Love and Differentiation of Self: What Your Brain Can’t Tell You
I’ve been thinking about what happens when someone falls in love. Not the story we tell about it, but what’s actually happening. The preoccupation. The longing. The sense that this person is essential to your wellbeing. It’s powerful, and it feels personal.
But what if love, at its core, is less about the other person and more about ancient biochemistry driving us to believe we are “in love”?
A 2009 opinion piece by Larry Young in Nature described love as “an emergent property of a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides and neurotransmitters.” Research by Aron, Fisher, Brown and colleagues (2005) used fMRI to study people intensely in love. They found that romantic love activates dopamine-rich reward and motivation regions, particularly the ventral tegmental area and caudate nucleus. Rather than being a specific emotion, love appears to function more like a fundamental drive, similar to hunger or thirst.
This raises a question worth sitting with: if love is partly a biological drive that can override clear thinking, what does that mean for how we navigate our closest relationships? Differentiation of self, a core concept in Bowen Family Systems Theory, offers a way to think about this.
The Biology Behind the Feeling
When we fall in love, the brain floods with dopamine. Aron and colleagues showed that viewing photos of a beloved activates the same ancient reward regions the brain uses for survival drives.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this had to be powerful. Raising offspring is costly. The species with the strongest pair-bonding responses had a better chance of passing on their genes. Love, in this light, is less a rational choice and more a chemically induced state that served a reproductive purpose.
Being with a loved one also generates soothing and safety signals. Your body calms. You feel secure. These feedback loops reinforce the bond.
Love, as many have observed, is “blind.” And reason is not invited to the party. At least not initially. Have you noticed this in your own experience?
Why Does Love Override Rational Thinking?
Psychiatrist Dr. Murray Bowen offered a framework for understanding this kind of override. He conceptualized three interconnected systems operating in all of us: the emotional system, the feeling system, and the intellectual system. Love is one of the clearest ways to see how these work together, and sometimes against each other.
The emotional system responds automatically and instinctively. It’s the physiological response, the racing heart, the pull toward another person. This happens below conscious awareness.
When that response is strong enough, we become conscious of it through the feeling system. This is where longing, desire, and attachment register as subjective experience. We “feel” in love.
If the feeling system is stimulated intensely enough, it impairs the intellectual system. Our capacity for rational, objective thinking diminishes. We can rationalize or overlook things we normally wouldn’t. I think most of us can recognize this pattern in our own history.
How Your Family of Origin Shapes Love
Here’s where it gets personal. How we respond when we’re “in love” depends significantly on the patterns of emotional functioning in our family of origin.
A person with a lower level of differentiation, less ability to distinguish between objective thinking and subjective feeling, tends toward more emotional reactivity and more dependence on an approving relationship. Sibling position influences how we relate to same-sex and opposite-sex partners. We learn what “love” looks like through family of origin patterns and multigenerational influences, which include cultural factors as well.
Each person’s biological “cocktail” is different, influencing who we’re attracted to and how intensely we respond. Both biology and relational patterns shape the experience of love.
The question I find useful: how much of what I call “love” is a thoughtful choice, and how much is automatic, shaped by forces I haven’t fully examined? In Bowen’s terms, what is fact and what is story?
What Is Emotional Fusion in Relationships?
The patterns from our family of origin often follow us into adult relationships. The early biology of love, in some ways, looks like fusion, the opposite of differentiation of self. It involves a complete orientation toward the other person.
Dr. Bowen called this pull toward agreement, cooperation, and compliance the “togetherness force.” In the early stages of a relationship, this force is strong and often welcome.
The difficulty arises over time. Fusion, the giving up of one’s own thinking to maintain the relationship, becomes the default. A person might act as if everything is fine when it isn’t. Chronic tension never gets resolved, just avoided. “Don’t rock the boat” becomes the operating principle.
Being fused for 30 minutes, 30 days, or even 30 weeks is tolerable. For 30 months or 30 years, can create real problems. This is one way to understand the rate of divorce. The biological drive that brought people together doesn’t automatically equip them for a thoughtful, long-term partnership.
Where do you notice fusion showing up in your own relationships?
Can You Be in Love and Still Think Clearly?
It doesn’t have to unfold that way.
More differentiation of self means having well-thought-out beliefs about what a partner is, what a parent is, what responsibility means. As psychiatrist and Bowen Theory scholar Dr. Michael Kerr put it, the work is to “be for yourself without being selfish, and be for the other without being selfless.”
Being differentiated doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means your thinking isn’t hijacked by the emotions of the situation to avoid tension, conflict, or rejection.
Good emotional contact, the ability to be open and direct without managing the other person’s reactions, is a marker of a solid relationship. It means talking about anything without fear of judgement or criticism, and hearing anything from the other in the same way. Fear of not being loved can prevent this. I believe a deeper love supports it.
I’ve noticed that what most people think of as “caring” is often another person trying to resolve their own anxiety about someone else’s distress. If I’m in difficulty, I want my partner to think clearly, not just soothe their own discomfort about my situation. Empathy, at its best, is understanding my challenge without the feeling system overriding the capacity to think.
As a relationship matures, having a principled, compassionate, empathetic partner serves better than having an infatuated, emotional, anxious, reactive one.
Something to Consider
We don’t need to pass on our genes with the same urgency our ancestors did. But we still carry the drive. The biology hasn’t changed.
What can change is how thoughtful we are about it. Love and differentiation of self aren’t opposites. The work isn’t to eliminate the pull of love. I work at noticing when that pull is doing my thinking for me, and at developing the capacity to think clearly alongside it.
That’s ongoing work. It doesn’t finish. But it’s the kind of work, sometimes supported through counselling, that makes a real difference in the quality of a relationship over time.
What do you notice about your own patterns when you’re “in love”? Where does your thinking get overridden? What is the fact of the situation, and what is the story you’re telling yourself? Those questions are worth returning to.
Chocolate and flowers can help as well.
Thank you for your interest in family systems.
Comments are welcome: dave.galloway@livingsystems.ca
Learn more about Bowen Theory here.
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