The Science of the Valentines Day
For those in the throes of mutual loving devotion, Valentines Day is the time of year for which no amount of flowers, e-cards, teddies and other mass-produced tokens of sincerity is enough. It is the annual perfect storm formed when fronts of love, guilt and seaside tat converge in a high pressure atmosphere of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin all presided over by by the benevolent Love Gods of Hallmark – the supposed corporate progenitors of this ‘fabricated’ holiday. (Not entirely true, St. Valentine’s day has been celebrated as a veneration of courtly love since the 14th century. St. Valentine is also, quite interestingly from a life sciences point of view, the patron saint of Epilepsy.)
Its well documented that love can be reduced to the aforementioned constituent chemical parts not to mention evolutionary reward systems, but it’s difficult to appreciate this when you’re sitting eagerly awaiting your first date with a certain some one or into your third hour of a ” you hang up, no you hang up” scenario or drunkenly spray-painting “I’m in like with you” on the drive way of their parent’s semi-D.
Nonetheless, the science behind how we feel when we are in love is fascinating and in the following eye-opener from AsapScience, we discover how this powerful attractive force can boost our productivity, help us make crucial decisions and cause us to feel -amongst other things – like we are on drugs.
The dating world isnt all roses in the garden though and for some singletons there’s the spectre of the dreaded ‘friendzone’ that apparently hangs omnipresently over potential romances and seems to be the bane of (usually male) bloggers and social networkers across the globe. You may be forgiven for thinking that being in a zone labeled ‘friend’ would be a good thing,but apparently it’s not when prospects of the physical act of love are on the mind . Most people have at one time or another felt the pangs of unrequited love, but this process of ‘friendzoning’ infers an agency possessed solely by the female of the species and thus the blame falls almost exclusively on their shoulders whenever men across the world are feeling jilted.
My problems with this are two-fold: For one, the feminist in me recoils in horror at the sheer victim complex bigotry of a guy who blames his inability to attract on his intended victim. Two – my inner alpha male balks at the thought of ceding authority to external forces (rawr.) But alas, there are indeed some external forces at play within the friend zone scenario however -like almost any other sociological conundrum to plague society – a little perspective can be gained when we turn it over to the experts. In this case it’s serial mindhole-blower, Michael at Vsauce whose presentation on ‘The Science of the Friendzone’ can serve to shed a little bit of light on why you are terrible at hooking up.
Conor Hughes @chughesvm is a marketing executive at Vertical Markets which incorporates Life Science Recruitment and Capital Markets Executive Search
Cartoon by xkcd.com @xkcd
The science of love written and created by Mitchell Moffit @mitchellmoffit and Gregory Brown @whalewatchmeplz
The Science of the Friendzone by Vsauce @tweetsauce