love

I remember when I first fell in love with hating you.

 The  visions that came into my mind 

expressed perfectly those  feelings:

The smiles, false ones, were rotating between us,

back and forth,

and the more I was hating 

the more the images 
repeated

in an almost seen film

the structure of your face without that death black hair, 

from the beginning worth nothing.

Meanwhile, the beauty  has disintegrated and reintegrated many times into 

the little girl middle aged woman thing

 and only words have remained, no richer, no wiser,

 doubled same time with eternity – in a word,  the downward road.

The fall from youth, unavoidable for every soul you loved, 

led me to seek to know what is  hate.

Our brain has a weakness for stories, like you with a little runback to a job

meeting frightened to be late for the boss man

who makes you afraid even now

like a little mong no good to anyone living

maybe the dead.


 From an evolutionary moment, 

the things ,the ones that have 

passed the time through time. therefore , the need  for them.

Love can be such a case,

 of the complete story, total meaning, that we wove 

 around a bundle of 

bought  emotions not  ecstasy just abyss.

And the last time I saw you

running back to the boss man

near the chinese where we drunk shit wine

trying to mean something

to the other mongs

what they call your co-workers

who fucking hate you 

more than me 

Neuroscience makes the difference between emotion and sentiment with an 
almost dry precision, devoid of romance but who brings the healing specific for understanding.

Emotion is the chemical reaction to a biological stimulus, while the sentiment is the story our brain creates to translate that emotion. 



All the poetic descriptions of love, glorification of the mating ritual on one hand, and expression of the nobleness offered by love on the other hand, are the result of this need of man to order what he feels in a story with sense.

Often in a love relationship, one of the two partners takes a masochistic role and the other a sadistic, with the specific attributes of each role.

At a deep level, the difference between the two roles is not so high, symbolizing the fusion without integrity. But very few think of integrity when they are in love …

The exclusive absorption in a love relationship, in which the individual becomes insensitive to the rest of humanity and is unable to feel affection for someone else than the subject of his passion, is a form of symbiotic attachment, of augmented selfishness in two .

Real love is what ennobles you, what makes you discover unknown generosities and what gives you that heroic aura which may seem naive for someone outside of that love relationship.

Love is a narcissistic process as well, because the individual falls in love with this enriched version of himself, full of existential tenderness and spontaneous kindness.

You  love what you become loving that person.

You fall in love with what you discover about yourself, with the upgraded version of yourself, as well as with the idealized vision that the other has about you.

Braking ups hurt not only because we lose the other one, but because you lose yourself too, you lose the enhanced version of yourself, enriched by love that you’ve discovered.

Neuroscience of love

The way love is seen on the scanned map of your brain is identical to the way that cocaine and other drugs affects the brain.

In essence, love is a natural drug, causing the same effects as drugs.

What are the symptoms of love?

* State of hyperactivity – you can live without food and sleep for a long time

* Being obsessive about the other person

* Irrational behavior that contradicts logic and even the survival instinct

* Depression, anger

* Inability to concentrate, the desire to daydreaming

Sounds more like a disease, right? One whose healing it is yet felt like a disappointment, a loss of a divine madness.

That is because love is similar to a drug in terms of the neurochemical mechanisms involved, a sudden separation from the beloved being very similar to a withdrawal.

A love relationship that is dismantled shockingly, causes a real withdrawal, the body and mind reacting violently to the loss of the stimulus that fed the body with the chemicals of happiness .

The functions of love

Great loves are never sterile. They forces you to transform, to become, they make you to get out of yourself. In spite of you, despite fears, selfishness or narcissism.

Love is probably the best tool for self-knowledge. Her magic comes from the fact that you can project into another self, that you experiment reality through an augmented reality.

Transcending of the present, this sense of being tangent to infinity are poetic expression for the important function that love fulfills: namely, annihilation of the fear of death or at least, the amnesia regarding the impermanence of life.

The feeling of well-being generated by love, the double validation of your existence as an individual – “I am loved, therefore I am” and ” I love, therefore I am” significantly mitigates the existential anxiety of passing the time.

Love, the savor of discovery of the self and then the dance of the two personalities preoccupied to maintain and explore the love between, occupies the individual’s  entire psychological space, therefore a pleasant amnesia about the prosaic of the existence instals.

Love, in essence, is an obsession in two, a welcomed process of self-hypnosis, without which existence seems poor. 

The need to get out of yourself and to inhabit another self is actually the need of the altruistic genes perpetuated by evolution.

Love is a phenomenon promoted by evolution because it favored the adaptation of the species: the individual who was protected by someone else, who has someone to care for him when he is sick or in trouble, is an individual who survives, therefore his genes are passed on and thus, altruistic individuals are those who become predominant.

Does similarity attracts or the opposite?

The theory according to which opposites attract each other is actually a myth. Long-lasting relationships are based on similarity.

The stability of a relationship is given by similarities such as:

1. common values, common aspirations

2. similar pragmatic visions for the future

3. similar energy rhythm

4. shared sensuality and passion

Attraction actually involves both components: similarities and differences. Similarity is what welds a couple, while the differences are what spices up the relationship in the first phase.

In a relationship must be satisfied both needs: the need for safety and the need for uncertainty. The similarity gives security, the pure feeling of love, and the differences provides uncertainty, creates passion.

When two different people are attracted to each other, is because each admires at the other one a quality that, through proximity, he wants to assimilate: therefore you will meet couples in which one is sociable and the other one is introvert, one is pragmatic and the other is bohemian, one is rational and the other emotional. Or a relationship in which he is rich and she is beautiful …

In the first phase, the attraction between the two involves these two opposing elements. If the two partners, over time, don’t assimilates what admires at the other one, if they don’t meet in the middle,  in the end what drew them together will break them apart.

I repeat: exactly what attracted them in the first place, the opposite and complementary qualities, is what will ultimately push them apart.

The extrovert one will  reproach to the introverted that he is silent at all times and is not communicative, while the introverted will reproach that he cares more about the others and that he prefers them to him.

The practical one will reproach the bohemian the clutter and lack of organization, and the bohemian will reproach in turn the aridity and lack of romance.

We are attracted by those who give us the possibility of self expansion and evolution.

 Basically, those with complementary traumas are attracted to each other, the relationship itself having a healing potential. But the lack of understanding, tact and diplomacy in negotiating the differences will break them apart eventually.

It happens as well that only one of them will heal, thus becoming a more complete human being than the other.

In this case, if the partner doesn’t  have the same rhythm of evolution, the separation is again a possibility, because the one who become more complete feels now that he can attract a new partner more appropriate for his qualities and new-found ideals.

It is therefore vital for them to evolve in the same rhythm and in the same direction. If only one grows personally and professionally and the other remains at the same level, there are big chances for breaking off.

There is a repetitive pattern of how we fall in love and the kind of partner that we all choose.

Was Freud right?

Psychoanalytic theory says that we fall in love unconsciously with the same kind of partner – the woman chooses as her partner a man similar to her father, and a man is looking for a woman similar to his mother.

We all heard the story: she marries an alcoholic and abusive man who strangely resembles her father in behavior. Yes, he is taller or shorter, makes more money or dresses better or worse, but his emotional attitude is similar to her father.

She eventually gets a divorce and finds another man, who, this time, does not drink at all. But after a while she discovers that he is dependent on gambling and that he also treats her bad.

The saga continues. Her third husband seems to be a man with backbone: a man with his own business, does not drink, doesn’t go to casinos and comes home every night.

But this man works 84 hours a week and when he gets home he is too tired to pay attention to her. They get into fights and she cries, unsurprisingly, that she doesn’t feel fulfilled, that she is not getting the love she wants.

The familiar feeling of wanting and not having is recreated thus “successfully.” The emotional desire to want love from someone who is emotionally unavailable is satisfied. In fact, it is the recreation of the relationship she had with her father.

Playing devil’s advocate, I will ask in your place: why, of all the features of her father, who certainly had some good character traits as well, she will only seek to recreate the suffering she had in that relationship?

As a psychologist, my answer is that in our future relationships with our partners, we seek to heal the traumas of the past. 

Love between the two partners has the potential to heal the complementary traumas that attracted  them in the first place.

Thus, neuroscience confirms what psycho-dynamic therapies have been advocating for some time: relationships can bring healing!

The attraction mechanisms are more complex than perhaps you imagined. Or than you want.

Up to a certain point, love is an abstract notion, a myth, a social and cultural construct. Movies, songs, novels, all of these builds a false image, idealized, excessively lyrical about love.

Only in poetry people are dying for love though, in reality we learn to console.

The problem is that people do not shed light on the unhealed wounds of the past, they don’t heal the traumas of the past by understanding the mechanisms that led to mistakes. But they just throw themselves blindly in relationships repeating the same  emotional patterns.

Love is the process by which a person’s identity merges with another person’s identity, creating a common personality, a shared, new entity through which each of them is enriched, thinks and breathes.

Protecting this new being that is born involves psychological sentimental archeology – identifying negative patterns, trauma that must be healed, understanding, forgiveness and the aware building of healthy attachments.

Because we need poetry as well as reason, ecstasy as well as abyss, certainties as well as uncertainties. The secret lies in knowing what to keep and what to let go from the past and from the present.



Whether it is the triumph of imagination over reason, whether it’s the supreme drug, shared madness or the gift of the gods,  love defines you as a human being. You love, therefore you exist. The rest are just shallow distractions meant to occupy your mental space until you find love.