Braces for Relationships

It starts with you buying her a drink. Normally you wouldn’t have the marbles for that, but for some strange reason she seems into you – and you know it. You’re hitting it off, some of your “Did it hurt?” pickup lines are actually making her laugh. A few drinks at the club turn into a few at your place. If only you were always this charming.

Two weeks, 400 text messages, 32 condoms and 12 arguments later, you’ve already fallen in and out of love. In those two short weeks you experienced the best and worst moments of your dating career.
And you used to be such a nice guy.

Heartbroken, you spill your sob story to the guys -- with dignity.
To your surprise, they’ve all dated this girl, or at least one like her.
So, what causes people to get sucked into this cycle in the first place?
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These days “healthy” is a term used to describe our relationships with others, a term that is in a lot of ways synonymous with balance. However, health in the media usually refers to how comfortable you feel.

I’m not going to waste your time on a blog about that kind of "health". Instead, we’re going to look at what’s happening neurologically and psychologically with our fictional heartbreaker over the course of the two weeks this Romeo and Juliet scene plays out:

During the intense moments of passion shared by the star-crossed lovers, blood flow increases to the emotional areas of her brain, which causes the heart rate, blood flow, and hormonal production to skyrocket. While this all makes for great moments of passion, overall it is not very different from stress itself. It starts with the initial excitement of the body, followed by a period of coping and finally the exhaustion of the body itself.

In a way, one could say it kills her; it erodes the potential for her to be both healthy and happy by stressing the body to the extreme.

Being happy, neurologically speaking, is NOT simply excitation of the emotional areas of the brain, but rather a nominal, often reduced level of blood flow here, as well as balanced levels of dopamine and serotonin ((Goetz, 1999) ).

Many women and men perceive these intense interpersonal flings as real or true happiness. Ironically, to them they really are "real”. So what causes these people to require such exciting (and simultaneously abusive) stimuli in the first place?

Often times what you’ll find is that they were traumatized at a young developing age. Rather than needing a myspace to save these wondrous memories forever, the interpretation and consolidation of memories pervasively gets wired into the brain and as a result, a personality of trauma and chaos is born. Because of this, they might only feel comfortable (or in familiar territory) in this cycle.

I say cycle because once this situation exhausts itself, it will eventually repeat once the energy is there for it to do so. This problem is pervasive. Early wiring (learning) dictates the most important aspects of who you are going to be. Due to this, things that are traumatic but familiar during childhood are often sought later on in life.

A major obstacle for the girl in our story (and others who have this psychopathology) is how attractive she happens to be. The biggest obstacle for women with a medusa-like allure to them (the ability to turn a particular male body part to stone, if you get what I mean) is that they are not going to have the same opportunity for healthy relationships as those who are not as physically enticing. Confusing, right?

Let me break it down for you. An attractive female will have the leisure of repeating this cycle more often than her less attractive peers for obvious reasons. This does nothing to encourage stable (healthy) physiological responses and interpersonal relationships. For all intents and purposes, the modern day Curse of Medusa doesn't turn the men to stone, it turns Medusa to stone.

The moral of this story for all of you who can relate to our fictional Romeo and Juliet is that if he or she is intensively attractive to you, and you happen to have a sordid past, chances are they probably aren't a healthy influence. Take a lesson from the sour taste this leaves, and go with broccoli rather than the Whopper that will give you heart disease.