Balance Your Heart With Your Head
Balance Your Heart With Your Head
Is it chemistry or common sense? It’s both! It is possible to make relationship choices consciously, paying full attention to your vision, values, goals, requirements, needs, and wants, while still feeling that powerful combination of chemistry and attraction. It may seem that making conscious relationship choices would diminish romance, but in actuality it enhances it.
It is common to have strong physical and emotional reactions to potential partners causing you to feel more alive and excited than ever before. Some say this experience is akin to the rush of adrenaline of skydiving or riding a roller coaster. We use the words “falling” in love. Some interpret these overwhelming feelings as “love” and a sign that a relationship is “meant to be.” And yet those feelings, taken by themselves, are a poor indicator of future relationship success. Some people can become addicted to this feeling and may move from relationship to relationship seeking to recapture and sustain it.
These physical and emotional reactions are what people commonly have in mind when they think of “attraction, “infatuation,” and “following your heart” when first meeting a potential partner. Most people would agree, at least on an intellectual level, that this is not the kind of love that they expect to last. After all, this phenomenon occurs prior to really knowing and building a relationship with someone. And yet the heart, not the intellect, is the driving force in some relationship choices.
What do these feelings mean? Should we follow them or ignore them? Are they reliable guides?
The technical stuff:
The physical reactions may include increased heart rate and blood pressure, feeling warm and perhaps sweating, tingling skin sensations, and/or sexual arousal. These responses are driven by pheromones (chemicals emitted to attract a partner), hormones such as oxytocin (which acts on the hypothalamus to produce emotions and is in itself a bonding hormone), PEA porphenylethylamine (natural amphetamine), dopamine and norepinephrine (natural mood enhancers), and testosterone (increases sexual desire). These chemical reactions are involuntary and strong, leading to powerful feelings of attraction that are chemical in nature and have little to do with either the head or the heart.
Involuntary emotional reactions can also be very powerful. It’s easy to understand why some would interpret them as “love.” Emotional reactions include anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, excitement, happiness, peacefulness, contentment, a feeling of being ‘home’, and infatuation (defined as strong feelings of romantic idealization).
The failure rate of relationships based on these physically involuntary and emotionally unconscious attractions is quite high.
What are the choices?
How can we prevent our biology from driving our partner choice? Should we defer dating and go into therapy to work on our unfinished childhood business to prevent childhood wounds from choosing a partner? Should we defer solely to the intellect to do the choosing?
None of those options sound very appealing. How about using the physical and emotional reactions to potential partners as information. Ask, “What are these emotions telling me?” Emotions are messengers. It is left to us to interpret the message, which is what usually gets us into trouble. The answer to these emotional reactions usually isn’t “this is the one.” Maybe they are telling you to get curious and get to know that person better. Maybe they are cueing you in that there’s some big picture things to keep in mind. Maybe all is well and it’s a time to feel all those wonderful emotions. It feels good to feel in love… just remember not to leave your head at home on the counter.
