Do you wanna know what love is? Well, scientists are about to find out what love is, as some boffins in China and New York are doing MRI scans to work out which bits of the brain glow when people are in love.
The scientists say that the study, Love-related changes in the brain: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study, had given the ‘first empirical evidence of love-related alterations in brain architecture’ .
Which is science-speak for ‘we’re on our way to finding out what love is’
But while they faff around with scanners and stuff, here are the modern girl’s tell-tale signs you’re in love.
If you've just fallen in love, you:
Delete all of the booty call numbers off of your phone/Facebook
A quick survey of The Debrief office says that once you’re in a relationship with a capital R, you delete all of the people you met before and liked to flirt with on social media. Exes who you’re still mates with – fine. But that one-time hookup who likes to send you filthy Snapchats? Blocked.
Cancel plans
Before, you would have traipsed out into the blustery cold winter night to go to the birthday party of a friend of a friend or someone who only invited you because you bumped into them at a bus stop five days ago. You weren’t explicitly going out to pull, but now you’re on a cosy sofa waiting for Netflix to buffer, maybe, maybe you were?
Put on weight
At least seven pounds. They’re not called love handles for nothing.
READ MORE: Why, When It Comes To Relationships, We Totally Need To Embrace The Age Gap
Stop shaving/waxing/plucking/preening
It’s not a political statement or anything, it just happens, because you’re no longer trying to guess at what they like to win them over. More often than not, your other half might prefer a bit of body hair on you in some places (stranger things have happened). Unless you’re going out with a dickhead who doesn’t understand that you appearing just-shaven three times a week is nigh-on impossible. This person is not worth your rash.
Dress a little different
Regardless of whether new clothes you buy now need to accommodate newly-sprouted body hair or those few extra pounds, you begin to change your outfits. What starts off as a minor change e.g. you’re not going out dressed scruffily if they’re all smart and formal, eventually ends up in you basically dressing like one another. That, and you’re borrowing their clothes on the regular.
If you've been in love for a while, you:
Get gross
Whether it’s lying someone down in the morning sun to get good light when you’re squeezing their spots and ingrown hairs, or even kind of enjoying the smell of their burps because it reminds you of that romantic dinner you just had, when you’re comfortable with someone you’re totally fine with all of their bodily activities. Even when they’re not sex ones.
Invent a new language
Whether it’s fifty variations of ‘bae’ that you splutter to each other, or a nuanced sequence of clicks you use to communicate, your linguistic patterns meld into one and all of a sudden you’re using babytalk in a supermarket.
Stop talking about them
You gripe about your job, your friends, your family to anyone who listens. But when you’re asked how it’s going with your significant other, you shrug and say ‘yeah, it’s all good’. And then you realise how long you’ve frog-jumped over the ‘will they call back?’ stage and you have literally nothing to report about because everything’s trundling along nicely.
Forget what dating apps do
Even if you met your significant other over a dating app, the permutations of social tech happen at such a rapid pace you can’t keep up and all of a sudden your mates are meeting people via drone and wait, can you just have a go on their phone for a second?
You feel bad for any exes you treated badly
This is a weird one. Once you’re in love you get peace with your exes. You feel a bit sorry for them; they were unable to put the right key into the lock of your cold, cold heart and now look at them, alone, sad without you. Oh, and you’re still the prick who’s coupled up and feels sorry for them. So you feel doubly bad for them. The sympathy extends no farther than the exes YOU were mean to. The ones who were mean to you? Still pricks.
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.