baker comes to her to ask for help in getting his ex-wife, emily, to fall in love with him again, Hope realizes it’s her opportunity to prove that love is just chemical — not the magical solution to a life of unhappiness — and therefore nothing to worry about. Nothing to hope for. Nothing to fear.

love and fear — in many ways they’re two sides to the same chemical coin