Why We Love
Authors: Helen Fisher
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Contents
1.
“What Wild Ecstasy”:
Being in Love
2.
Animal Magnetism:
Love among the Animals
3.
Chemistry of Love:
Scanning the Brain “in Love”
4.
Web of Love:
Lust, Romance, and Attachment
5.
“That First Fine Careless Rapture”:
Who We Choose
6.
Why We Love:
The Evolution of Romantic Love
7.
Lost Love:
Rejection, Despair, and Rage
8.
Taking Control of Passion:
Making Romance Last
9.
“The Madness of the Gods”:
The Triumph of Love
For Lorna, Ray, Audrey,
and the rest of my family
(Hark close and still what I now whisper to you,
I love you, O you entirely possess me,
O that you and I escape from the rest, and go utterly off,
free and lawless,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea
not more lawless than we;)
That furious storm through me careering.
I passionately trembling;
The oath of the inseparableness of two together,
of the woman that loves me, and whom I love
more than my life, that oath swearing,
O I willingly stake all for you,
Walt Whitman
“From Pent-up Aching Rivers”
To the Reader
“What is love?” Shakespeare mused. The great bard was not the first to ask. I suspect our ancestors pondered this question a million years ago as they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars.
In this book I have tried to answer this seemingly unanswerable question. Several things motivated me. I have loved and won and loved and lost; I have certainly experienced the joy and agony of romantic love. Moreover, I am convinced that this passion is a foundation stone of human social life, that just about every human being who has ever lived has felt the ecstasy and the despair of romantic love. Perhaps most important, a clearer understanding of this whirlwind may help people find and sustain this glorious passion.
So in 1996 I began a multipart investigation to unravel that mystery of mysteries, the experience of “being in love.” Why we love. Why we choose the people that we choose. How men and women vary in their romantic feelings. Love at first sight. Love and lust. Love and marriage. Animal love. How love evolved. Love and hate. The brain in love. These became major themes of this book. I also hoped to gain some insight into how we might control this unpredictable and often dangerous fire in the heart.
Romantic love, I believe, is one of three primordial brain networks that evolved to direct mating and reproduction.
Lust,
the craving for sexual gratification, emerged to motivate our ancestors to seek sexual union with almost any partner.
Romantic love,
the elation and obsession of “being in love,” enabled them to focus their courtship attentions on a single individual at a time, thereby conserving precious mating time and energy. And male-female
attachment,
the feeling of calm, peace, and security one often has for a long-term mate, evolved to motivate our ancestors to love this partner long enough to rear their young together.
In short, romantic love is deeply embedded in the architecture and chemistry of the human brain.
But what actually produces this thing called love?
To investigate this, I decided to make use of the newest technology for brain scanning, known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to try to record the brain activity of men and women who had just fallen madly in love.
For this important part of my investigation, I was fortunate to be joined by two exceptionally gifted colleagues, Dr. Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Dr. Arthur Aron, a research psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Debra Mashek, then a doctoral candidate in psychology at SUNY Stony Brook, Greg Strong, another SUNY psychology graduate student, and Dr. Haifang Li, a radiologist at SUNY Stony Brook, all talented individuals, also played crucial roles. Over a period of six years, we scanned the brains of more than forty men and women who were wildly in love, collecting some one hundred forty-four pictures of brain activity from each. Half of our participants were men and women whose love was reciprocated; the rest had recently been rejected by someone they adored. We wanted to record the range of feelings associated with “being in love.”
The results were startling. We found gender differences that may help explain why men respond so passionately to visual stimuli and why women can remember details of the relationship. We discovered ways in which the brain in love changes over time. We established some of the brain regions that become active when you feel romantic ecstasy, information that suggests new ways to sustain romance in long-term partnerships. I came to believe that animals feel a form of romantic attraction for one another. Our findings shed new light on stalking behavior and other crimes of passion. And I now understand more about why we feel so depressed and angry when we are rejected, and even some ways to stimulate the brain to soothe the anguish.
Most important, our results changed my thinking about the very essence of romantic love. I came to see this passion as a fundamental human drive. Like the craving for food and water and the maternal instinct, it is a physiological
need,
a profound urge, an instinct to court and win a particular mating partner.
This drive to fall in love has produced some of humankind’s most compelling operas, plays, and novels, our most touching poems and haunting melodies, the world’s finest sculptures and paintings, and our most colorful festivals, myths, and legends. Romantic love has adorned the world and brought many of us tremendous joy. But when love is scorned, it can cause excruciating sorrow. Stalking, homicide, suicide, profound depression from romantic rejection, and high divorce and adultery rates are prevalent in societies around the world. It’s time to seriously consider Shakespeare’s question: “What is love?”
I hope this book will be as useful to you as writing it has been to me, in our mutual and eternal dance with this monumental force: the instinct to fall in love.
1
“What Wild Ecstasy”:
Being in Love
The world, for me, and all the world can hold
Is circled by your arms; for me there lies,
Within the lights and shadows of your eyes,
The only beauty that is never old.
James Weldon Johnson
“Beauty That Is Never Old”
“Fires run through my body—the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Sickness wanders my body with my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you. Consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain. Where are you going with my love? I’m told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I’ve said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye.”
1
So spoke an anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of southern Alaska in this wrenching poem, transcribed from the native tongue in 1896.
How many men and women have loved each other in all the seasons that preceded you and me? How many of their dreams have been fulfilled; how many of their passions wasted? Often as I walk or sit and contemplate, I wonder at all the heartrending love affairs this planet has absorbed. Fortunately, men and women around the world have left us a great deal of evidence of their romantic lives.
From Uruk, in ancient Sumer, come poems on cuneiform tablets that hail the passion of Inanna, Queen of Sumeria, for Dumuzi, a shepherd boy. “My beloved, the delight of my eyes,” Inanna cried to him over four thousand years ago.
2
Vedic and other Indian texts, the earliest dating between 1000 and 700
B.C.
, tell of Shiva, the mythic Lord of the Universe, who was infatuated with Sati, a young Indian girl. The god mused that “he saw Sati and himself on a mountain pinnacle / enlaced in love.”
3
For some, happiness would never come. Such was Qays, the son of a tribal chieftain in ancient Arabia. An Arabic legend, dating to the seventh century
A.D
., has it that Qays was a beautiful, brilliant boy—until he met Layla, meaning “night” for her jet black hair.
4
So intoxicated was Qays that one day he sprang from his school chair to race through the streets shouting out her name. Henceforth he was known as Majnun, or madman. Soon Majnun began to drift with the desert sand, living in caves with the animals, singing verses to his beloved, while Layla, cloistered in her father’s tent, slipped out at night to toss love notes to the wind. Sympathetic passersby would bring these appeals to the wild-haired, almost-naked poet boy. Their mutual passion would eventually lead to war between their tribes—and death to the lovers. Only this legend remains.
Meilan also lived by dying. In the twelfth century
A.D
. Chinese fable “The Jade Goddess,” Meilan was the pampered fifteen-year-old daughter of a high official in Kaifeng—until she fell in love with Chang Po, a vivacious lad with long tapered fingers and a gift for carving jade. “Since the heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I was made for you and I will not let you go,” Chang Po declared to Meilan one morning in her family’s garden.
5
These lovers were of different classes in China’s rigid, hierarchical social order, however. Desperate, they eloped—then were soon discovered. He escaped. She was buried alive in her father’s garden. But the tale of Meilan still haunts the souls of many Chinese.
Romeo and Juliet, Paris and Helen, Orpheus and Eurydice, Abelard and Eloise, Troilus and Cressida, Tristan and Iseult: thousands of romantic poems, songs, and stories come across the centuries from ancestral Europe, as well as the Middle East, Japan, China, India, and every other society that has left written records.
Even where people have no written documents, they have left evidence of this passion. In fact, in a survey of 166 varied cultures, anthropologists found evidence of romantic love in 147, almost 90 percent of them.
6
In the remaining 19 societies, scientists had simply failed to examine this aspect of people’s lives. But from Siberia to the Australian Outback to the Amazon, people sing love songs, compose love poems, and recount myths and legends of romantic love. Many perform love magic—carrying amulets and charms or serving condiments or concoctions to stimulate romantic ardor. Many elope. And many suffer deeply from unrequited love. Some kill their lovers. Some kill themselves. Many sink into a sorrow so profound that they can hardly eat or sleep.
From reading the poems, songs, and stories of people around the world, I came to believe that the capacity for romantic love is woven firmly into the fabric of the human brain. Romantic love is a universal human experience.
What is this volatile, often uncontrollable feeling that hijacks the mind, bringing bliss one moment, despair the next?
7
The Love Survey
“O tell me the truth about love,” exclaimed poet W. H. Auden. To understand what this profound human experience actually entails, I canvassed the psychological literature on romantic love, culling those traits, symptoms, or conditions that were mentioned repeatedly. Not surprising, this potent feeling is a complex of many specific traits.
8
Then, to satisfy myself that these characteristics of romantic passion are universal, I used them as the basis for a questionnaire I designed on romantic love. And with the assistance of Michelle Cristiani, then a graduate student at Rutgers University, as well as Dr. Mariko Hasagawa and Dr. Toshikazu Hasagawa at the University of Tokyo, I distributed this survey among men and women at and around Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of Tokyo.
The poll began: “This questionnaire is about ‘being in love,’ the feelings of being infatuated, being passionate, or being strongly romantically attracted to someone.