The Super-Meaning of Romantic Relationships

[InquiringMind]

You have to remember that we're sold an extremely romanticized version of love and relationships by movies and books.  Happily ever after doesn't exist.  Most love is fleeting, and our brains change enough over time that it is highly likely that any love you experience will fade.  Our brains are essentially big pots of chemical soup, and love is really just a chemical reaction in your brain.  We need a certain level of certain neurotransmitters to maintain a happy mood, and how we go about our daily lives definitely affects that.  The different relationships we have with other people release different chemicals into our brains, which make us feel satisfied.  If you find yourself only being satisfied by romantic relationships, it's most likely that you are experiencing some sort of chemical imbalance that the stimulation of a relationship helps to fix, which leads to a feeling of satisfaction and validation.

That's why some people get addicted to drugs easily.  They lack the proper neurotransmitters, so when they take the drugs that release those neurotransmitters, their brains start craving that alternative source.  You're essentially using love as your drug.  When you're in a relationship, you get the stimulation that releases those transmitters.  But when the relationship ends,you lose that source of neurotransmitters, and your brain is hardwired to want to repeat whatever it was that was giving you that.  Thus, you crave a relationship and feel meaningless without it.

You have to remember that we're pretty much complex biological robots.  It feels as if certain things make us happy, but what it really is that those things are the stimulation that releases the neurotransmitters that make us feel happiness.  The good news is there are all kinds of things beside a relationship that release the chemicals we need, like exercise.  The key is finding what works for you.

I've studied a fair amount of evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and all the related stuff.  The more I learn about life, the less I believe that the people pushing these theories have anything of scientific value to tell us. Here are my four reasons:

1) Most of this "knowledge" comes with a heavy dose of confirmation bias, so they highlight the observations that match their theory's predictions and ignore observations that don't fit their theoretical framework.  

2) Neuroscientists have failed to solve the "hard problem of consciousness" which is how a set of neurotransmitters and electrical signals translates to the subjective first-person experience of consciousness.  Talking about "neurotransmitters" gives me exactly zero useful information about what romantic love feels like, or about how to stop being attracted to women who treat me badly.

3) All of this knowledge about evolution and brain function has failed miserably at helping us solve the basic problems of the human condition, such as war, poverty, divorce, suffering, etc.  

4) The power of a scientific theory lies not it its ability to explain the past, but in its ability to predict the future.  Evolution in particular can give us detailed explanations about what's happened in the past, but can't tell us anything about what's going to happen next.   This is one of the reasons I like physics: it has the best predictive power of any scientific discipline.  

I guess my real frustration with neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is that it never helped me to solve any of my personal problems, or most of the problems of the people around me.  

That really doesn't have much to do with the meaning of romantic relationships.  Unless neuroscientists are able to identify a neurotransmitter that moderates a person's sense of meaning in life.