This Is Your Brain on Heartbreak
We all know that when love is good, it’s really good. Research shows that romantic attachments, when they’re healthy and supportive, can be immensely beneficial for our health. Married people tend to live longer than single people and seem to fare better when seriously sick. But as poets and pop singers have long told us, when love goes awry, it hurts like nothing else. After my marriage ended—not by my choice—I found some comfort in art, but what I really wanted was science. I wanted to know why we feel so operatically sad when a romantic attachment dissolves. What I discovered is that love changes us so deeply—at a physiological level—that when it’s lost, we hurt more than if we had never loved at all.
“One of the most painful experiences that a human being can suffer is to lose a life partner,” says Helen Fisher, the author of and a biological anthropologist who studies the neurochemistry of love as a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute. Despite that, she told me, it’s been vastly underexamined as a topic of study. Many scientists, she believes, simply underestimate the power of heartbreak, but they also find the excitatory state of falling in love more alluring. Fisher herself has done . But after years of tracking the brains of the suckers who fall in love, she thought it
