Illusions Of Love

If you find out that love is an illusion, you don't need words. The music is enough.

The Old Sailor,

Unfaithful

Dear Bloggers,

Unfaithful is the word of the day.

(This is my greatest fantasy, the girl of all my erotic dreams)

“Well? Tell me! What would you do?”
(this discussion started when we talked about sexual hunting feelings, my opponent is everything I am not "Young, free an single")
These are my questions to my opponent.
The subject is committing adultery and more people are showing up to give their opinion.
The small talk about this subject turned all of sudden into the talk of the day.
“Would you tell it?” someone is asking.
With no doubt I say: "Yes, I would tell her."

I get up and walk away from the group.
“What the hell is going on” I wonder why this is so important to them, are they afraid that their own partner might do the same?



And is that not partly their own fault, women are strange in that way.
“What would you do?” someone all of a sudden asks.
“If you would see a friend of you kissing someone else?”
Straight forward as I am, I answer: “I will warn him about what this might do to his future.”
“And furthermore I find that he should tell his girlfriend otherwise I could not face them as a couple.”
“But what if she was the one?”



“Then I would talk with her, if this was a wise decission in her life?”
The remark is clear: “I never thought that you would be so much softer towards women”
I react: “The difference between man and woman are so huge.”
And my opinion is that men think as a hunter, with women it is more about feelings and it is much deeper.
I guess that the woman has already said goodbye to her relationship, before she goes into a new adventure, eventhough she still loves her man, but in a different way.
“He simply can not arouse her enough to give her the shivers when they have sex.”



“To me it is somehow kind of logical” Let’s have a smoke.
When we enter the smoking room still discussing this matter.
Other persons jump in and give their opinion.
“I woke up once in someones bedroom and I could not remember what happened” But the comment on a note on the table said it all. “Goodmorning beautiful, I love you.”
(No!, I am not going to tell you who said this, as it will undermine my integrity.)



Then someone else tells that her family goes first.
“Oh, I have been trying to mess up someones relationship.”
Says all of sudden someone, where I never expected that kind of things from.
My brain is runing on top speed and I am listening sharp, as this a great subject to place on my blog.


(something for the girls, otherwise I am called a sexist)

My conclusion is: “That we are all have gone through different experiences and all think in our own way.”
Some of us have enough and do not struggle with these kind of things, others have a fantasy and feel themselves comfortable with that.
And there are of course the ones that bring this fantasy to live.
And you know that they are having a relationship at home.
I am convinced that nobody is for a 100% satisfied in life, it explains a lot about us as human beings. But also that sex is important in someones life.

“Why are otherwise condoms and viagra are sold so much?”
A good investment at the moment a sex is a stabile factor even there is a financial crisis.
But tell me ..........honestly dear bloggers,
“What would you do if the friend of your best friend is unfaithful to her partner?
It gave me a lot food for thought, what about you?

The Old Sailor,

We should enjoy life

Dear Bloggers,

As usual I have quite a happy way to go through live.

It is only such a shame that I am thinking sometimes that I am the only one that can take nearly every situation as a realist.
If you being over 80 years old, than you should be able to think and accept that not all the things are so flexible as in your 20’s.
But yeah I am not a person that can stand melancholic people that think that the doctors can fix everything.
There is a time for everybody that you come to the end of your life journey. Everyone will end his life one day and whatever the cause might be.
If you are getting a bit older you have brought already a few family members or friends to "the fiddler's green".
I question myself sometimes: why have elderly people not adjusted themselves on the fact that a journey to the hospital by ambulance could be the last journey in life. Why is the human being so persistent to survive?
Over and over I am thinking "this could be the last one, if my wife calls that grandpa is in the hospital again."



But every time the surprising news is coming that he is getting better and can go back home again.
My question is: What is the quality of life?
The life is not always a rose garden en living happily ever after is also a fully milked out product.
I have known a time myself that I rather saw life going instead of facing another day filled with horrible thoughts and memories.
To me life is like a brutal child, which you love anyway.
I have never thought, that could ban these bad thoughts.
But I succeeded to get them far into the back of my head.
I do not have the illusion that I am going to be very old.
I am living life how it comes and day-by-day, I am not planning things very far ahead.
My way of thinking is: Who lives now has no need to complain later in life that he or she did not do anything because they saved for their pension.
When my time has come, a few persons will grief about you and probably miss you, but I am hoping one thing, that they will not grief forever.



You don’t have to be forgotten but with the years the memory is placing you in the background and of course the world did not stop turning and life is going on for all the other human beings.
They just carry on with the things they were.
Everybody can be replaced, although we think that we cannot be missed.

”Live life as long it is there, pray for less fights, spend your last money on a drink and fuck if your life is depending on it.”

The Old Sailor,

Parade of the bums

Dear Bloggers,

As I am only home for a short period, we had to go shopping on a Saturday.
And that is definetly not my favourite hobby, as you get pretty irritated by pensioners that have to pick up their social lives and block in the mean time with their shopping carts the alleyway.
Another thing with them is that can hold up the cue with counting out all their cents at the till.
Further there are mothers with children, which she can not handle on her own, as they are screaming and running through the shop.
And these are absolutely the spoiled kids, and I just wonder what is daddy doing at this moment?
Is he like me not home, or is he not willing to go with his family.
He was only the producer of the seed to make these little monsters, but she was the only one that wanted to have kids.
So that is why daddy is sleeping in, and she does not dare to fight him.
She still loves him, but something inside her is telling her that she is not fully happy with her live.
Ok, he is having a great income but he did not turn out, to be the romantic prince that he was when she just met him.



At that time she was young and had a lot of guys around her that tried to get her attention.
Or was it a pure sexual thing that these young blokes wanted.
Today she is there in the supermarket just in her thirties and she is joining all these other women, she is one of them, who is not getting any attention of her husband anymore.
They have a set live, they make love on Wednesday and Saturdaynights when the kids are sleeping and the soccergame is over.
Today she has done something very naughty.
She got out of her regular informal clothing, and dressed herself up as she was dressed when she was just eighteen.



Today she became a member of the parade of the bums.
She is wearing a short jackett and a thight pair of jeans, real eye candy, my mind is spinning another woman is playing with me.
I have to get myself down to earth again, for crying out loud what is happening to me.
And she is not the only one dressed like this, there are more women on the hunt.
The future is scaring me, more and more I get affraid of growing old.
Before I could hide myself as I fell for young girls, and tell myself you are to old for them.



But now I can’t hide as they are from my age, maybe my wife should do a better job to keep me away from all these tempting ladies.
I am thinking of sex all day, I am just like all the other guys and there is nothing wrong with a happy fantasy.
I feel like I am eighteen again and the hunters blood is crawling up in my body again.
The only difference is that we all have more live experience.
It never struck me before, but today it did.
Maybe I got as well a different look on women as before.
Still I am a man who is running around in the world watching other women, if I stop looking then there is something wrong.
I have to get hungry outside and eat at home.
But today was a good day as there was a lot of competition for the parade of the bums.

Bad luck for me that when we got home, I got horny, but she didn’t.
Another day without any kind of sex passed by, has my time come to only watch women, and have only sex on set days.
Is my wife starting to get old now or did she loose her interest in me?
This is really scaring me.

The Old Sailor,

It is autumn and gnomes have no place to live

Dear Bloggers,

Outside the weather is miserable and soon they are coming back from the coffee shops, were they hardly sell coffee but magic mushrooms are the thing to buy.
As the gnomes did not have any shelter problems during the summertime. It now all of a sudden gets dangerous on the paths of fairytale forest.



With brutal force the gnomes fight eachother to find a place to live.
My backyard looks like little Sarajevo, every day I have to collect the dead gnomes from my garden, as these pictures are not to nice for my youngest daughter.
It is not only in my backyard happening it is all over.



As it was beautiful weather later today, I jumped on my bike and toured a little bit with my kids.
When we stopped for a break and sat down on the bench, you could hear the machineguns rattling in the distance.



A battlefield in fairytale forest as the need for housing becomes bigger day by day.
As we travel on we have to wait at the gnome crossing as hundreds of them march to the battlefield, with grumpy faces and loaded guns.



My poor kids will have never a happy childhood because of these crazy tourists that come to my country to eat so called magic mushrooms or paddo’s which is short for paddestoel
(Gnomes house)


I just thought what was wrong with smoking grass or drinking beer? As the people that use it got some awesome hallucinations it became all of a sudden popular.
I always learned that hallucinations are images that don’t really excist.



But that must be difficult for our new generation as they believe in a virtual world, they are fully brainwashed and don’t have a clue about service anymore.
They google,skype,date and od everything possible on the computer, but if it comes to normal
conversation most of them don’t know how to deal with it.
They walk around totally out of the planet, not knowing who they are and were they are.
I would say in this case stop eating these mushrooms as they are not that healthy for your brain and all the stories about gnomes will be only stories and myths.



So there is not much left to tell your kids when you grow up finally. I think it is as big as the greenhouse effect and it is also bad for the finacial market. Wall street is collapsing due to this, because leprechauns (close family to the gnomes) put a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.



No wonder that it goes bad with the economy as there is hardly any manpower left to place these pots of gold at the end of the rainbows.
Also rainbows are not that often there anymore due to the global warming. The weather has really changed as it was miserable this morning and nearly summers this afternoon. I hope that this world will stop with acting stupid and our new generation finds out it is time to just work hard and will stop using these crazy drugs.
Then the future can continue again where it stopped, who will be the next victim? Santa Claus? Oh my god it is worse then I thought. Were will this end, wake up for crying out loud.



I feel sorry for these little creatures it is heartbreaking to see the little women cry about their fallen loved ones. Carrieng the dead bodies of their sons and husband, and this all because of people eating their houses. Come on human beings think before you have fun as old fashioned stuff might be not that good but it does not harm that much.


(Maybe I should stop drinking now for a little while, as I have the feeling that I get carried away a bit.) But yes I have to be there for my kids tomorrow as normal as possible anyway I will end like always with:”Live life as long it is there, pray for less fights, spend your last money on a drink and fuck if your life is depending on it.”

The Old Sailor,

What is the meaning of life?

Dear Bloggers,

This very deep questions were hitting me, it just came over me: "What is the meaning of our lives" and "Why are we here?"
I started thinking about these questions, when we had to practise a terror act drill.
It is still kind of strange to me that these people feel that they are the chosen ones, who is telling them this kind of crap?
You must be pretty crazy or brainwashed to blow yourself up.
At least you must have a pretty miserable live, with nothing in it
Every person needs to believe in to something in life



That they are really excist and handle like this in the name of a higher power.
It is strange that they believe on the other hand that everything was made by him,
and also that they are promised to go to heaven, hmm I always have been wandering if rapists and murders go to heaven?

I admit that every person has in life some challenges crossing their path.
But I must say: some are getting more challenges than the other, what is in my opinion also strange.
As everyone should be equal.
I just see it like this, we are in a way all the same from what culture are religion that does not matter.
Because at the day that we are born we all appeared butt naked on this planet and we all had to learn how to walk, how to talk.
And even though we are not all getting old and we die in a thousand different ways.
There will always be a few that mis you and remember you.
As we have gathered a lot of stuff, to make our life less miserable.
There is actually really nothing that we can take with us.



My final thought of it is:" We are coming with nothing and we are leaving with nothing."
So where is it all good for?
You can work hard, you can live your life with your heart filled with love and we are all hoping for better times.
Let us hope that someone out there is loving you with all her heart.
And that you never have to doubt or worry about the on you are depending on.



But if the time comes, that you are sailing to your final destination.
If you drop your anchor and your engine stops, you are there in silent harbour, waiting rusty until your time has past.
Ask yourself the question: "Was your life worth it?
If the answer is no it is never to late to go and get a live.

I am not forcing anyone, but I will stick these very basic things in live:
“Live life as long it is there, pray for less fights, spend your last money on a drink and fuck if your life is depending on it.”
A brighter light might be on the horizon, also for you.

The Old Sailor,

Home Sweet Home or Homesick?

Dear Bloggers,

It sounds strange but it can even happen to me.
Yes, even somebody like me, can get homesick somehow.
A couple of weeks ago , we were driving around a bit by car and all of a sudden, It struck me like lightning.
My mind was drifting of and was playing with me, when we had stopped at the lakeside and I stared across the water.



I saw the boats sail by and then I just realized that I was homesick.
I finally missed after all these years, the place were I was raised.
In a small village next to the lake.
I never experienced these feelings before, It took my breath away.
And the funny thing is that I could not talk about it for days.
I had to find out, why I had these feelings.
After a couple of days I talked about it to my wife.
It is not that I miss the village that much that I have to go back there.
But it is the water, the smell of the fresh breeze and the mentallity of the people living there.
It is a big difference to what I am used to now.
I simply have to admit that I miss the fresh air, the summer breeze which is nearly always there and simple things like going by bike with my kids to the beach.
Also that you wake up early morning and take the bike and cycle across the lake, when everybody else is still asleep. The other early people you greet when you pass them but not disturbing anything.



Enjoying every minute being in the middle of nature and together with your loved ones.
Concluding after my wife has been calculating, we have to stay at least eight years in the place were we are living now.
Before we can move back again to the area where I learned all the basic things of life and nature around me.
Unless we win the jackpot in the lotterie, or get money in an other way.
So I keep gambling on the future.
I believe that God can do miracles.
and I hope that a miracle will come my way.

Don't worry dear bloggers, I will not let my head hang down and run around fully depressed.
I still have my own believes.
Well I stick to this phrase like always: “Live life as long it is there, pray for less fights, spend your last money on a drink and fuck if your life is depending on it.”

The Old Sailor,

How to kill the pain

Dear Bloggers,

Painkiller…
I need you so badly.

After the extraction of my moulder, on september 5 this happened - read also love gives wings, I was pretty happy when I left the dentists office.- the pain got actaully worse, after a couple of days I went back to dentist and he found out that the imflammation I had, had done it’s work already in my jaw.
It was a pretty hungry bunch of bacterias who ate a hole in my lower jaw. (as big as a golfball.)
I ended up at the the dental surgeons office in the hospital and he fixed the problem.
Only side effect is that the pain will disappear in the coming week.
Hmmm, let’s hope so.
More than two weeks of toothpain is more than enough, you get so tired of it.
I have checked on the internet what the explanation is of this so called perionditis.
Read and weap I would say.
"I wish nobody to have the same experience in pain."



Periodontitis (peri = around, odont = tooth, -itis = inflammation) refers to a number of inflammatory diseases affecting the tissues that surround and support the teeth.
Periodontitis involves progressive loss of the alveolar bone around the teeth and may eventually lead to the loosening and subsequent loss of teeth if left untreated. Periodontitis is caused by a convergence of bacteria that adhere to and grow on the tooth's surfaces, along with an overly aggressive immune system response against these bacteria.



Treatment of Periodontitis
In the earlier stages of the disease, most of the treatment involves root planing and curettage (cleaning) under the gum margins.
It involves the removal of plaque and inflamed soft tissue in the pockets around the tooth with an instrument called a curette.
Its purpose is to remove the bacterial colonies and the mechanical and chemical irritants that cause inflammation in hopes that the disease can be eradicated.
The goal is that the gum will reattach itself to the tooth or will shrink enough to eliminate the pocket.
In most early cases, root planing, curettage, and proper daily plaque removal are all that are required for a satisfactory result.

In more advanced cases, the treatment may become more complex.
If after removal of the deposits, fairly deep pockets remain, they can be eliminated by a minor surgical procedure called gingivectomy.
This is done under local anesthesia, and a medicinal dressing is placed to cover the wound area for a week or so while it heals.



In my case it was more advanced as my bone was heavily attacked but most of them were killed already by the antibiotics, so the curretage was not that hard anymore and the hole was filled up with somekind of atrificial bone, which goes in as a cement and hardens out when it is placed.
At least I am happy it could be done with local anesthesia and I could leave the hospital after an hour, there was no problem to fill the gap through the hole that the moulder left after it was extracted.
The pain I will keep in line with some heavy weight painkillers.



Although I walk around like “Stoned For ever” I feel a lot better, and soon I will return to work again.

I will be smiles all over again.


The Old Sailor,

if grief.......

Dear bloggers,

I just go back to the days of my youth where a couple things came on my way that were less pleasant. At that time I lost my belief in the church or let me say the religius part of it. If there is a god why do these very sad things have to happen..

Let me start at the beginning.
It was half way my time of puberty and I did not have anything to complain about female attention.
This is not because I am a Casanova, but due to the simple fact that my dad had a riding school with horses.
This is working as a magnet on young girls until the boys are entering their lives.



I learned pretty quickly that I was not the ideal picture for all women, and that you had to put in quite a bit of effort to get their attention.
Although it went slowly, every now and then I booked a little success and kissed one of these “dreamgirls”(puppy love).
Anyway being in love is the same feeling all the time.
Butterflies all over the place.
But to much more, it came on a later period in live.
The unbelievable feeling in your stomach and the build up tension made it super special.
And that is pretty tricky if you are not really knowing how to deal with all these feelings.
It is very strange if you are at the beginning of your life, and all of a sudden you get the message that one of these young girls dies of a brain tumor.
Years later you are thinking back about the fact that she was suffering of very painfull headaches.
But nobody came to the conclusion that you could die of this, Not even a single doctor could see that there was something wrong inside her head, and she was just a young flower getting in bloom growing to something beautiful.



And then all of a sudden you are standing there blurred and with mixed up feelings, it felt like part of my body was removed, shocked and as struck by lightning.
I stopped and had no words when I was next to her coffin and saw a family totally shattered by grief.
Young and inexperienced, you are standing there not knowing what to say, not knowing what to do.
Although I was convinced that there are things in life where you did not count on. This was very barbaric of life and I have never understood this.
Days in a row, I have been crying my eyes out and filled with incoprehensible feelings is was trying to find out why.
My mum could only try to comfort me as I was brokenhearted and I had to find myself back.
After a while I had to go on with living, eventhough I had the feeling the world had stopped turning, everything around me had done her normal things.
Still I have trouble to give this a place in my live, although I let it rest more and more.
But like today it pops in my mind again and I have no clue what has triggered it.
I am caught in silent grief again, and my heart is softly crying.
My brain is running on full power and I have to do something to get my thoughts back to something normal.
Also the anger against the religion is coming up again.
Although i have the idea that also this anger will not help anyone and is it God’s fault?
Or is it natures fault?
Who will explain it, as until now nobody really can give a proven theory about our excistence on this planet.
At least the story about the beginning is still a mystery and in life you are not sure of anything.
One thing is a fact for everybody: “The light on the horizon is there for all of us, and one day we will end this life with dying.”

The Old Sailor,

Love gives you wings

Love gives you wings?

While I was sitting in the waiting room of the dentist I read a part of the following article, I was there with a terrible toothache and as a happy ending one of my moulders was extracted.


Love gives wings

The article I finished reading on the internet and it was published in Dutch in 2004 (that F**king old news) what you find by the dentist.



This is how the article starts:
‘It was beautiful weather about 13 degrees, wind in the back’, These things Nijboer remembers after he has beaten the record on the Dutch marathon. ‘Furthermore I just graduated and met my girlfriend who is now my wife. These kind of circumstances you can’t just create. But they are giving you wings.’ If you should believe all the writers of poëtic popsongs, is Nijboer not the only one, who is struck by love and all other things seem to go better in life. Bryan Adams (When the feeling’s right, I can run all night) until Whitney Houston, from The Olsen Brothers until Chris Norman, the wings of love should by many of us sweep us up to severe hights. Is love giving us wings ? And how are these wings working?



About the deepest functions of love and falling in love can higher educated people have total different opinions. For many of them it is clear: In the end – Think about Darwins opinion – the love is only there to keep the species a life. ‘Being in love is hanging strongly together with sexual desire’, says Cas Wouters, professor sociology from the University Utrecht. Being head over heals is in this approach of love the engine that turns the sexual behavior on, with as a result reproduction of the species. Others see for love a roll of freedom in it. The romantic love, has according to them, in the biggest part of history love was playing a secondary roll in life. Especially when it came to reproduction ‘The strong combination between love and reproduction of the species is only about a century old’, says seksuoligist and psychotherapist Carolien Roodvoets, author of "Nu alleen de liefde nog", (Now only the love still) a selfhelpbook for single females above thirty years of age.

Melting together with a partner
‘In the prehistoric times women were just in between fertilized, as dogs and horses do it just happens’, says Roodvoets. Marriages, she analysed, were not there because of love, but more for the sake of economic interests or power proportions. ‘The love has maybe always been there but it was never the switch to be hit for sex.’ But , it was there in the interest of reproduction, the need for love can be as strong as the need for food or sleep, believes also Roodvoets. ‘Every human being suffers of existentiël lonelyness’, she thinks. ‘the love can ease the pain a bit.’

It sounds like the Eros-mythe of Aristophanes, were Plato wrote about. The prehistoric human has united according to this story both genders. But when they threatened the gods because they thought they were surpreme, Zeus cut the human beings into two. Since then we are all looking for our better half. ‘The desire to melt together with their partner, is the heart of love’, thinks Roodvoets. The question is: does it get us to greater hights?



Who goes looking for the hard proof about stimulating side effects of the human falling in love, will not find much, barely nothing: poëts, philosphers en romantics, and in a lesser way also the alfa- en gammascientists have all told their tales, but in the exact, biomedical science the subject is not really worked out. Although this is not that surprizing: Being in love is a distinctive function that can be very difficult to test on guinnee pigs. And with living humans it is tricky to experiment, if they are being in love or not. Also because pharmaceutic companies are not looking yet for a “fall in love pill”, therefore we are missing money and motivation for a large scaled investigation in this field.

Theoretics about love
Still there is a lack of theoretics about the biochemical ground of the loving feeling, and the effects that they are having on our functioning around it. The most popular theory is speaking about having any doubt and calls it ‘the molecule of love’, also known as phenylethylamine, a small amfetamine kind of molecuul that de brain can make herself.

According to the followers of this theory is phenylethylamine forming(in English shorted to PEA) the first and central link in a finetuned network of signals who are steering the body when it is heavily in love. A shot PEA in the brain would be the starting signal for making the hormones like dopamine, adrenaline en noradrenaline, all with their own stimulating and braking effects.

Dopamine, for example, is a brain hormone that is closely involved by pleasurable and even euforic feelings, due to the fact that stimulating side of it has effect on the ‘rewarding centre’ of the brain.- this centre plays a big role by addicted persons. That dopamine can influence sexual behavior comes out when Parkinson disease patients are getting short of dopamine and this is filled in with dopamine from outside: the sexual drive and desire can strongly rise after the insertion of dopamine.

Adrenaline in the centre?
In the centre of the boosting workout of being ‘head over heals’ it could be formed by the hormone adrenaline. This hormone prepares – not only by being in love, but also by fear- the muscles in the body for action, if needed the body can preform optimal. The vains are getting narrow, de heartfrequence and the bloodpressure are rising, the congestion is running on low and the sences and the brain are being on extra alert – all ready to get in action fast and sharp when ever needed.

The discovery of small amounts of PEA in cacao and chocolate gave these populair theory the last few years the extra fuel. On several internetsites you can read that PEA declares why some persons after a disappointment in love fully get in the grip of chocolate bars – all to get enough of this stuff into the brain, although it is clear that PEA already in the bowels is dismantled and due to that – unfortunately – never will reach the brain.

In reality, says endocrinologist Focko Rommerts from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, en theorys like this have to be taken not to serious. About the central rol of PEA by love is as a matter of the fact less known than that they all say or write, he explains. ‘After the first articles published about this subject has everybody made his own opinion about the substance. The reality is that we not know that much about the hormonal changes during the time that we are falling in love.’

Matter of hormones
Our body make continiusly dozens of hormones, declares Rommerts, which anyway all react on eachother. It is not that easy to pinpoint the hormone which is responsible for what it is exactly doing. An extra complicated factor is that many hormones on different places in the body give total different effects. ‘In the vains fishing for elements in the hope to discover how love is working, is as hopeless as looking through the garbage of a restaurant to find out what yesterdays guests had for diner’, this is how Rommerts recapitulates the problem for endocrinologists. Probably it will be proven, he presumpts, that many of the hormones playing one roll at the same time, ‘because if it was only one, we had closed this case a long time ago.’

A few years ago the young Swiss neurobiologist Andreas Bartels, then still a doctoral student in London, but in the meantime working at the Max Planck-institute for Biological Cybernetics in the German city of Tübingen, was turning it another way around. He decided to find out about the biological secret behind the love by taking a different route, a kind of following the tracks. Together with his professor, Semir Zeki ,Bartels traced volunteers that, after their own telling, were really insanely “head over heals about someone”.Out of seventy people that reacted were seventeen selected by the doctoral student as test persons, average age was 23 years old. The ones that were chosen had during the interview been ‘dripping in’ loving feelings.

The chosen turtle doves were placed in a machine that with the help of magnetic waves every few seconds was making pictures of their brain. Half of the experiment was that they looked at a friends picture, nothing special. But the other half was melting away by looking at the laughing faced picture of the love of their life.

Activated braincentres
After measuring the two scientists deducted the two series from eachother and reconstructed it as one average set of brains. The result was a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), a picture that shows in one flash of the eye, which parts of the brain are using relative a lot of oxygen and which ones use just a little oxygen on the moment that the picture was shown of the one they where head over heals with.

The brains section that lighted up, tells Bartels, are centres that are also being involved by other positive emotions, and are being part of the already named rewarding centre. Other braincentres, involved by negative feelings and social disapproving, seemed to be on non active when they looked at the picture of their love – who said that love does not make you blind?



The activated centres, Bartels remarkably finds out that they, have nerve cells where we know from that they are very sensitive for two hormones: oxitocine en vasopressine. Both of them are in the last few years, especially in experiments with mice, being brought in connection more often with the drive to strong social matingbonds that will be formed, like the bond between the mother and the newborn child of the bond between two adult animals.

Love as encouragement
Here brings the brain explorer the falling in love investigation through a couple of spectacular brainpictures us back to the hormones – although they are not looking like anything anymore that gave the physical encouragement to Nijboer that brought him to his record time.

That love gives wings, can still not be measured and be based on biological hard evidence: For the excistance of stimulating physiological effects of being in love there is no hard evidence. But that doesn’t mean that the loving feeling on the psycholgical field can not be a form of aroussel – and that especially when this is being answerred.

‘Love is affirmative’, says Roodvoets. ‘It reinforces your self esteem through the fact that your partner gives you the feeling that you belong to him or her. That you are being the number one. The joy about this works as a pink cloud. You can tone down the things better, you can enjoy yourself on things as a romantic diner or good night of making love. The feeling that someone is there for you, and special the promise of getting mor of all these beatiful things, makes that everything goes a bit easier then normal.’A rotten day at work? What the …. Does it make any difference. More important is where you want to go for diner tonight.’

Who gets butterflies in his stomach, should drink a lot to drown the bastards, before they do any real harm.



The Old Sailor,