Let me count how many ways I love you

Apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the title line, which I creatively adapted from one of her poems. We have survived another frantic flower-buying, champagne-popping, pink-penguin-attack called Valentine’s Day. The retail industry, every year, lugs huge bags of money to the bank while gleefully chuckling at the foolish consumer who buys into the hype.

In a fascinating study, anthropologist Helen Fisher has determined that there are three forms of love. Valentine’s Day flower sellers certainly benefit from the fact that one of these is lust. There surely is many a bearer of red roses whose sole purpose of bestowing such a gift on the love of his life is to soften up the prospect of some bedtime exercise.

A second emotion in this category is romantic attraction. Helen Fisher has spent many decades studying human emotions in the range of love and affection. Romantic attraction, she and her research team at Rutgers University have discovered, exhibits many characteristics.

Some of these are obsessive thinking about one’s love interest, seeing only positive qualities, finding a special meaning in the person and a desire to spend all available time together. Being in love, they found, is a fairly unique and powerful state of mind and they identified it as more than that, even calling it a basic drive.

In fact, what was quite surprising for them was the discovery that the emotions of people in love were so strong that they experienced exhilaration, euphoria, boundless energy, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, trembling and even feelings of anxiety or panic.

It could be that the tales of famous lovers such as Romeo and Juliet who died for their loves might not just be fairy tales. Romantic love can be so strong that the beloved would be willing to sacrifice his or her life for a partner.

But going back to the Valentine’s gift happenings: Why would one want to shower one’s love with flowers, chocolates, candlelit dinners, violin-playing gypsies and other unusual gifts? It seems that one way to make somebody fall in love with one is to share romantic, novel and wonderful experiences.

Bearing that in mind, the idea of Valentine’s Day might not be that far-fetched after all. By bringing your loved one something romantic and novel — that’s where the pink penguins fit into the picture — one might end up being able to persuade the love of one’s life to reciprocate the feelings.

And what feelings! The researchers discovered that when one falls in love, one experiences increased concentrations of dopamine in the brain. It’s on par with what a drug user will experience when using amphetamines and cocaine. Heady stuff indeed.

So what is the third love emotion? That is attachment, say the anthropologists. That’s the good stuff because once all the high-powered emotions have calmed down and the dopamine has run its course, we can relax into relationships that allow us to nurture each other and any offspring that all the Sturm und Drang periods have produced.

However, there is one more thing these scientists have discovered that could put the cat among the pigeons. Humans can be in any one or all of these three states of love, and not necessarily with the same person! Oh dear, that could certainly end up being an easy excuse to hide behind if the need arises. After all, one can’t help it!

If you have a moment, do view the video of Helen Fisher at TED.