The Molecule of More

The Molecule of More

It started with a phone call. She was in New York, he was in London, and for four months they had been the most important people in each other's lives. Every night the call lasted until two, three in the morning. They talked about everything -- childhood memories, half-finished plans, what they would do when they finally met. He thought about her face constantly. She replayed his voice between calls. When friends asked if she was in love, she said yes without hesitation, though she had spent fewer than forty-eight hours in the same room with him.

Then he flew to New York for a long weekend.

By Saturday afternoon, something had shifted. Not a single thing was wrong with him. He was exactly as advertised: thoughtful, funny, genuinely interested in her. But the breathless pull she had felt for months -- the magnetic forward-lean she experienced every time her phone lit up with his name -- was simply not there. They went to dinner. They talked. It was fine. She felt guilty about the word "fine." Sunday was more of the same. He flew home. She spent a week trying to understand what had happened to the version of him she had been in love with.

The answer, it turns out, has nothing to do with him. It has everything to do with a single molecule in her brain. That molecule fired wildly during the phone calls, when he existed as pure future-tense -- a promise, a possibility, something not yet obtained. The moment he arrived, the molecule had nothing left to anticipate. It went quiet. And what she experienced as the evaporation of love was actually the shift from one brain system to another, from the chemistry of wanting to the chemistry of having. She had confused anticipation for affection. Dopamine for love.