Over 400 years ago, Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “Love is blind, and lovers cannot see”. I’d always assumed he was referring to relations with the aesthetically challenged. Well give me a big fat F in my English lit score, because I was wrong, and I’ve only just come to realize what he was actually talking about…

Have you ever looked back at your exes and thought “my god, what was I thinking?” or “jeez, he/she’s gone downhill since we broke up”? Well the reason may be that now your feelings for them have faded, your rose-tinted spectacles have finally fallen off the end of your nose.

And this isn’t just one of those love theories anymore, there’s actual scientific evidence to support it. A 2005 study by Rutgers University biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and colleagues examined the fMRI brain scans of 17 men and women who reported being truly, madly, and deeply in love. Each of the images showed the same activity in the brain’s reward system as that which occurs in the brain of a cocaine addict.

What’s more, the love-struck participants could readily tick off traits or characteristics they didn’t particularly like about the objects of their affections, but under the influence of pleasure-enhancing dopamine and other monoamines, they quickly overlook those faults.
A-ha, so this is why when it is blatantly obvious to the world that your best friend’s boyfriend is a loser, she still thinks the sun shines out of his ass. Now it all makes sense! Of course she hears you saying, “he’s a bum. Get rid”, but your words are no match for the pleasure principle she gets from being with the Bum. But hey, who are we to judge, because we’ve all been there. Who hasn’t spent time crying and moaning about an ex who treated them like crap, who didn’t appreciate how amazing we were, who used us. And when we look back on the relationship now, we wonder, ‘why oh why did we ever put up with it?’

The thing is, when you fall in love, you become intoxicated with enough adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine that you become fitted with a kind of tunnel vision. Their flaws are no match for the irresistible concoction of brain chemicals and hormones that are making your palms sweaty, your heart race, and your face flush.

So when it comes to love, it turns out we’re all just a bunch of addicts, perpetually in search of the next ‘hit’ we get from the feelings we have for someone else. And when we feel that hit, we are oblivious to all the little flaws that make them less than perfect. When Beauty fell for the Beast, she was so high on love that the clouds were misting up her eyes. And when Sophie Dahl and Jamie Cullum fell in love, the height difference was irrelevant to the passion they felt for one another. And how about Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng…Oh wait, maybe this couple had alternate reasons…Ahem.

But along the way there will be heartache. The cocktail of hormones in your head that create the illusion of a perfect person are not everlasting. The fantasy can be shattered, and the high can fade. Your ‘perfect’ person might hurt you, or maybe you become enticed by someone else. This is the thing about falling in love; sooner or later you’re going to hit the ground.
And when you get your fingers burned, you may vow to stick to finding all future highs in the bottom of a Starbucks espresso, but before you know it, you’ll be back again, my junkie friend.
You just have to wait for the next time you feel that ‘click’, ‘ding’, or, heaven forbid, ‘awooga’, and then uh-oh, here comes the tunnel vision again.