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“Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all / Withhold no atom’s atom or I die.” Keats wanted to possess every bit of his beloved.
Men and women of ancient India called romantic love “the eternal dance of the universe.”51 They were right.
Dopamine involvement may even explain why love-stricken men and women become so dependent on their romantic relationship and why they crave emotional union with their beloved. Dependency and craving are symptoms of addiction—and all of the major addictions are associated with elevated levels of dopamine.8 Is romantic love an addiction? Yes; I think it is—a blissful dependency when one’s love is returned, a painful, sorrowful, and often destructive craving when one’s love is spurned.
In John Donne’s words, “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”18 Love springs up everywhere, at any time.
When a neuron is electrically stimulated by a nearby neuron, the impulse often prompts these neurotransmitters to exit from a nerve cell, sail across a tiny gap, or synapse, and dock at “receptor sites” on the next nerve cell. This way neurotransmitters send an electrical impulse along, cell by cell. Each nerve cell has about one thousand of these synaptic connections; and there are some 10 trillion synapses between nerve cells in the human brain. Some machine! Each nerve cell communicates only with specific others, however, producing nerve networks that connect specific brain parts and
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First of all, like drives, romantic attraction is tenacious; it is very hard to extinguish. Emotions, on the other hand, come and go; you can be happy in the morning and angry in the afternoon. Like drives, romantic love is focussed on a specific reward, the beloved, in the same way that hunger is focussed on food. Emotions, like disgust, pin themselves to an immense variety of objects and ideas. In fact, romantic love is linked with many diverse emotions depending on whether this urge is being satisfied or frustrated. Like drives, romantic love is not associated with any particular facial
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“The BRAIN—is wider than the sky—,” wrote Emily Dickinson.44 Indeed, this three-pound blob can generate a need so intense that all the world has sung of it: romantic love.
Love is a harmony, as Shakespeare wrote, sometimes even a cacophony of sensations. Exuberance, tenderness, compassion, possessiveness, rapture, adoration, longing, despair: romance is a kaleidoscopic pattern of shifting needs and feelings all tethered to a celestial being on whose slightest word or smile one dangles, spinning with hope and joy and craving. Complexity, thy name is love.
Love changes over time. It becomes deeper, calmer. No longer do couples talk all day or dance till dawn. The mad passion, the ecstasy, the longing, the obsessive thinking, the heightened energy: all dissolve. But if you are fortunate, this magic transforms itself into new feelings of security, comfort, calm, and union with your partner. Psychologist Elaine Hatfield calls this feeling “companionate love,” a feeling of happy togetherness with someone whose life has become deeply entwined with yours.45 I call this complex feeling “attachment.”
“Wild is love,” as the song goes.
There is a great deal of psychological literature on types of love, as well as on the various components of love and styles of loving.73 One conceptualization of love that is popular among contemporary social scientists is that of psychologist Robert Sternberg. Sternberg divides love into three basic ingredients: passion—including romance, physical attraction, and sexual craving; intimacy—all of those feelings of warmth, closeness, connectedness, and bondedness; and decision/commitment—the decision to love someone and the commitment to sustain that love.74
Romantic love is also linked to a host of more complex feelings. Respect, admiration, loyalty, gratitude, sympathy, apprehension, bashfulness, nostalgia, remorse, even the sense of fairness: philosopher Dylan Evans calls these “higher cognitive emotions”77 because they are not fast-acting or associated with specific facial mannerisms;
Romantic love can dominate the drive to eat and sleep. It can stifle fear, anger, or disgust. It can override one’s sense of duty to family and friends. It can even triumph over the will to live. As Keats said, “I could die for you.” “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning. There are so many ways. Like a chord on a piano, the feeling of romantic passion harmonizes with myriad other feelings, drives, and thoughts to create different melodies in different keys. Moreover, each of us is wired somewhat differently. Some are predisposed to happiness; others to
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“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Yeats asked.
Osiris, the legendary ruler of predynastic Egypt, was overwhelmed by the physical beauty of his beloved wife, Isis. As he wrote over four thousand years ago, “Isis has cast her net, / and ensnared me / in the noose of her hair / I am held by her eyes / curbed by her necklace / imprisoned by the scent of her skin.”31
On average, women everywhere in the world are more skilled with the nuances of language, an ability linked to the female hormone, estrogen.
“Love looks not with the eyes, but the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind,” wrote Shakespeare.66
As Maurice Sendak wisely noted, childhood is “damned serious business.”
“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms / numberless times, / In life after life, in age after age forever … / Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end / in you, / The love of all man’s days both past and forever.” Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore sensed that his passion for a woman had come across the eons from a mind built long ago.
The first human conversations were probably about the weather. I say this because I am constantly amazed at how earnestly and repeatedly people converse on this matter.
Not the computer, the printing press, the steam engine, or the wheel would transform humanity as did this basic technological development: controlling flame. With fire they could harden points on spears, smoke small mammals from their burrows, drive elephants into bogs, steal a lion’s supper, and frighten all sorts of creatures from their caves—and then move in. The sick, the young, the old could lounge in camp. They were able to maintain a camp. And they could extend the day into the night, talk around the flame, and sleep in its protective glow. Unchained from the circadian rhythms of all
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Of course, our Homo erectus forebears had other vital reasons to develop uniquely human capacities. Nariokotome Boy and his relatives needed to feel empathy for a wounded comrade, patience for a cranky child, understanding for a disgruntled teen, and to develop the social graces to get along with obstreperous or pompous members of the group. They were a band. They had to move together through the grass, a killing field for predators. So those who could perceive dangers, remember past calamities, devise strategies, articulate choices, make decisions, judge distances, foresee obstacles, and
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By thirty thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon people sported totally modern human skulls, as well as brains like yours and mine. Now they would decorate just about everything they touched.
Humanity had emerged from its jungle crucible. Someday we may lift off from Earth entirely and soar toward the stars. These voyagers will carry in their heads exquisite mental machinery born on the grass of ancient Africa over a million years ago. Among these special talents will be our wit, our flair for poetry, the arts, and drama, a charitable spirit, and many other courting traits, including the astonishing human ability to fall head-over-heels in love.
“Parting is,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “all we need to know of hell.”
Poet Donald Yates once wrote, “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.”
“One of the relics of early man is modern man,” wrote psychiatrist David Hamburg.
“Love’s weather is so fair,” wrote William Cavendish.2 Indeed, we radiate when we love.
World poetry and literature even refer to romantic passion as a form of hunger. In the Song of Songs, the ancient Hebrew love poem, the woman exclaimed, “I am starved for his love.”3 In the Chinese fable “The Jade Goddess,” Chang Po said to his beloved, Meilan, I “crave to see you.”4 In the Arabian tale, Majnun cried out, “My beloved, send a greeting, a message, a word. I am starving for a token, a gesture from you.”5 And Richard de Fournival in his thirteenth-century book, Advice on Love, said of this magic, “Love is an unquenchable fire, a hunger without surfeit.”
Our fMRI experiment on people in love supports this proposition: romantic love is an addictive drug.
“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by the imagination,” Voltaire wrote.
“Exuberance is beauty,” wrote William Blake.
Female orgasm most likely evolved to suit many purposes. But scientists have long thought it emerged, at least in part, to distinguish Mr. Right from Mr. Wrong. This “fickle” orgasmic response helped ancestral women recognize lovers who were willing to commit valuable time and energy to pleasing them. It still does.
The ancient Greeks called romantic love the “madness of the Gods.”
