Love: What Happens
When Pain Becomes Pleasure
How
many times have we been told? Love hurts. To be in love, requited or not, is to
be, to some extent, in a constant state of pain. A person in love will spend
hours watching the phone waiting for a call that will never come, or will be
irrationally upset by any mistake their partner makes. It comes down to this:
everyone is human, and all humans are imperfect. To be in love with a person,
then, is to be in love with someone who will make mistakes—who will hurt you in
some way at least once. But it is not just about the other person. We ourselves
will make mistakes as well. Further than that, it is in our nature to drive
ourselves crazy for no reason (if you need more proof of this, read Annie
Ernaux’s Simple Passion). Especially
young girls will obsess over what they may or may not have done wrong, possible
additional meanings behind their lover’s words, and whether or not the
relationship has a future. With all the worry and pain we put into
relationships it’s a wonder we don’t give them up all together.
A
recent study on pain might bring some new insight to why, despite all the pain
and frustration, we still actively seek love. Siri Leknes, along with her
colleagues at the University of Oslo (in Norway) conducted a study in which
sixteen participants were put on a machine designed to put them in varying
levels of pain by applying heat to their arms. While the subjects were being
put through the tests, researchers carefully monitored MRIs of their brains. At
the end subjects were asked to rate the enjoyability they found in each shock.
In
the first test, moderate pain was the highest level the subject were put
through, and the subjects did not list this level as enjoyable. However, in the
second test, when intense pain was added to the mix, the subjects—and their
brain activity—confirmed that the same level of moderate pain suddenly became
enjoyable. But here’s the really interesting part: the part of the brain that
feels pleasure is the same part that feels relief. In fact, that may be all the
subjects were really experiencing when they thought they were getting pleasure
from the pain. "In other words, a sense of relief can be powerful enough
to turn such an obviously negative experience as pain into a sensation that is
comforting or even enjoyable," (Siri Leknes qtd. by Tia Ghose).
So
is the simple answer that love is just a relief from the pain of being single?
It would seem from this experiment that the pleasure of being in love may stem
from the fact that we are relieved to have someone to focus on—to have hope. This
may also be the reason we are so drawn to the chase of unrequited love, or a
person who will play ‘hard to get’. Perhaps the reason we want the chase is that
it makes the pain of not having that person worse and more drawn out. And if
the pain is worse, would that not make the relief more satisfactory?
There
you have it. Love is, in short, a relief from being single—the lesser of two
evils. If it were not, we would not enjoy the torture it puts us through, and
might even run screaming at the first sign that it was coming on. Relief may be
the most powerful emotion of all.
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