By Molly Triffin and Holly Eagleson
Google-Earthing his house. Mentally decorating the place you’re sure you are going to share one day, even though you’ve only been on a few dates. Feeling insanely jealous when he talks to a female friend. Any of these behaviors ring a bell? If so, congrats — it means you’ve probably been in love.
Most women find themselves acting a bit uncharacteristically cuckoo after they fall hard for a guy, and there’s a physiological reason why passion can have such a strange effect. “Being in love floods your system with mood-altering chemicals,” explains Helen Fisher, PhD, author of Why We Love. “These chemicals throw off your normal brain chemistry, tampering with your common sense and judgment.”
“It’s called falling in love for a reason — it comes upon us quickly and knocks us off our feet,” explains Pamela Regan, PhD, professor of psychology at California State University at Los Angeles. All the emotional tumult can trigger obsessive, impulsive actions, she adds.
And though the vast majority of women won’t do anything that’s dangerously off the wall, being in love has pushed some chicks over the edge when conditions were right. Cases in point: Lisa Nowak, the NASA astronaut who allegedly drove 900 miles this past February (reportedly wearing an adult diaper!) to attack a woman who was dating her ex. And a few months before, a young Belgian skydiver allegedly sabotaged her friend’s parachute after learning that the friend had had an affair with her boyfriend, ultimately leading to the friend’s death.
BIZARRO BEHAVIOR 1: You Get Stalkerish
When you’re head over heels, it’s normal to crave constant contact with your guy — so much so that when you’re physically apart, you become kind of a stalker-lite: You pepper him with texts, call repeatedly, even check his Facebook profile during downtime at work...despite the fact that you saw it an hour ago. You know it’s over the top, but you just can’t help yourself.
And you’re right: You can’t help yourself. “When you’re really into a guy, you experience a surge of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the reward center of your brain and makes you crave your partner very bad,” says Fisher. “You get an intense rush of pleasure whenever you see or hear from him, and because of this, being with him becomes your primary goal, overriding everything else.”
Dopamine also activates your anterior cingulate, an area of the brain that helps you focus. As a result, you’re always thinking of ways to get close to him. It’s linked to our most basic evolutionary survival techniques. “The mental mechanism that alerts us when we need essentials, like food and water, also kicks into gear when we’re in love,” says Lucy Brown, PhD, professor of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. If you’re really thirsty, for example, getting water becomes your overriding goal. Romantic passion works the same way: All your energy is funneled into wanting your man, so it seems impossible to concentrate at work because your mind is always on him.
What makes a woman go from sane to psycho: If the man you’re wild about is mostly unavailable or plays mind games, you may develop what Fisher calls frustration attraction: He strings you along, which drives you to take increasingly extreme measures to connect with him. This anguish can cause some women to reach a breaking point. “Their impulse control goes by the wayside, and they may become true stalkers,” says Fisher.
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