The chemistry that made him feel necessary
Every time you saw his name on your screen, your brain released dopamine. Not because of him, exactly, because of the anticipation of him. Dopamine is not a pleasure chemical. It is a wanting chemical. It fires hardest at the possibility of reward, not the reward itself. This is why the waiting for a text felt more electric than the text. This is why the early weeks of a relationship feel almost unbearable in their brightness. Your brain had been trained, the way any system gets trained by a variable reward schedule, unpredictably, powerfully, completely.
