Love Medicine

In the May 2020 edition of Discover Magazine, I ran across an article entitled “Love Medicine” by Jeffrey Rediger, which quotes Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Dr. Fredrickson has been involved in research on the link between the vagus nerve and social connections for more than 20 years, and what she’s learned from her studies is that what keeps us strong and healthy mentally is small moments of positive interaction, which she dubbed “a sort of falling in love” with the people who surround you on a day-to-day basis.  That means everyone, from your spouse and children, to the barista you’re getting to know at your corner coffee shop.

Fredrickson believes that culturally, we underestimate these fleeting moments.  To her, love is a series of “micro moments of positivity resonance” that we experience, over and over again, as we go through life.  We may have one of these interactions with a stranger at a bus stop or a million of them over the course of a lifetime with the person we marry.  

Rediger goes on to muse about an interaction he’d had soon after his interview with Fredrickson, with an older woman who was pushing a baby in a stroller as Rediger hurried toward his office.  He joined her in walking and afterwards he recognized that in that fleeting conversation, filled with laughter and friendly talk, he’d experienced a moment of real bonding with someone and exercised his vagus nerve in the process.

I was so struck by this article that I looked back at what gives me great pleasure and a sense of being right with the world.  I’m a single woman with a couple of good love experiences with a mate but with no partner or love interest in my life at present.  In fact, I’d go so far as to call myself asexual, not interested sexually or romantically in any person, male or female.  I’m happy with my celibate life and do not feel deprived by it.

And I realized that my life is enriched and made delightfully pleasant by the moments I have talking with others at the grocery store or over coffee or on the Riverwalk, the times when I extend myself to greet another person and warmly receive them into a kind of friendship, if only on the Riverwalk or over the salsa at Freddies or admiring someone’s dog or a color they’re wearing.  In fact, I go out of my way to make those connections.  And when I come home and look back, it is those moments that help me realize my own place in the universe and how I maintain it.

Incidentally, the vagus nerve is worth reading about.  Look it up.