(BOULDER, Colo.) — As Valentine’s Day draws near, you may be pondering the risks and rewards of romantic love. Now, thanks to a study done by neuroscientists in Boulder, we have a little more information to work with.

The study concerns the mating habits of the prairie vole—a small rodent that happens to share the human propensity for long-term bonding. Voles find a partner, settle down, have smaller voles, and experience something like grief when their mate dies. They are among the 3% to 5% of mammals that mate for life.

Neuroscientists studied the vole’s brain hoping to shed some light on the human experience of love. They found something interesting: like humans, voles fall in love. And when kept apart from their partner long enough, they fall out of love, too.

“What we have found, essentially, is a biological signature of desire that helps us explain why we want to be with some people more than other people,” said senior author Zoe Donaldson, associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at CU Boulder.

Of course, nobody is suggesting that voles feel the kind of complex romantic bond that leads humans to send one another letters from the battlefield, mixtapes, and questionable text messages. All we know is that the vole’s brain chemicals are doing things that explain how these bonds are formed (and unformed) in mammals like us.

Donaldson and her team were concerned with studying the vole’s nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain that motivates mammals to seek reward—anything from water and food to illegal narcotics. In humans, holding hands has been shown to light up this reward center.

The voles were given challenges temporarily separating them from their partner. For example, they had to get through a door or over a wall to reach their mate. The team used state-of-the-art neuroimaging technology and fiber-optic sensors to measure the animal’s dopamine during these challenges.

When the vole reached its partner, the fiber-optic sensor “lit up like a rave” said first-author Anne Pierce, who worked on the study as a graduate student in Donaldson’s lab.

But the results were very different when the vole on the other side of the door was a stranger. When the vole being tested reached the random vole and realized with dismay that he was not her chosen partner, the fiber-optic sensor went dim.

“This suggests that . . . there’s actually more dopamine coursing through our reward center when we are with our partner than when we are with a stranger,” said Pierce.

In an interesting follow-up experiment, the partnered voles were separated for four weeks (which is a long time when you’re a vole). When brought back together, the voles remembered each other but the dopamine surge was no longer in play.

Apparently, if you’re a vole, you can be friends with your ex. Whether or not this works with humans is debatable. But the study does offer some hope: the brain has a mechanism for recovery after heartbreak.

Donaldson hopes that the results of this study will help us better understand healthy bonds in the brain. This could eventually lead to the discovery of therapies for mental illnesses that affect social bonding.