Your Secret Love Potion – Part III

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

Editor’s note: This post is the third in Jed’s series about keeping passion alive in your relationship. Click here to read the previous posts.  

There is a magic “Love Potion” that can keep us in love forever if we use it correctly. When we look back to the times when we were out-of-our-heads in love, it felt like we, and our partners, had taken some kind of love potion.  Remember the song, “Love Potion Number Nine?”  It starts with these words:

I took my troubles down to Madame Rue
You know that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth
She’s got a pad down on Thirty-Fourth and Vine
Sellin’ little bottles of Love Potion Number Nine.

I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I’ve been this way since 1956
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said, “What you need is Love Potion Number Nine.”

When we’re down and lonely and we need someone to love, it would be nice to have that little bottle to make it easier to find someone and fall deeply in love. Well, the latest research on the science of love tells us that there really is a love potion like that. It may even have nine main ingredients including such things as Oxytocin, Pheromones, Testosterone, Estrogen, Serotonin, Dopamine, Vasopressin, Prolactin, and PEA (phenylethylamine). Theresa Crenshaw, M.D., author of The Alchemy of Love and Lust, calls these brain chemicals “The Love Brigade”. “When you fall in love or in lust, it isn’t merely an emotional event,” says Crenshaw. “Your various hormones, each with unique features to contribute, get in bed with you too.”

There are two important things you need to know about this “Love Potion Number 9.”

First, we don’t have to buy it from a gold-toothed gypsy named Madame Rue. We can make it ourselves.

Think of it like going to the paint store and wanting to have just the right color paint. We show the clerk the color we want and he gets a gallon of white, then squirts just the right amount of different colors into the can to produce the color we’re looking for. That’s what our brain does. When we are in the right state of mind to fall in love, we get just the right squirts of these nine ingredients and,bingo, we have our love potion.

The second important thing to know is that although we can make our own love potion, we also make another potion.  I call it Fear Potion Number 9, which can neutralize Love Potion Number 9.

Way back in 1979, Jerry Jampolsky, M.D. wrote a wonderful little book called Love is Letting Go of Fear. In it he reminded us that love is central to our lives and well-being, but that fear can undermine and neutralize that love. “Fear always distorts our perception and confuses us as to what is going on,” says Jampolsky. “Love is the total absence of fear.  Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement. Love, then, is really everything that is of value, and fear can offer us nothing because it is nothing.”

All you have to do to keep your passion for your partner alive decade after decade is to keep the love flowing. Sometimes that seems impossible, but it’s actually quite simple. We just have to stay focused sharing our love, appreciating our partners, and being grateful to be alive. To do that, we simply have to let go of our fears and let our love flow naturally. It is simple, but it’s not easy. The final secret is to understand and heal our unconscious fears.

Stay tuned for the final two articles in the series.

Jed Diamond, PhD, MCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well. Though focused on men’s health, MenAliveis also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.