“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5).
“If you know anyone who is colorblind,” says Professor John Money of Johns Hopkins University, “then you have a good idea of what it means to be love-blind.” What the professor is talking about isn’t the starry-eyed youngster who falls in love, but the individual who seems entirely normal—social, friendly, and handsome or attractive, but just can’t seem to fall in love with anyone. Believe it or not, love-blindness is but one of a broad spectrum of romantic problems now believed to result—at least in part—from chemical instabilities or malfunctions in your brain.
Another interesting aspect of this research is the fact that scientists now are finding direct evidence that relates love, or the emotions of love, to chemicals that are controlled by the pituitary gland. It still isn’t clear whether it is the chemical that produces the emotion, or the emotion that produces the chemical. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? But it’s a fact: love is more than an emotion.
Another doctor, Michael Liebowitz, has authored a book entitled The Chemistry of Love, and he contends that when you fall in love, there is a high similar to that produced by amphetamines, which will eventually mellow. He writes, “A giddy high … inevitably accompanies the state of falling in love. But with continued intimacy the novelty of the relationship wears off, and the initial feeling of elation usually gives way to new emotions that serve to cement the tie between partners. At this stage, the presence of a loved one no longer heightens arousal but has a calming influence, inducing a sense of general well-being.”
And there you have it, scientific evidence for what you’ve known all along: You can tell a young person in love, but you can’t tell ’em very much. Now, on the serious side, what the research does is enable some individuals, who otherwise could not carry on normal relationships, to function in normal relationships with corrective medication.
There is a chemistry to love, and it defies prognosis or analysis in a laboratory; it is the chemistry that binds us to each other, that gives us the strength to endure years of separation and privation, and causes us to choose that one special person above all the others in the world. Love is still the strongest force in all the world, the greatest motive for change in your personal behavior, the glue that keeps relationships from disintegrating.
In all the writings of the poets and mystics, no finer description of the chemistry of love has ever been written than that which came from the pen of the Apostle Paul, who wrote to the Corinthians long ago. In the famous love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, Paul makes 15 statements about love’s chemistry. Listen to them: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant; love does not make a fool of anyone; love does not seek its own; love is not provoked; love does not take into account wrong suffered; love does not rejoice in unrighteousness or wrongdoing; love rejoices with all truth; love bears all things; love believes all things; love hopes in all things; love endures all things; and love never fails.”
No force in the entire world has the power to change people as the chemistry of love. What modern research has borne out, is that which we’ve known all along—the chemistry of love, God’s kind, really, really works. You can prove it for yourself.
Resource reading: 1 Corinthians 13:1-8.
