A Natural History of Love (44 page)

   This is called a dinner date. But what it really is is “courtship feeding.” Many animals do it. Males who wish to copulate with females first offer them food or some other present. Penguins do it. Apes do it. Scorpions do it. Fireflies do it. Humans do it. The purpose is to prove to the female that the male will be a good provider and meet her needs. We think of men as the great seducers in mating dramas, but women do much of the choosing. Women more often initiate a flirtation, women give subtle signs that it’s all right for the courtship to continue, and women decide if they want to go to bed with the men. This also happens among most other animals. Males display for females, who then choose which males they desire. Among the cottontop tamarins, small forest-dwelling monkeys of South America, males do much of the child rearing. If a male wants to mate with a female, he shows up carrying a baby cottontop on his back. That turns the female on. Essentially, the male is telling the female: “See what a caring father I’d make? I’d be great with your kids.”

What else do females choose in a male? High on the list is health. Females recoil from signs of disease, parasites, or infirmity. An exhausting courtship display doesn’t just impress a female with a male’s seriousness, it tells her if the male is hardy, if his cardiovascular system is strong, if he has the stamina to be her mate. She could also learn this through athletics, spirited play, or sending him out on quests. Or she could make him serenade her. Female gray tree frogs are attracted to operatic males that will sing sprightly numbers long into the Caribbean night. The males use vast amounts of oxygen in the process and tire themselves; but that suits the female fine. She wants a robust, vigorous crooner who will sire hearty offspring. For some species of frogs, more than exhaustion is at stake. A few years ago, bat biologist Merlin Tuttle discovered how
Trachops cirrhosus
, a Central American bat, stalked its prey by sound. Preferring the taste of the frog
Physalaemus
, the bat listens for the male frog’s mating call. The louder the song, the plumper and juicier the frog. This puts the frog in an awkward position. It needs to sing for a mate to perpetuate its kind—and in the tropical night it is full of sexual longing—but singing also reveals its whereabouts to any hungry
Trachops cirrhosus
bat. Should it sing halfheartedly, the female frogs won’t be impressed, even though the bat may think it’s a lovesick runt. If it sings about its prowess with large, croaking, swollen pride, then a bat is bound to court the frog in ways too ghoulish to describe.

Wealth is also important. A female wants a generous male who will protect and support her offspring. When a male
Pyrochroidae
beetle desires a female, he shows her a deep cleft in his forehead as one of his display moves. She’s impressed all right. It’s a hell of a deep cleft. In beetle terms, he’s a hunk, a handsome, well-endowed beetle. So she grabs his head, licks it, and permits him to mate. What the male carries in his cleft is a small dose of a poison she’s immune to that will protect her future eggs from ants and other predators. He gives her just a taste of it during foreplay to let her know that it would be in her best interest to mate with him, because during intercourse she would receive a huge gift of the precious chemical along with his sperm. “It’s as though he’s showing her a fat wallet,” entomologist Tom Eisner explains, “and saying, ‘There’s more in the bank where that came from.’ “

Female bowerbirds of New Guinea choose multitalented males, those who collect the most ornaments, design the most extravagant nests, and put on the best sideshow dance. Any male who isn’t a gifted interior decorator and builder is a nerd. So males construct architectural wonders (sometimes nine feet tall) out of sticks, lichens, ferns, and leaves. Then they decorate the nests with orchids, snail shells, butterfly wings, flowers, bits of charcoal, bird-of-paradise feathers, seeds, fungi, beetle carapaces, ballpoint-pen tops, toothbrushes, bracelets, shotgun cartridges, or whatever else they can find. A sense of decor drives the males wild. As the flowers wilt, they freshen them daily. There is always a carefully considered color scheme, blue being the favorite. Researchers have counted as many as 500 decorations on a single bower. Because fierce battles arise between piratical males trying to plunder a neighbor’s nest for decorations, a well-stocked bower advertises a male’s power. Females are attracted to males with large, artistically designed bachelor pads in good repair. For the bowerbird to build a seductive bower, Jared Diamond explains, “a male must be endowed with physical strength, dexterity and endurance, plus searching skills and memory—as if women were to choose husbands on the basis of a triathlon contest extended to include a chess game and sewing exercise.” When a female is attracted to the bowerbird equivalent of a ritzy flat and a flashy red sports car, the male grovels at her feet, cackles and squeaks his appeals as he dances around her, pointing to various objets d’art with his bill. All the male wants to give her is his seed. Therefore a razzmatazz seduction is essential; courtship is his all. The male hopes to attract and mate with as many females as possible. But the female needs to get pregnant by just one extraordinary male, and then fly off to build a modest, inconspicuous nest where she’ll raise her young by herself.

If our couple decides to go dancing after dinner, or to a nightclub, or a bar, they’ll bathe their minds in pop songs. It won’t matter if the songs are rock, country, or easy-listening—all will be about love. Popular music has an obsession with love. Occasionally, there will be a work song, or, rather, a “take this job and shove it” song. Or a poignant song about the sacrifices Mom or Dad made to raise the kids. But there are no songs about the joys of heli-arc welding or how much fun it is to go sledding. Pop songs vivisect relationships. They are the primary source of love education for adolescents. The airwaves have become our troubadours. People all over the country can turn on their car radios, television sets, or CD players, and hear the same songs at the same time. In pop songs we share our myths and ideals about love. In a tough, mercantile way, they warn us what love may cost. But they also alert us to what grandeur it may bring. They offer advice on whom to love, how to know if it’s the real thing, what to do if one’s betrayed, how to cope if love disintegrates. We are constantly in love, looking for love, losing love, or hurt by love; in short, we are “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Our songs say it all.

In evolutionary terms, humans have not required music for mating, but we do find it hypnotic and seductive. A language of pure emotion, music heightens courtship, and most cultures include music in their mating rituals. For the Cheyenne Indians, courtship took time and was suffused with romance. A brave would hide in the woods waiting for his sweetheart to pass and then serenade her on a special love flute. In time, his melodies worked their way into her heart. Then he would woo her with compliments, gifts, and attentions. But she would not make love with him before they wed. A Cheyenne girl put on a chastity belt at puberty and wore it until she married. She might keep her beau waiting for five years or so, which gave him plenty of time to master the flute, a phallic symbol of the beautiful music his body had to offer.

The Cheyenne maiden wouldn’t have been comfortable if her beau sang songs with sexually explicit lyrics. I can’t imagine what she’d make of such pop songs as “Sexual Healing.” Love songs of the twenties “sang of carefree nights and frenetic days,” says Richard Rodgers, “that rushed headlong into the nightmare and fantasy of the thirties…. Breadlines seemed less burdensome if one could sing.” During the thirties, forties, and fifties, women yearned in love songs for love to save them, to give their lives meaning and direction. Without love, a woman was worthless. Nothing a man could do to a woman was too great a price to pay for the gift of his love. Hence the popularity of such songs as “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” in which the man is shiftless and unworthy but the singer is glad to love him anyway. Men idealized women as angelic creatures with a talent for sorcery, who stole their hearts, enslaved their thoughts, and made them feel irrational. Women called the shots in most love-song relationships. The ability to drive a man crazy with love was the only real power a woman had. Enjoying sex was not something women could talk about openly. If singers like Billie Holiday sometimes cooed “The meat is sweeter closer to the bone,” it was deliciously scandalous. When rock and roll hit in the fifties and sixties, love songs suddenly reflected social revolution, uninhibited sex, love as mysticism, and a rejection of middle-class taboos. Love was a religion again, one that could save the world, as the Beatles and other groups proclaimed. By the time the eighties rolled around, men in pop songs were loners who wanted sex but not commitment. “Baby, baby, don’t get stuck on me,” a typical song warned, because men were tough and lean and troubled and they just weren’t “the marrying kind.” Today, pop songs tend to be clever and cynical. Now that sex is freely available, and inhibition and denial have given way to frankness, songs have changed from coy, romantic euphemisms to yowls of blunt desire. The lyrics have gotten sexier, even raunchy at times, and simple lamentation has turned into hard truths and stark reality. But in many of today’s songs singers croon again for head-over-heels love, and psychologists Schlachet and Waxenberg think perhaps this

renewed interest in enduring love is a backlash against a culture of narcissism and consumption that emphasizes the primacy of the individual over the human need to relate in an interdependent way, which leaves its members feeling empty and alienated with nothing but the quick fix of a new sensation to provide temporary comfort.

They see hope in the popularity of albums by Linda Ronstadt, Barbra Streisand, and Carly Simon that return to ballads of the thirties and forties.

Why do so many people listen to love songs? In imaginative envy, we idealize what we don’t have. The act of yearning for something transmutes it from base metal into gold. Anyway, putting a lid on sexuality inspires romance, because people are then driven to fantasize about it. Romantic love does occur in tribes where sex is freely available (particularly if one is forced to marry someone they don’t prefer), but not as often and not as an institution. Denial, repression, and inhibition all feed romantic love, because people obsess about satisfying their biological drives, yet cannot avoid the confines of morality. In that climate, pop songs stoke the hottest fantasies and keep the idea of romance alive. For some people, down-and-dirty love songs are all the romance they can find, and whether it reminds them of yesteryear or defines what they’re waiting for, it sounds good. It’s a little like waving slabs of beef before a caged lion so he doesn’t forget the scent of a fresh kill. Men who can’t put their feelings in words without embarrassment and discomfort are often able to sing passionate and sentimental love songs. Singing someone else’s lyrics gives them a railing to hold on to. Just as the worst stutterers can (usually) sing fluently, men who are emotional stutterers can express their feelings through song. “If music be the food of love,” Shakespeare wrote, “play on.”

After their dinner date, our couple feels a mixture of hope and uncertainty, the twin ingredients necessary for romance to thrive. Both of them have gone through agonizing divorces. He still has dark circles under his heart from his ex-wife’s infidelities and the painful breakup. Her key problem with her ex-husband was that she was married to Hammurabi, a man who thought he was the ultimate judge and deviser of laws. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope, or fails as often, as love. But, despite that, they are searching again for “the glory, jest, and riddle of the world,” as Alexander Pope called love. They have many things in common—their age, work, taste in music, attitudes about life—but, most of all, timing. They are both ready to risk love: a critical stage. Once someone is ready, willing, and able to love, they often fall for the next appropriate person they meet. Both are tantalized by love’s slow dance, which they know can begin in the damnedest places: on back roads that spin along like time itself; an interlude in a redneck’s arms; in the company cafeteria; on the spine-cracking seat of an old pickup truck; while gutter-crawling through ramshackle country pubs. What starts as a simple arithmetic of limbs and desire can suddenly become a calculus of powerful feelings. Until then, not even the low soughing of the elms, blood-dark under the August moon, not even the apple tree in the yard, sweeping one heavy bough like a censer, not even pond glow frizzled bright as a marquee, can shake the heart from its waiting.

“Falling in love,” we call it, as if into a pothole, and “falling out of love,” as if out of an airplane. When you’re in love, you’re in a bowl of its thick stew. The sides of the bowl are slippery and no matter how hard you try to climb out you keep sliding back in. As this couple strolls arm in arm, other couples are falling in love in Finland, in Patagonia, in Madagascar. Conducting a worldwide study of 168 cultures, anthropologists William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer found romantic love in 87 percent of them. In most of those, the men give the women food or other small gifts as part of the courtship. Despite their different cultures, fashions, and worldviews, they would all understand the dinner date. They would all know how it feels to free-fall through the atmospheres of infatuation, with hope as the only parachute. They all long to be “a couple,” that emotional jigsaw puzzle with only two pieces.

FLESH OF MY FLESH: THE MARRIAGE