7 telltale signs you're in love, according to a scientist who's spent decades studying human relationships
- Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist who studies love and relationships.
- She's found that there are certain universal behaviors that suggest a person is falling in love.
- Those behaviors include not being able to stop thinking about the object of your affection and feeling incredibly energetic.
One of the greatest things about new love is that it really feels new. As in, you're the first person ever to find it difficult to sleep, eat, work, and generally do anything that doesn't involve thinking or talking about the object of your affection.
Tell this to a scientist and they'll laugh. Current evidence suggests that romantic love unfolds in more or less the same way in everyone - both in the way they behave and in the way their brain reacts.
In fact, the Daily Mail recently reported that, by 2028, couples will be able to take a kind of "love test," for which they'll get their brain scanned to see if they're really smitten with their partner.
But when I asked Helen Fisher, who is a biological anthropologist and the chief scientific advisor to dating site Match, whether she believed that such a love test would be available within a decade, she said, "I wouldn't count on it." The brain in love is a combination of multiple systems working together, she added, so it would be hard to isolate just one chemical that indicates a person is in love.
That said, Fisher has studied and written about the universal traits and behaviors associated with romantic love - ones that don't require a brain scan to see. In her book "The Anatomy of Love," which she revised and re-published in 2016, Fisher describes many of those key signs. Some are drawn from research done by Dorothy Tennov, author of the book "Love and Limerence."
Some of those indicators are listed below - and there's a solid chance you've experienced at least one before.