[During romantic or passionate love, you're gonna feel the sense of being addicted to your partner.

People who are madly in love can fall madly in love with somebody who's married, who lives on the other side of the planet, who comes from a different religion. And somehow, they'll say to themselves, we'll work it out, we can work this out. Because of all that energy of intense romantic love.

Over time, as this whole neurotransmitter thing settles out, what's left?]

TED FISCHER (Professor of anthropology) :           [OST1]

We define romantic love as an intense desire for another, with the expectation that it's gonna persist into the future. 

And that distinguishes it from lust, which is generally fleeting, and also for more companionship love, which doesn't have that intensity of desire, that you want to possess the other in some way.

GAIL SALTZ (Psychiatrist & Author) :

Studies have looked at activity in the brain when recalling passionate or romantic love, versus say maternal love, and finds that different centers definitely are more active. And they would, say, put people into the functional MRI, and they said, think about your partner, or think about your lover. And certain areas lit up, or they said, think about your mom, and different areas lit up. Which is important, because different areas are responsible for the release of different neurotransmitters. Which then come to affect your future feeling states and future behaviors.

During romantic or passionate love, what happens from a neurotransmitter standpoint, those chemicals that are released when you have that particular experience? Dopamine goes up. Dopamine is essentially the neurotransmitter of reward. So it is a neurotransmitter that's released when you have new or novel experience, but particularly experiences that are reinforcing. Like gambling. Or something that is really addictive. In fact, literally addictive. It's the neurotransmitter if you snorted cocaine that is most responsible for, wow, that was great, and I totally wanna do it again.