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The Results

A few days later, Brown e-mails me some initial findings. It's a great e-mail, full of exclamation points and capital letters. ("OOOh, this is just too exciting...") It's also quite technical. I understand a good 40 percent of it. She e-mails again a few minutes later: "I just read my message over again, and I'm not sure it's that coherent. Sorry. I'm excited."

Later, I get a more polished report and do a debriefing with the scientists. It's interesting — the interpretation of the results isn't like reading a red or blue litmus paper. It requires art as well as science. (Skeptics say more of the former.) The major findings:

Romance: I'm not so addicted to love. The forty-nine human guinea pigs who went before me were all truly, madly, deeply in love. Some had just fallen in love. Some had just been dumped. (In a cruel twist of bioengineering, the romantic craving actually gets more intense post-dumping.) And seventeen belonged to the small, freakish subset of people who claim they are still madly in love after years of marriage. These long-term romantics did, in fact, show cocainelike responses. I am not in that freakish subset. In fact, I'm one of the first of the fMRI guinea pigs not to show the rush from my lizard brain. This wasn't an honor I wanted.

Now, I'm not totally devoid of romance. Julie did fire up my prefrontal cortex, which is more intellectual, less visceral. "It's a more complex picture," says Brown. "Your brain is not just seeing pure reward, the way it is in the beginning of a relationship. Your brain is seeing some difficulties."

I tell Julie I don't have head-over-heels romantic feelings toward her.

"Shocker," she says.

"Why, you aren't head over heels in love with me?" I ask.

"Uh, no."

As part of the study, we'd each filled out questionnaires about how passionately we love each other. One of the questions was Do you tremble when you see your lover?

"So you don't tremble when you see me?" I ask her.

"No. Did you say you trembled?"

"A little. Sometimes."

"You so do not tremble."

She's right. I was just worried she'd see the questionnaire and get pissed.

Attachment: I love like a rodent of the grasslands. Scientists who study sex and love are totally smitten with prairie voles, a breed of overgrown mice that lives in dry parts of the Midwest. What's so special about prairie voles? They're basically monogamous — unlike the sluts and man-whores that make up 97 percent of mammals.

So if you want to study monogamy — and the government won't let you manipulate human love lives — you play God with the voles. Scientists do this by tweaking two brain chemicals — oxytocin and vasopressin. If you suppress the vasopressin system, normally faithful voles start acting like Eliot Spitzer. But if you boost the vasopressin in a promiscuous vole (such as the prairie vole's randy cousin the montane vole), it settles down with a mate. Vasopressin seems to be a key to attachment in male rodents. Oxytocin is the female equivalent. They do their job in a brain section called the ventral pallidum — which lit up when I was looking at a picture of Julie and one of my sons.

"There's lots of data on prairie voles about this area, but you're among the first humans to show this," says Brown. "It reveals this system may be conserved through mammals."

Like the voles, I have a strong attachment to my mate. It's hard to rank the three love systems, but it looks as if attachment is the winner for me, edging out sex and romance. And mine is a positive attachment, flavored with the dopamine pleasure drug. (You can be attached to someone and hate them.) This is reassuring information. On the other hand, I could block my vasopressin and be wenching in no time.

Sex: Against all odds, I'm still hot for my wife. Chemically, I'm at the most unmanly point in my life. A guy's testosterone drops when he gets married. (I'm nine years in.) It also drops when he has kids. (I've got three boys.) "Every time you cuddle with your children, you're likely to be driving down your testosterone," says Fisher. I can feel this. My sex drive is in neutral a lot of the time. Before the results came in, Brown told me to keep my expectations low. The sex regions might stay dark. She told me, "I actually think men in your situation" — meaning married with young kids — "should be encouraged to go to the Internet and look at pornography, because it brings novelty into the home. When you look at [porn], you're going to have some hormonal flooding. Which is needed in the 'captivity' situation."

And yet, according to the MRI, my libido is surprisingly strong. Looking at a sexy photo of my wife "activated part of your 'new brain' that represents the sensation of touch in your genital area," says Brown. "It's an interesting finding, because you said you had no erection." That's true. I had no erection. At my age, I need some soft music and small talk.

Even when I was in the romance phase of the test, the sex regions of the brain lit up. This is beginning to look like quite a message for women, Brown writes me. Men always tell us that sex is important to them, that they are always thinking about it, it's always a factor when looking at women, but these data are making it really sink into my thick skull and take notice.

You read it here first.

Angelina

Here's what my wife said when she found out she was going up against Angelina Jolie: "If you don't find Angelina more sexually attractive, there's something wrong with you." The results are in — and apparently there's something wrong with me.

Brown writes: Julie and Angelina were exactly the same in areas associated with sexual arousal. Your midbrain thinks Julie is just as attractive as Angelina in the objective sense. But the romantic love isn't there for Angelina. Well, it's almost there for Angelina. Perilously close, in fact. But it doesn't make the cut.

I do find my wife beautiful. But hotter than Angie? Like my wife, I'm not sure how to explain it. The measurements may be off. The researchers might be reading too much into the results. The MRI might have picked up the guilt and anxiety I felt when thinking about bradding Angie (and knowing my wife would see the results). Or... there's the lovely possibility that I am more sexually drawn to my wife.

The Chinese

A colleague of Fisher's did a study of newly-in-love Beijing couples. The results — though preliminary — are intriguing. The Chinese subjects were much more cautious about love than Americans. "They were more fearful about it, more careful about their emotions," says Brown. The research paper (written by Xiaomeng Xu and several collaborators) puts it this way: "The Chinese participants tended to associate love with negative features, e.g., heartbreak, and spontaneously listed more negative items than Americans, who associated love with more positive features, e.g., adoration."

The key brain region here might be the lateral orbital frontal cortex. This is a newer part of the brain, more intellectual, less instinctual, involved with weighing rewards and losses. And it fired up when both the Chinese and I thought about love.

This finding rings true. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more scared of love. I've come to see it as a dangerous emotion. I love the falling-in-love part. It's the falling-out-of-love part I can't stand. The paranoia, the depression, the aching. The gunfire.

Nowadays, if I had to sacrifice the highs to avoid the lows, I would. I'd prefer a mild emotional climate in my brain. Like the Bay Area. Fisher says she agrees with me. A few years ago, she says, "I was rejected horribly. I lost twenty pounds. My clothes looked ridiculous on me. I only had three hours of sleep at night. This is not all in fun. There's a lot of talk about the positive aspects of love. We as a society downplay the danger, the anxiety, and the disappointment. We romanticize romance." She adds, "Evolution really overdid it with the feeling of falling out of love."

So, in the end, how do I love thee?

"You do love your wife," says Brown. "It's just in a more complicated way. The way most people love their long-term spouses."

I love her, but not with the junkie's high. "But don't give up on that," says Fisher. "I think those children are going to grow up and you're going to have the experience of being madly in love." In fact, she and Brown want to put me back in the scanner each year for several years. "We want to determine the natural history of love relationships and the corresponding changes in brain systems within individuals."

I could even try to rev up the romance quotient for next year. Unfortunately, the best way to kick-start romance is by following that tiresome marital advice about doing exciting, novel, slightly dangerous things with your spouse. "Take a subway, and get off at a random stop, and eat at some dump that's the first place you see," suggests Fisher. It'll get the dopamine and testosterone flowing. Not good news for housebound schmoes like me.

Then again, legal love potions may be on the market soon. That'd be easier. One company is already selling bottles of what they call Liquid Trust. It's an odor-free spray laced with oxytocin, the chemical that jacks up trust and attachment. I got a bottle sent to me at Esquire a few weeks ago. "It might work," says Brown, as she spritzed some on her hair, just in case. "It needs to be tested in a double-blind test."

It's a weird feeling, trying to reduce love to organic compounds. Fisher's been doing it for years and is often asked if it takes all the fun out of love. She says no. "I can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, but when I sit down to eat it, I can still feel the joy."

For me, translating love into biology is actually kind of reassuring. Yes, it takes away some of the mystery — but also the fear. Think of it like a drug: If you're high and feel like you're sliding off the face of the earth, you can tell yourself, Hey, I'm having a horrible chemical reaction, but I'll get over it. I will stabilize.

Plus, the MRI gave me some supposedly objective proof of my feelings. This comes in handy. Julie snaps at me today for forgetting to buy her oranges on the way home. She accuses me of being inconsiderate.

"Sorry," I say, "but it's a scientific fact that I love you."

And I've got 3-D images to prove it.