I'm Adeli Mell and this is The Slowdown.

I was listening recently to a radio interview with science writer Florence Williams on the

effects of love and heartbreak on the body.

She talks about how, in a very real physiological way, our body shift when we fall in love.

We mirror our partners, our heart rates often sink up, our cortisol levels often match.

We tend to ebb and flow with our beloved.

But she also talked about what happens to us when our partners leave.

cortisol levels rise, alarms go off in our nervous system.

We are hardwired to think we are suddenly unsafe.

I felt both these feelings, the sinking up, the rhythmic bliss, and all the alarms going

off in the body like it's under attack.

It is serious, love is serious.

When anyone comes to me with heartbreak, I will try to honor it with all my attention.

Once when I worked for a travel magazine in New York City, a friend called Sobbing, she

just found out that her boyfriend had been cheating on her and she was crying alone

in an Irish bar in Midtown, it was around 3 pm and I stood up to tell one of my colleagues

what happened and I'll never forget, with all the seriousness of an emergency room nurse,

my kind colleague said, you must go to her and I did.

I remember once having fallen in love very young and thinking everything had changed,

that my body had been struck by lightning or somehow anointed for pleasure in a way that

I had never known.

But it wasn't necessarily a peaceful feeling.

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