Once Love has Found You, Your Nose Can Take a Break

There is no question that body odor plays a significant role in sexual attraction (remember the Stinky T-Shirt Study?), but do people who are “in love” perceive and process these odors differently? A theory of romantic attraction called Deflection says Yes.

The theory, which states that being in love causes a reduction in the attention our senses pay to other potential suitors, got a major boost this month from a study conducted at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Researchers Johan Lundstrom and Marilyn Jones-Gotman asked 20 female volunteers to fill out a “Passionate Love Scale” questionnaire to determine just how deeply in love they were. Meanwhile, both intimate lovers and casual friends of the women spent a week sleeping with special absorbent pads sewn into the underarms of their t-shirts. The women were then asked to sniff out the t-shirt of their friend or lover from a group of three, two of which had been worn by total strangers. The results? While all 20 women displayed similar success in picking out the t-shirt of a lover, those whose questionnaires revealed them to be deeply in love were much less adept in distinguishing the odor of a platonic male friend from that of a stranger.

“I’m not really a love guru,” says Lundstrom, who is currently planning follow-up studies at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia into the brain activity of the lovers as they sniff friends, strangers, and one another. “The main focus of the project is to look at how the brain processes odors.”