by Donna Eden
The Energy of “Spooky Action”
As partners develop an enduring relationship, not only do they begin to complete one another’s sentences, this entanglement looks to Donna like the partners are complementing one another energetically. They become energetically linked and harmonized, with unbroken figure-eight patterns weaving their energy fields together.
In fact, while the brain systems for lust, romance, and deep/enduring love are distinct from one another, they may be stimulated in any order and one may activate another. People who have been close friends for many years, deeply attached but romantically uninvolved, may one day fall in love and only then become sexually interested in one another. Lust often accompanies romance, but the romance circuits may light up in new acquaintances before sexual desire is kindled. Different circuits can also, inconveniently, become simultaneously involved with different people. As Fisher points out: “You can feel profound attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic passion for someone in the office or your social circle, while you feel the sex drive as you read a book, watch a movie, or do something else unrelated to either partner.”9 But, as she also observes, “as romantic love matures, it often expands into hundreds of complex and fulfilling feelings of attachment that produce an enormously intricate, interesting, and emotionally rewarding union with another living soul.”10
The Stages of Love
O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE11
The neural networks for lust, romance, and deep/enduring love express themselves in three basic stages of love:
The first stage centers on the exhilarating processes of falling in love and beginning to build a partnership. It is dominated by the brain systems for lust and for romance.
The second stage is the challenging path from the first stage to the third stage. Strewn with hazards and triggers that bring out your worst behavior and your meanest or most pathetic ruminations, it doesn’t seem to have a brain system involved at all. At least it may feel that way as you and your partner are moving through it.
The third stage reflects the achievement of a rich, fulfilling, lasting partnership. It is dominated by the brain system for deep/enduring love.
Such stages are, of course, generalizations. Not every love relationship passes through all three stages or passes through them in this order. In fact, in cultures where arranged marriages are commonplace—including parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—a different sequence is typical. “Love starts hot in the West and cools down,” goes the saying, “but it starts cool in the East and heats up.” This is promising news for couples who have lost or never had great passion. Still, understanding the stages that typically unfold for those of us in cultures that hold romance as an ideal can provide a useful map for a volatile landscape.
Stage 1: The First Breaths of Love—Romance!
In fabled tales of new love, you see passion, determination, high spirits, sparkle, idealizing, obsession, loyalty, possessiveness, gratitude, courage, hope, and joy. Romance and lust energize one another. The chemicals of romance (dopamine and norepinephrine) trigger production of the chemicals of lust (such as estrogen and testosterone), but the chemicals of lust also trigger the chemicals of romance. You may spend hours every day thinking and pining about your new love, with imaginings that are rich with passion, creative vision, and poetic expression. Fisher describes how “the brain network for romantic love melds with many more brain systems . . . as well as with many emotions, memories, and thoughts. All these ingredients add fantastic depth, nuance, and spice to our feelings of romance.”12
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Stage 1: Wild Passion
When two people are passionately in love, the energies of each partner are greatly expanded, buoyant, and radiant. They merge, interact, and uplift one another. They are no longer confined as “skin-encapsulated egos”; the energetic connection with the other is euphoric and may seem palpable. The energy system known as the radiant circuits is in high gear.
On the inside, you are powerfully focused on this new being who has entered your psyche like a wild horse running free. But something else is happening as well. The boundaries that restrain your spirit seem to fall away. You know yourself as a larger force, feel more joy, and sense—perhaps more fully than ever before—how profoundly connected you are not just to your partner but to every human who has ever lived and loved and even to the cosmos. You love being in this loving space, but even more important, you feel complete.
Stage 2: Disappointment and Reckoning
Being seen through the eyes of a treasured someone who perceives your true, beautiful nature is among the sweetest and most uplifting pleasures a person can enjoy. However, the higher the pedestal, the greater the drop. The more powerful the merging, the more challenging to find your way back to yourself as a complete and separate individual. In Stage 1, a glimpse of possibility fueled by deep longings propelled you into a sense of glorious fulfillment. But its foundations were weak, its staying power limited. Stage 2 is nature’s way of forcing you to come to terms with the illusion, to reclaim your deeper self, and to evolve. It accomplishes this in part through an insidious perceptual shift, changing the lens through which you view your partner—from rosy to dark. Disorienting though this can be, Stage 2 seems, for many couples, a necessary passageway to a Stage 3 where two people build a relationship that transcends each of them yet embraces both in their weaknesses as well as their strengths. It is most often not an easy passage.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Stage 2: Disappointment and Reckoning
How do your energies look when you are in Stage 2? Your auric field and your partner’s auric field tend to repel rather than to overlap. Your field spirals around you, alone, disconnected, and self-absorbed, unless you are actively engaged with one another, as in a fight. In calmer times, when you are together, your energies are no longer joyful or expansive. They look somewhat wilted as they weave around you, sometimes seeming rigid or retreating from the energies of the other in fear or anger.
When your beloved’s focus shifts to mere behavior, personality, and the tasks of daily life, the magic fades, the shine tarnishes, and disappointments and resentments grow. This is the stage where the person who seemed so stable is now simply boring. The one who was wildly exciting is now erratic and volatile. The one who was so romantic and persistent is now intrusive and smothering. Compared to the shiny promise of Stage 1 you may have shared, the letdown can be heartbreaking. Yet compare you do, and the realities of the reckoning stage are depressing. The psychic boundaries that had fallen away—giving you each vastly expanded appreciation, apprehension, and a deepened, perhaps spiritual connection with all of life—have somehow sprung back into place. An independent brain system turns out to be involved after all, the biochemistry of fight/flight/freeze and the “diffuse physiological arousal” that precedes it.13 Your emotional centers are on the ready for evidence that the relationship your biochemistry is wired to find—and that your soul has been investing itself in—is failing. Even the most subtle signs of criticism or withdrawal can propel your primal sensory system into a threat response.
You were on a magical ride and you don’t know why it stopped. The bond that thrilled your heart and sent your woes quietly into the background is rupturing. You find faults in your partner that you are sure are the reasons your relationship has become difficult. Where you had each magnified the other’s virtues, you now minimize them and magnify the flaws. You also come face-to-face with your own vulnerabilities and shortcomings. Like a person who has had a spontaneous mystical experience, you long for the profound connection and the bliss that went with it. So you are willing to do everything you can think of
to get it back. Through this effort you may break through to Stage 3 or you may, ultimately, wind up deciding it is hopeless and leave the relationship. Stage 2 impels you and your partner to reckon with difficult realities in one way or another. But all this is somehow surrounded by a lingering sense of possibility. Echoes of what you once shared together or long to share now call to you through the fog, beckoning that you try to find your way back to one another.
Stage 3: Deep and Flowing
Stage 1 is built on fantasies, and Stage 2 requires coming to terms with the distortions contained in those fantasies. Commenting on romance, George Bernard Shaw once quipped that love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and all the others. Stage 3 is based on reality. It is built on shared experiences, honest appraisals, earned trust, acceptance, and jointly acquired skills for fostering your unique relationship. The energies in you and your beloved become fluid within that secure base, contained within you yet readily merging into the larger field that is your partnership. The adrenaline and dopamine that drove you with addictive power toward the goal of establishing a secure partnership has receded. The low serotonin that was causing you to obsess about your partner is back to its normal levels. Even without these biochemical propellants, the relationship moves forward on its own power. Meanwhile, oxytocin and vasopressin pepper your highest brain functions as you mold a partnership that has never before existed and will never exist again. When at their best, couples in Stage 3 find ways to keep restimulating the brain systems for lust and romance while building a soul-deep partnership, the topics of Part 3 (chapters 8–10).
As the two of you in tandem paint your unique journey together onto a life-size canvas, you are able to reach for not only the more mundane colors of daily existence but the magnificent shades of love that—in a stable, evolving partnership—manifest in ever-fresh ways. Lasting love is a shared achievement whose beauty reflects your souls. Less euphoric but more deeply gratifying, Stage 3 is the culmination of all that has gone before—the romance and the reckoning now integrated into a larger context that is even more fulfilling.
We are, of course, not suggesting that every love relationship passes through these stages in some neat order, or that couples don’t move back and forth among them, or that when you are in one stage, elements of the other stages won’t also be present. But at its core, the three-stage model does seem to represent an organic direction and design, with each stage having its own set of required tasks, neural networks, and energy configurations. No one in Stage 1, however, is particularly interested in understanding its ephemeral nature, so if you are in the heat of romance, just enjoy it and set this book aside until you need it. But if you are in the reckoning of Stage 2 or the challenges of maintaining a vital Stage 3, this book is for you.
Men’s Brains/Women’s Brains
We will explore yin and yang—the energies of the female and male principles—later in this chapter, but any discussion of heterosexual marriage would not be complete without having addressed the gender differences that are rooted in the brain and the hormones. Contemporary scientific understanding offers greater detail and nuance about brain physiology and chemistry than existing language allows when speaking of energies. Keep in mind, however, as you read the following that the body’s energies are always operating in concert with the brain and hormones.
As shown earlier, we each have distinct brain systems for lust, romance, and love, and there is some neurological rhyme and reason to the way each unfolds. Another inherited set of traits that impacts the way you love and want to be loved is whether your brain has male or female wiring. Consider, for instance:
HER DIARY: I think Bob is planning to leave me. We got together tonight at a restaurant for dinner. I was a bit late and he seemed upset, but he made no comment about it. Conversation wasn’t flowing, so I suggested we go somewhere more quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn’t say much. I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Nothing.” I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn’t upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him I loved him. He smiled slightly and kept driving. I can’t explain his behavior. I don’t know why he didn’t say, “I love you too.” When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted to have nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent. Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About fifteen minutes later, he came to bed. But I still felt he was distracted, that his thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep. I cried. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.
HIS DIARY: Motorcycle won’t start . . . can’t figure out why.14
While men’s brains and women’s brains are far more similar than different—over 99 percent of the genetic coding is identical—where they are not the same, vive la difference! A boy, by the time he is seven months old, is able to tell when his mother is angry or afraid by the expressions on her face, and this will focus his attention.15 By the time he is twelve months old, however, he has developed an “immunity” that allows him to ignore those expressions. For a girl, her mother’s subtle look of fear will rivet her attention. Even within the womb, girls’ brains are outpacing boys’ in the development of brain circuits for communication, gut feelings, emotional memory, nurturing, and social nuance, while boys take the lead in circuits that will support rough-and-tumble muscle movements, exploration, and sexual pursuit.
Until eight weeks old, the fetal brain has the characteristics of a female brain. At the eighth week, if a Y chromosome is part of the genetic coding, testosterone begins to surge, developing more cells in the brain’s aggression centers while killing off cells in the communication centers; if there is no Y chromosome, the communication centers develop unimpeded. This particular dichotomy in male-versus-female fetal development apparently holds true regardless of the individual’s eventual sexual orientation.16 We each occupy our own special place on the spectrum of having more yin (female) or more yang (male) energy, and there are great differences in degree from one person to the next, but some characteristics come with your gender.
The Relative Size of Brain Structures
The differences in male and female brain structures lead to different behaviors and different realities. Louann Brizendine explains common misunderstandings between women and men by comparing the female brain to the male brain:
What if the communication center is bigger in one brain than in the other? What if the emotional memory center is bigger in one than the other? What if one brain develops a greater ability to read cues in people than does the other? In this case, you would have a person whose reality dictated that communication, connection, emotional sensitivity, and responsiveness were the primary values. This person would prize these qualities above all others and be baffled by a person with a brain that didn’t grasp the importance of these qualities.17
After birth, your brain structure continued to develop according to a genetically programmed plan. A girl’s ability to maintain a mutual gaze will increase by more than 400 percent during her first three months of life, while a boy’s does not increase at all. The parts of your brain that grew larger in relationship to other parts govern specific functions that are linked to your gender. Women have larger brain areas for language, hearing, feeling, observing emotion in others, and remembering the details of emotional events. This translates into abilities and behavior. Girls can, for instance, discern nuance in the human voice that boys simply cannot hear, which leads to great accuracy in reading another’s emotions. Brizendine summarizes that the female brain is hardwired for “outstanding verbal agility, the ability to connect deeply in friendship, a nearly psychic capacity to read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind, and the ability to defuse conflict.”18
Men, meanwhile, are hardwired to prioritiz
e problem solving and physically supporting and protecting their family. They have larger brain centers than women for muscular action, aggression, mate protection, and territorial defense. When a man’s partner is in emotional distress, the areas in his brain devoted to problem solving light up. Another area that creates an emotional boundary between his experience and his partner’s is activated, strengthening his ability to use his analytic and cognitive capacities to find a solution. He focuses on finding a way to fix things in situations where a woman would first be inclined to attune to her partner’s emotions and foster interpersonal connection. Another important brain difference is that the hypothalamus, which regulates visceral responses, allots two and a half times as much real estate to sexual drive for men as it does for women. As a result, sexual thoughts enter a man’s consciousness with considerably greater frequency.
Experience
In addition to the relative sizes of specific brain structures and the impact of hormones, experience further wires the brain. An adolescent girl’s obsession with her sexual attractiveness is reinforced by powerful cultural messages and personal experience—relentlessly delivered by media, peers, and boyfriends. These encounters add to an expanding network of behavior-shaping pathways in her brain, while a boy’s built-in propensity toward competition and protection is reinforced by messages that he must be strong; must hide his fears, pain, and softer emotions; and must meet challenges bravely and with confidence. As boys and girls carry out their culturally prescribed roles, neural pathways are formed that further support those roles.