There they are, at the beach, in the store, on the corner-couples who stand so close and stare so longingly that you blush just watching them. It's perfect, sweet-and so definitely sick. Songwriters have long crooned that love is insane. Heeding these voices, people with OCD feel compelled to repeat mundane activities or chase risky thrills, like gambling. That may not sound like blissful love, but some psychiatrists now say that passion's thrills do indeed resemble OCD's angst, both in outward habits and the brain's inner chemistry.
Love is just a lot more fun.
What's more, these researchers say, the pathology of romance may play a pivotal role in our evolution. And their conclusions might just explain why love makes you do such utterly foolish things. One chief suspect was the neurotransmitter serotonin-a chemical that has a soothing effect on the brain. Which means that scientists can gauge roughly how much serotonin is skipping about your head from the levels of related proteins in platelets. But she also discovered something surprising.