Why We Love (25 page)

Why? Because the despair of unrequited love is most likely associated with plummeting levels of dopamine. As you focus your attention and do novel things, you elevate this feel-good substance, boosting energy and hope.

Exercise is particularly good for rejected lovers. Every time you slump into a chair, sit by the phone, or stare out the window, you give your departed sweetheart time to stoke the fire in your aching heart. Exercise can starve the flame. Any kind of physical exertion will elevate your mood.
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Jogging, biking, and other forms of strenuous physical activity are known to drive up levels of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens of the brain, bestowing feelings of euphoria.
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Exercise also elevates serotonin and some of the endorphins, calming substances. And it increases BDNF (brain-derived neurotropic factor) in the hippocampus, the memory center, which protects and makes new nerve cells. In fact, some psychiatrists believe that exercise (aerobic or anaerobic) can be as effective in healing depression as psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs.
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Sunlight is another tonic for depressed lovers.
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It stimulates the pineal gland in the brain, which regulates bodily rhythms in ways that often elevate mood. So pick a daily activity you can do in daylight, preferably out of doors.

To risk sounding like Ben Franklin in his
Poor Richard’s Almanac,
I’ll add these thoughts for a depressed lover: avoid sweets or drugs that you know will stress your body and your mind. Count your blessings; optimism heals. Walk with the ancient human stride (as discussed in chapter six); it’s graceful and easy on your muscles—and probably your brain. And smile; put on a happy face even as you cry inside. The nerves of these facial muscles activate nerve pathways in the brain that can give you feelings of pleasure.
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Even imagining that you are happy can spur pleasurable brain activity.

“Stay me with apples; comfort me with flagons / For I am sick with love,” cried the lover in the Song of Songs. I suspect forlorn lovers sought distractions and daylight, made up soothing maxims, took herbal remedies, exercised, and smiled to alleviate love sickness a million years ago.

The “12-Sep” Approach: Love Addicts

One way to meet new people, learn new coping mechanisms, and develop a fresh perspective on life and love is to join a “12-Step” program. This innovative movement began in the 1930s when two Americans, “Bill W.” and “Dr. Bob,” agreed to conquer their addiction to alcohol by speaking with each other
any time
of the day or night they felt the urge to drink. Building on these exchanges, they created the principles and rituals of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Today this shrewd formula for kicking addiction has spawned over a hundred similar kinds of groups, from Gamblers Anonymous, to Over-Eaters Anonymous, to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA). Each group follows the same 12-Step design for living—an ingenious array of slogans, principles, and practices that have helped addicts around the world recover.

“One day at a time”
is a basic tenet. To members of AA, it is unrealistic—if not impossible—to consider giving up alcohol for the rest of one’s life, but one can resist the demon hour by hour. “Just for today,” they say, “I will not drink.” In the same vein, the chocoholic decides not to reach for a chocolate bar today. Gamblers decide not to bet today. And the rejected lover can decide not to contact the beloved—today.

“If you don’t want to slip, don’t go into slippery places”
is another 12-Step slogan. Applied to the love addict, it means: stay out of the restaurants where you and your lover dined. Go someplace new to shop or get your exercise. Don’t play the songs you used to share. Avoid the “people, places, and things” that trigger a desire for your wayward partner.

Another maxim is,
“It’s the first drink that gets you drunk.
” In short, addicts know that when they have their first martini or chocolate donut, they will surely have a second and a third. In like manner, don’t make that first phone call, write that first e-mail, or drive past his or her house that first time. One contact with the rejecting sweetheart will inevitably lead to more contacts—and more misery.

Perhaps the most intriguing slogan is
“Think the drink through.”
To members of Alcoholics Anonymous, this means that as you stand at an elegant wedding reception and gaze at all the pretty people sipping glasses of champagne, think
past
this genteel moment to its possible end: a devastating bender that could last for months. In the same manner, the jilted lover tends to romanticize the glory days. So they pick up the phone and make contact with their rejecting sweetheart with these magnificent memories in mind. Think past those joyous moments to some horrible weekend when your “true love” never called.

“In a net I seek to hold the wind,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch.
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He knew how impossible it is to retrieve a departed lover. Better to give up the drug and rebuild your life. And remember: your former lover won’t help you. Most feel morally blameless, yet guilty for hurting you.
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But they do not know how to handle your grief or their own feelings about the ruptured tie.
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So although they may be friendly if you contact them, most will be perplexed, annoyed, even angry that you have intruded on their new life.

Taking Antidepressants

“I turn you out of doors / tenant desire / You pay no rent / I turn you out of doors / All my best rooms are yours / The brain and heart / Depart. / I turn you out of doors / Switch off the lights / Throw water on the fire / I turn you out of doors / Stubborn desire.”
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The fifteenth-century French poet Alain Chartier knew that feelings of romantic love can take up stubborn residence in the mind. And when things go sour, you must turn them out.

Modern medicine can help.

There are many different types of depression. The woman suffering from postpartum blues is not experiencing exactly the same kind of depression as the man who just got fired. Rejected love may provoke yet another form of depression, with a specific chemical fingerprint in the brain. Moreover, people mired in the initial “protest stage” of rejected love are suffering different symptoms than those who have given up hope entirely.

Nevertheless, all forms of “clinical” depression seem to manifest themselves with four basic symptoms. Cognitive impairments include lack of concentration on business as usual, the inability to remember daily events or duties, obsessive thinking about your problems and your pain, and other abnormalities of thinking. Mood is altered; depressed men and women struggle with despair, anxiety, fear, anger, and/or other disabling mood states. Bodily problems arise; depressed people generally have trouble eating, sleeping, or engaging in sexual play. And many contemplate suicide.

Rejected men and women often express all these symptoms of major depression. Unable to cope, many turn to antidepressant medications to relieve their anguish. Currently the most popular are pills that increase brain levels of serotonin in one way or another. The most common ones are the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Today serotonin-enhancing medications are a $12 billion industry in the United States alone. Some 7.1 million Americans take some version of serotonin booster to counter depression, stress, bereavement, or the despair of tragic love.
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As the drug takes effect, the physical and psychic pain of utter sorrow begins to dissipate. You spend less time staring at the wall in what psychiatrists call a “vegetative state.” You begin to sleep through the night, eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and go about your business in a more timely and effective manner. Eventually the incessant reflecting diminishes. You become less impulsively drawn to contact “him” or “her.” And feelings of rage, despair, and longing interrupt your thinking less and less. These medications even repair some of the physical damage that has occurred. They stimulate the growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, thereby reversing the harm often caused by prolonged stress.
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But these serotonin-boosting drugs often have adverse side effects. Some people gain weight. An estimated 70 percent of patients taking these medications suffer diminished libido, delayed sexual arousal, and/or the inability to achieve erection, ejaculation, or orgasm.
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And these drugs can often induce apathy, what psychiatrists call “emotional blunting.”

All these side effects are worth enduring, of course, if you feel you may kill yourself or someone else. However, it might be wise to periodically reassess your condition and consider supplementing your antidepressant medication with one that raises levels of dopamine, even switching to a dopamine enhancer. There are several on the market. These dopamine-elevating substances are not as predictable in lifting suicidal depression, but for many patients they work.
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And unlike the serotonin-enhancing medications, they do not produce weight gain or lower sex drive. Indeed, patients regularly report that their sex drive increases.
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More important to our story, when rejected lovers take an antidepressant that elevates dopamine levels in the brain, they are replenishing the very substance the lack of which is most likely causing their withdrawal symptoms.

Estradiol (an estrogen) has antidepressant effects, as do testosterone and thyroid hormone.
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Substance P seems to work as an antidepressant. I suspect an opioid antagonist might alleviate some of the craving of romantic love. Moreover, medications that block corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), the brain hormone released during stress, may soon come on the market to relieve chronic sorrow. These and other new drugs promise to relieve melancholy.

Of course, no antidepressant medication will relieve every patient. Users must work with their doctors to find what is right for them. Moreover, none of these drugs entirely conquers the agony of lost love. And they all have side effects of one kind or another. But if they may not prove a magic bullet in every case, these chemical products are a far better alternative than stalking a former lover in your car, sobbing uncontrollably in the dark, or sitting stupefied before the TV set, awash in rage and sorrow. And anything beats suicide.

“Talking Therapy”

“For use can almost change the stamp of nature,” Shakespeare wrote in
Hamlet
. What wisdom. Talking about your predicament with a therapist, and thereby modifying the ways you think and act, can change your brain activity. Studies show that psychotherapy can produce many of the same changes in brain function that antidepressant medications produce.
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In fact, sometimes “talking therapy” can be just as effective at alleviating major depression.
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In one telling study, scientists compared twenty-four untreated adults suffering from the apathy, melancholy, and hopelessness of major depression with sixteen adults with no psychiatric problems. First each person’s brain was scanned, using an fMRI machine. The depressed men and women showed abnormally increased activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex, the caudate, and the thalamus (a relay station of the brain); the controls did not. Then ten of the despondent subjects were administered the antidepressant paroxetine, which elevates serotonin levels. The other depressed participants attended twelve psychotherapy sessions instead. Then all of the depressed patients had their brains scanned again. Following
both
forms of treatment, activity was reduced in those brain regions that had shown abnormal activation.
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Interestingly, those who underwent the psychotherapy got a bonus. These men and women registered significant new activity in regions of the insula that can inhibit feelings of depression.
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Rather than measuring out the merits of talking therapy versus drug treatment, many psychiatrists now believe that the combination of talking therapy and antidepressant medications is more effective than either treatment by itself.

Time to Heal

“All things flow; nothing abides,” wrote the Roman philosopher Heraclitus. As you remove the stimuli that fan your ardor, arm yourself with a battery of slogans, build new daily habits, meet new people, take up new interests, and perhaps find the right antidepressant medication and/or the right therapist or guide, your addiction to a former lover will eventually subside. We heal. Sometimes it takes a few weeks. More normally it takes months. Often it takes more than two years of separation. But some glorious morning you will notice that you haven’t thought of your hurtful partner in a week or more. Your enemy is no longer lodging in your head.
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People never forget a true love, of course. Despite his devotion to his wife, Martha, George Washington preserved a lifelong passion for another man’s wife, Sally Fairfax. Historians believe America’s first president never kissed Sally, nor was he rejected by her. They were friends. But Washington adored her. He wrote to Sally some twenty-five years after their last encounter, saying that none of the great events of his career, “nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind those happy moments, the happiest of my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.”
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In a similar vein, Su Tung-Po, a Chinese poet of the eleventh century, wrote, “Year after year / I recall that moonlit night / we spent alone together / among hills of stunted pine.”
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“We know well only what we are deprived of,” wrote French author Francois Mauriac. No one forgets. Nevertheless, even those who have been brutally tossed aside begin to lose their feelings of agony, bitterness, and disappointment. You can speed your recovery; but it does take determination, sometimes medication and/or therapy, and what Shakespeare called “the inaudible and noiseless foot of Time.”
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