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The Perfect Partner
What is the definition of the perfect romantic partner? Many people go through life searching for their soulmate, but it’s difficult to find. Romantic relationships are complicated and sometimes even good romantic relationships do not end up in marriage. So what is the secret to meeting “the one”? Today we are going to explore love and romance.
Love is a mix of feelings and actions that shows a deep liking for someone or something. But there is a laboratory called Yerkes National Primate Research Center located at Emory University in Atlanta, that studies the neurobiology that underlies pair bonds, or what nonscientists might call love. Scientists think that love is a set of chemical reactions within the brain.
In 2009 a scientist by the name L. J. Young and his team published a scientific study in the journal Nature where he laid out evidence that they may soon be able to tie the emotion “love” to a biochemical chain of events, and might someday even be able to develop drugs that enhance social bonding, in much the same way that pharmaceuticals today can help regulate emotions like anxiety and depression.
In his lab at Yerkes, Young studies rodents called prairie voles. Unlike 95 percent of mammals, prairie voles mate for life. “They form a lifelong bond,” Young said. “They nest together and they raise a family together. So they have this really intense bond between them.”
Not all prairie voles mate for life, Young discovered that the ones that cheat have fewer receptors in the brain than usual for a particular variant of a gene called AVPR1A that codes for vasopressin. Vasopressin is the gene that produces hormones that promote both pair-bonding and fatherly behaviors like grooming young voles.
In another study, Young found that implanting a version of the AVPR1A gene in meadow voles, a related species that does not mate for life, produced never-before-seen monogamous meadow voles.
Recently, Swedish researcher Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that a related gene in human males has similar effects. He studied a version of the AVPR1A gene in human males. He studied more than 1,000 Swedish men, and found that men who do not carry the AVPR1A gene were less likely to be married, were more likely to report a recent crisis in their marriage, and ranked lower on a scale of partner bonding than men that did”
Although Young does believe that scientists may someday develop bonding-enhancement drugs, he said, that day is still far in the future.
But an Internet company called Vero Labs is already trying to take advantage of the work of Young, Walum, and other scientists. They sell a product called “Enhanced Liquid Trust,” a mix of oxytocin and pheromones that the company claims will enhance your dating life. But when they were asked, the scientists said “It’s all just baloney. It is better if you get to know the person well”