Your brain on love.

Falling in love feels like seeing someone clearly at last. Tatkin argues it is closer to being under the influence, which is why a long-term choice needs your thinking brain and a few people who are sober.

In love means under the influence

Tatkin puts it bluntly: when you are in love, you are on drugs. He means drugs the body makes for itself, which change how you feel and how you see. Early in a romance the brain produces a great deal of dopamine and noradrenaline, along with testosterone and other chemicals such as oxytocin.

His comparison is a bar. Alcohol, he says, dulls your eye for the small unevenness in a face, so people look better after a couple of drinks. Infatuation does something similar to your judgement of the whole person.

The reason is that nature has a short-term aim. It wants people to pair up, have children and mix the genes, and it has no interest in whether the two of you still get on decades later.

Three chemicals of early love

Testosterone is on his list too, and he says only that it distorts judgement. Oxytocin he names once, without comment. While the mixture is running, you cannot tell whether this person is a good choice for the long run.

About the model: This is Tatkin's teaching picture, given without sources. The real chemistry of attraction is more tangled than one chemical per job.

Familiar beats the checklist

Who does the choosing, then? The fast, automatic brain from lesson 1, and it picks by familiarity. It moves toward people it recognises and away from people who are too hard to read. A little strangeness is exciting. Too much, and it backs off.

Most of that recognition sits in implicit memory, the kind you cannot put into words. You simply like one person and not another. This is why a checklist loses. Someone can match every item on your list and leave you cold, because the lower brain has already said no. Someone else can look like a terrible idea on paper and still pull at you.

Tatkin adds, without naming a study, that before about age 25 the front of the brain is not fully wired, so a choice can simply be a poor one. After that he sees little accident in it: people choose someone familiar. Familiar means recognised. It does not mean good for you.

More addiction than emotion

Most people think of love as a feeling. Tatkin says it is less an emotion than an addiction, because being in love runs on the same reward circuit that drives craving. Next to dopamine he places GABA, a calming chemical that many drugs and medicines act on. He adds that people who use such substances heavily often find it hard to fall in love, because the circuit is already overused.

A note from us: Tatkin states this flatly and names no research. Early love and addiction do appear to share reward pathways, but most researchers would not call them the same thing. We read his point as practical: the state is powerful, and it is a poor judge.

The fog of love

All of this adds up to what Tatkin calls the fog of love: while the chemistry runs, your judgement is impaired. People tell him their picker must be broken, meaning whatever in them chooses a partner. They keep falling for the same type and think of giving up and getting a dog.

He calls that a misunderstanding. Nobody's picker works well during infatuation, because the lower brain and the body are doing the choosing. The fog is normal and does its job of bringing two people together. It just says nothing about the long term, so you need a second source of information.

Vetting with sober eyes

That second source is other people. Tatkin thinks we have lost an old habit: letting the people around us look over a new partner. He calls it vetting. You are under the influence, so you need people who are not.

1. Go round both circles. Take your partner to your friends and family, and go and meet theirs.
2. Mix the audience. Include people of different ages and of both sexes.
3. Ask about the pair. Not only what they make of the person, but how the two of you seem together.
4. Want the answer. Vetting only works if you are willing to hear it.

His cautionary tale is a client who discovered, after years of marriage and several children, that her husband had been unfaithful from the start. Her women friends had adored him. She had never asked their male partners, and the men were now telling her they had never liked him.

Many people skip vetting because they do not want their choice commented on, and he says that is when things tend to go wrong. He admits it is not always possible: some people have no friends or family whose judgement they can rely on. He and his wife vetted each other this way.

What the higher brain checks

So choosing a partner has two parts, done by different parts of you.

Picturing that future is what Tatkin calls futurizing, and he says many people never do it. They marry or make other big decisions while still intoxicated, on the lower brain's word alone.

You need both. Attraction gets a relationship started. Thinking it through, and listening to friends who can say how you are together, offsets the fog and tells you whether it can last.