For Ernesto Peralta, true love began with a smile.
Jenifer Price flashed the smile Ernesto’s way one night in Kansas City, Mo.
Boy meets girl.
It’s a biological imperative for human beings to pair up. Still, to many people the act of falling in love and becoming a couple remains one of life’s grand mysteries.
That said, forget all those romantic movies for a moment, and let science give you a tour of one couple’s attraction and courtship.
“Romantic love is deeply embedded in the architecture and chemistry of the human brain,” says Helen Fisher, anthropologist and author of “Why We Love.”
Advances in brain scanning, genetics, evolutionary biology and behavioral research mean that science has a new ability to drill deeper into the brain and understand how two people like Peralta and Price come together and fall in love.
The couple didn’t know much about brain chemistry in summer 2004, when they first noticed each other. Eventually, though, they realized what happened was unmistakably special, and it became clear a complex series of physiological events had begun to take place.
“He really just intrigued me,” says Price, 28.
Peralta, 41, who until recently spent five nights a week tending bar, says: “I see a lot of people in this business, meeting and hooking up, but very seldom do I ever see a couple come out of it.”
A lot of nights when Peralta got off work he would land at the Granfalloon, a popular sports bar with a late-running kitchen and a casual crowd.
Peralta wanted his usual, the quesadillas and a Coke. From time to time he glanced at Price, who worked part time there while studying for a degree in interior design.
She is short, pert and trim, her long sandy hair often tied in a ponytail. Peralta, his hair shaved to the scalp, has the frame of a bodybuilder.
One night the bartender wanted to serve him on the house and asked Price, the night manager, for permission. When she asked why, he replied, because he’s such a nice guy.
And then Price looked at Peralta, sitting there over his plate of quesadillas, and she smiled. Peralta felt awestruck.
To sex therapist and professor Dennis Dailey, Peralta possibly was responding to an “attraction template.”
Dailey posits that people possess an unconscious sensory response triggered by encounters with other people.
The template, he says, may develop in the brain as far back as early childhood. Good relationships, happy encounters, even childhood “sex play,” he says, may leave a lasting inner feeling – the template – that’s triggered again by the right person at the right time.
Dailey recently retired from a regular schedule at the University of Kansas, where he long taught a wildly popular lecture course on human sexuality.
The attraction template is unpredictable, he says, but it’s clear that a certain look, an odor, the sound of a person’s voice can turn another person’s head. While all that’s happening, brain chemicals and synapses are firing, sending signals of curiosity and contentment.
Peralta had been married before. His ex had dark hair and didn’t look much like Price at all, though they both have small frames. Did that figure into his attraction? He couldn’t say.
Perhaps the template that moved him involved a smile, because he was sure of one thing: Price’s smile.
The face, after all, is the first landscape of love and affection, says David Givens, an anthropologist in Spokane, Wash., who has studied nonverbal communication, body language and courtship for two decades.
Facing up to biology
Studies of human attractiveness agree that the face is where it all begins.
“Constituting only 5 percent of your bodily surface, it carries 95 percent of your allure,” Givens writes in his new book, “Love Signals.”
Significant too is the presence in the face of all those places where the senses work.
Facial symmetry is highly prized in all cultures, Givens says, but eye-catching exceptions such as a “beauty mark” draw attention too.
Specific neurons in the temporal lobe fire up in the presence of an engaging face.
Price’s smile spoke directly to Peralta’s system, probably triggering his hypothalamus and pituitary gland, which sent hormones flying toward his sex glands.
The hypothalamus and related neural circuits make up the limbic system, the place in the brain that controls emotions and moods. The limbic system produces the physical language of nonverbal communication – facial movements, shoulder shrugs, eye blinks – which plays a significant role in how we flirt, connect and fall in love.
Spend a few minutes almost anywhere young singles gather to get a sense of what Givens has studied for two decades.
Clutches of young men and women scan the room and survey the possibilities. Some of them stand with weight shifted on one foot, their classic contrapposto stance, with a slightly twisted torso, signaling vitality. They are ready to spring.
A dark-haired woman at one table entertains the attention of two men, one on each side. When she laughs, her head bends back further exposing the soft “neck dimple,” a sign of vulnerability and trust.
That makes her approachable, Givens notes, just as wolves, crocodiles and other animals show their throats to express harmlessness. Flirtation is founded on such unconscious but powerful signals.
“When you start to see the emotional muscles contracting, you know there’s some attraction,” Givens says. “The muscles of the face are definitely emotional. The upper trapezius muscle is emotional, which causes you to flex your head and your shoulders.”
If a couple’s flirtation period succeeds, Givens suggests, a relationship matures through five phases of courtship.
By now, after attracting attention, and recognizing the other as a potential mate, Peralta and Price had three more phases to experience: conversation, touching and making love.
Peralta returned to the Granfalloon. Price sat down, and the two of them chatted.
From that night on Peralta returned for chicken quesadillas every night. He and Price talked about their childhoods and growing up and his divorce. It all felt open and frank.
“We gained trust with each other’s stories,” Peralta says. “She was listening, and that gave me confidence. …
“I lost touch with everything else around me. Time flew by.”
One of Helen Fisher’s research insights was to examine the relationship of certain brain chemicals in the inner workings of love.
The natural stimulant dopamine already had been discovered to play a role in mammalian attraction.
Nearly 10 years ago Fisher and colleagues began scanning the brains of people in love. They began not only to confirm the heightened production of dopamine but also the specific regions of the brain where love resides, where millions of firing synapses signify a person in love. While Fisher links dopamine to the stage of life we call romantic love, she relates the hormone testosterone to feelings of lust and two other intriguing chemicals, vasopressin and oxytocin, to feelings of attachment.
Price may have felt dopamine rising on the Sunday night last October when she and Peralta arranged their first date.
Their evening moved from a drink at Re:Verse to dinner at Morton’s, the power-people’s steak house.
Bonding over food
Unconsciously but undoubtedly, Peralta and Price experienced over their steaks a behavioral phenomenon widespread among human cultures and the animal world. “Just by eating together it makes you feel psychologically closer,” says Givens.
His and other behavioral studies show that people (as well as wolves and other mammals) strengthen their bonds in courtship by doing things together. For humans that means having lunch and dinner.
“Apes do it. Scorpions do it. Fireflies do it,” Diane Ackerman writes in “A Natural History of Love.”
“The purpose,” she writes, “is to prove to the female that the male will be a good provider and meet her needs.” Peralta and Price ate at Morton’s and talked again late into the night.
From then on, except for school and work, they’ve spent all their time together.
Romantic love is virtually universal, Fisher writes in “Why We Love.” It’s found in 147 of 166 cultures, she says, and not in the others because it hasn’t been studied there yet. People bond to further the species but also to feel a sense of human completion and contribute to their own happiness.
As Peralta and Price talked and their relationship progressed they discovered a powerful attraction was their shared religious beliefs.
As with most couples, their love for each other eventually settles down from its intense, high-dopamine stage to the longer-term period where brain activity reflects calm and comfort, Fisher’s research says.
In July, Peralta and Price ate dinner and watched people salsa dancing at a hotel in Acapulco. Later, he wound up his courage and asked her if she would be his wife.
With dopamine rising in her brain, heart racing and blood pumping, Price said yes.
They married last month.
