Anatomy of a romance

What goes into attraction for another person?
By STEVE PAUL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
For Ernesto Peralta, true love began with a smile.
Jenifer Price flashed the smile Ernesto's way one night at the Granfalloon in Kansas City, Mo.
Boy meets girl.
The equation plays out across the country millions of times a day and sometimes leads to a long-term relationship. It's a biological imperative for human beings to pair up. But to many people, the act of falling in love and becoming a couple remains one of life's grand mysteries.
Yet, as they've done with other mysteries, scientists have begun to solve it, making some sense of the inner workings of love and courtship.
Call it the chemistry of personal chemistry. Or the principles of human magnetics.
For most people -- and the same chemistry usually is involved when boy meets boy or girl meets girl -- all they need to know is that behind that smile may be a pounding heart. But leave it to science to reduce such things to neural and chemical responses, to hormonal activity and longstanding, innate human behaviors.
"Romantic love is deeply embedded in the architecture and chemistry of the human brain," says Helen Fisher, anthropologist and author of "Why We Love."
Advances in brain scanning, genetics, evolutionary biology and behavioral research mean that science has a new ability to drill deeper into the brain and understand how two people like Ernesto Peralta and Jenifer Price come together and fall in love.
The Kansas Citians didn't know much about brain chemistry in the summer of 2004 when they first noticed each other.
How it started for the two
Eventually, though, they realized what happened was unmistakably special, and it became clear that a complex series of physiological events had begun to take place within each of them.
"He really just intrigued me," says Price, 28.
Peralta, 41, who until recently spent five nights a week tending bar, says: "I see a lot of people in this business, meeting and hooking up, but very seldom do I ever see a couple come out of it."
A lot of nights when Peralta got off work he'd land at the Granfalloon, a popular sports bar with a late-running kitchen and a casual crowd.
Peralta wanted his usual, the quesadillas and a Coke. From time to time he'd cast a glance at Price, who worked part time there while studying for a degree in interior design.
She is short, pert and trim, her long sandy hair often tied in a ponytail. Peralta, his hair shaved to the scalp, has the sculpted frame of a body builder.
One night the bartender wanted to serve him on the house and asked Price, the night manager, for permission. When she asked why, he replied, because Peralta's such a nice guy.
Then Price looked at Peralta, sitting there over his plate of quesadillas, and she smiled.
Peralta felt awestruck.
To sex therapist and professor Dennis Dailey, Peralta possibly was responding to an "attraction template." Dailey posits that people possess an unconscious sensory response triggered by encounters with other people.
The template, he says, may develop in the brain as far back as early childhood. Good relationships, happy encounters, even childhood "sex play," he says, may leave a lasting inner feeling -- the template -- that's triggered again by the right person at the right time.
Dailey recently retired from a regular schedule at the University of Kansas, where he long taught a wildly popular lecture course on human sexuality.
Many things can trigger it
The attraction template is unpredictable, he says, but it's clear that a certain look, an odor, the sound of a person's voice can turn another person's head. While all that's happening, brain chemicals and synapses are firing, sending signals of curiosity and contentment.
It's not as simple to say that Peralta has a thing for women who look like Price. He'd been married before. His ex-wife had dark hair and didn't look much like Price, though they both have small frames, he said.
Did that figure into his attraction? Peralta couldn't say.
Perhaps the template that moved Peralta was a smile, because he was sure of one thing: Price's smile.
The face, after all, is the first landscape of love and affection, according to David Givens, an anthropologist in Spokane, Wash., who has studied nonverbal communication, body language and courtship for two decades.
Studies of human attractiveness agree that the face is where it all begins.
"Constituting only 5 percent of your bodily surface, it carries 95 percent of your allure," Givens writes in his new book, "Love Signals."
Significant, too, is the presence in the face of all those places where the senses work.
Facial symmetry is highly prized in all cultures, Givens says, but eye-catching exceptions such as a "beauty mark" draw attention, too. Specific neurons in the brain's temporal lobe fire up in the presence of an engaging face.
Getting a little scientific
Price's smile spoke directly to Peralta's system, probably triggering his hypothalamus and pituitary gland, which sent hormones flying toward his sex glands. The attraction became real, at least for Peralta.
The hypothalamus and related neural circuits make up the limbic system, the place in the brain that controls emotions and moods. The limbic system produces the physical language of nonverbal communication -- facial movements, shoulder shrugs, eye blinks -- which plays a significant role in how humans flirt, connect and fall in love.
Spend a few minutes almost anywhere young singles gather and you can get a sense of what Givens has studied in the last two decades. Clutches of young men and women scan the room and survey the possibilities. Some stand with weight shifted on one foot, their classic contrapposto stance, with a slightly twisted torso, signaling vitality. A contrapposto stance is the position of a figure in which the hip and legs are turned in a different direction from that of the shoulders and head. They are ready to spring.
A dark-haired woman at one table entertains the attention of two men, one on either side. When she laughs, her head bends back further exposing the soft "neck dimple," a sign of vulnerability and trust. That makes her approachable, Givens notes, just as wolves, crocodiles and other animals show their throats to express harmlessness.
Flirtation is founded on such unconscious but powerful signals.
"When you start to see the emotional muscles contracting, you know there's some attraction," Givens says. "The muscles of the face are definitely emotional. The upper trapezius muscle is emotional, which causes you to flex your head and your shoulders."
Birds do it, bees do it ...
Birds and bees flirt, too, of course, and many parallel human behaviors have evolutionary origins. Males compete for female attention, whether it's on a prairie chicken's booming ground or in a beer hall. The scent of a female gypsy moth can lure a male seven miles away, perhaps a little stronger than a dose of a woman's Chanel but the idea's the same. A male bowerbird builds an open-ended, foot-high nest of twigs, buttons and beach trash, winning over the discerning female who walks inside. (Think "Queer Eye for the Bower Guy.") Your BMW's high-gloss finish and leather interior may reflect the same impulse.
After responding to those first signals of attraction and flirtation, each person will then extend the action, testing the other as a potential companion or sexual partner.
If a couple's flirtation period succeeds, Givens suggests, a relationship matures through five phases of courtship.
And by now -- after attracting attention, and recognizing the other as a potential mate -- Peralta and Price had three more phases to move through: conversation, touching and making love.
Not long after the night of Price's smile and the free quesadillas, Peralta returned to the Granfalloon. Price sat down, and she and Peralta chatted for a few minutes.
From that night on, Peralta returned for chicken quesadillas every night. The two talked and talked and talked some more.
They talked about their childhoods and growing up and his divorce. It felt all open and frank.
"We gained trust with each other's stories," Peralta says. "She was listening, and that gave me confidence. And I was very interested in what she had to say.
"I lost touch with everything else around me. Time flew by."
Chemical reactions
One of Helen Fisher's research insights was to examine the relationship of certain brain chemicals in the inner workings of love.
The natural stimulant dopamine already had been discovered to play a role in mammalian attraction, especially among a little rodent called the prairie vole.
Nearly 10 years ago Fisher and colleagues began scanning the brains of people in love. They began not only to confirm the heightened production of dopamine but also the specific regions of the brain where love resides, where millions of firing synapses signify a person in love. While Fisher links dopamine to the stage of life we call romantic love, she relates the hormone testosterone to feelings of lust and two other intriguing chemicals, vasopressin and oxytocin, to feelings of attachment.
Jenifer Price may have felt dopamine rising on the Sunday night last October when she and Peralta arranged their first date.
Their evening moved from a drink at Re:Verse to dinner at Morton's, the power-people's steak house.
Unconsciously but undoubtedly, both experienced over their steaks a behavioral phenomenon widespread among human cultures and the animal world. "Just by eating together it makes you feel psychologically closer," says Givens.
His and other behavioral studies show that people (as well as wolves and other mammals) strengthen their bonds in courtship by doing things together. For humans that means having lunch, dinner. For one thing, eating together has evolutionary consequences for humans and other species.
"Apes do it. Scorpions do it. Fireflies do it," Diane Ackerman writes in her book "A Natural History of Love." "The purpose," she writes, "is to prove to the female that the male will be a good provider and meet her needs."
Peralta and Price ate at Morton's and talked again late into the night.
From then on, except for school and work, they've spent all their time together.
Romantic love is virtually universal, Fisher writes in "Why We Love." It's found in 147 of 166 cultures, she says, and not in the others because it hasn't been studied there yet. People bond to further the species but also to feel a sense of human completion and contribute to their own happiness.
As Peralta and Price talked and their relationship progressed, they discovered a powerful attraction was their shared religious beliefs.
Peralta's taking his three children to church every Sunday morning was important to Price and, she says, a rare find in the late-night restaurant world.
As with most couples, their love for each other eventually settles down from its intense, high-dopamine stage to the longer-term period where brain activity reflects calm and comfort, according to Fisher's research.