Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (32 page)

Together with a few friends from the lab I had planned to go on a long bike-ride along the river. But spring was late and the weather was uncertain that weekend. Clouds came and went and an annoying drizzle convinced us to change our plans. A movie followed by dinner seemed like a worthwhile alternative, so we all arranged to meet in front of the cinema in time for the six o’ clock screening. As often happened, I arrived early, so I waited outside by a stall where they sold ice-cream and popcorn, watching people walk by.

The rain had briefly stopped and, at a certain point, as I turned to see if my friends were coming up the road, my eyes landed on something I would not easily forget.

On the other side of the road, with one leg bent against the wall and an arm embracing a big cello case, stood a tall, dashing young man whose presence shone bright and demanded notice. He looked like he was waiting for someone as well. Our eyes locked and my perception of the surroundings became murky. I felt quickly absorbed into another reality. A building could have collapsed next to me without my noticing it. I read delight in his face as well as a tinge of surprise and curiosity. Then he smiled, complacently, and I smiled in return, as if to acknowledge something we were both eager to discover and know better. Simply paralysed, I pondered what to do. I didn’t want to look too eager, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. I wanted to get closer, find out his name, inspect his face more closely. Was he a tourist, a touring musician, or was he too a student? If so, how was it possible that I had not seen him in town before?

As I asked myself these questions, the boy started to walk towards me. Incredulous, I closed my eyes and lost my breath for a moment. I rushed to come up with something kind and smart to say, but as he was getting closer, it all stopped. ‘Here we are! Sorry for being late!’ By pure coincidence both his and my friends showed up at the same time and shyness got the better of us. Result: neither of us said anything. The unknown beauty and I looked at each other again briefly and, as I was ushered into the cinema, he and his friends walked off towards the main square. The undying brightness of his face stayed as a blinding after-image in the darkness of the theatre, still against the motion of the movie, lodging itself firmly in the depths of my wishing well.

To this day, I still can’t recall what movie I watched. It didn’t matter.

The whole of my attention was unreservedly concentrated on the vision of this new creature I had never seen before in town. When I came out of the cinema, there was obviously no trace of him, and I started to obsessively wonder if I would ever see him again.

For a few days, it felt as if I had a fever. My mood swung sharply during the day; I found myself daydreaming, but also restless. I couldn’t sleep. I would often think of him, the more so because I was afraid of forgetting his face and what he looked like.

Love is, above all, insanity. When in the initial fiery stages of love, we enter a space in which fears, desires and outlook on life are shifted. Priorities change. The ecstasy taking possession of us is so strong that as well as falling in love with a particular individual, we tend to feel at harmony with the entire world. We become optimistic and overlook things that used to annoy us.

If the target of our desire is the recipient of unfaltering consideration, he or she is also a source of recognition for us. As we highlight and underline the other’s attractive properties, when we approach them we are also in search of confirmations of our own value. We enjoy being noticed and appreciated. What we need is gratification, a regard for our own self-worth. Love definitely sits on the positive end of the rainbow of emotions. It is – mostly – a source of joy. Of all emotions, love is perhaps the most complex, ambiguous and unpredictable, but also one of the most rewarding, both when giving and when receiving it. Alone, it encapsulates feelings of joy, anxiety, jealousy, sadness, and even anger, guilt or regret.
¹
Almost everyone is or has been interested in it during a phase of their lives, or at its mercy. In 2012 ‘What is Love?’ was the most searched question on Google.
²

In the previous chapter I concluded that meaningful friendships rank very high as a contributor to happiness. Yet for many, love, by which is meant the reciprocal affection and passion between two individuals, beats friendships. We could all be fine with friends. Yet we seek the exclusive affection of one individual. Though hard to define, and sometimes even more difficult to achieve, true love remains one of the ultimate life goals to which a lot of human beings aspire.

What’s neuroscience got to do with it?

Up until the second half of the twentieth century, molecular explanations of love were not the most prevalent. In our cultural imagery, the fabric of love is not made of molecules and units of DNA, but of passionate, fugitive moments of ardour and union. Love and its secrets also belong to intimate conversations. It seeps through confidential chatter among friends and lovers of all levels of expertise who share their successes or failures in dealing with it, always in search of rules and precedents that can teach how to go about it.

So, the question is: can love be studied in the laboratory and trapped in a test tube? Indeed, from a neuroscience perspective, love is still only sparsely understood. Neuroscientists have the curiosity and ambition to dissect the wonder of love into its neural components. An increasing number of studies involving genetics, neurochemistry and brain imaging have sought to explain all phases and kinds of love, from the passionate establishment of romantic bonds to sexual pleasure, maternal love, relationship attachment and the desolate experience of rejection. Doubtless, this mighty emotion reflects considerable and tangible changes in our bodies.

The fact, for instance, that we focus our attention on one human being alone and that we imaginatively build sexual fantasies, scenarios of intimacy and prospects of union with them reflects enormous changes in our cognitive and emotional life, which, of course, involves tremendous rearrangement in neuronal wiring.

However, especially during the initial phases of my infatuation, my knowledge of neuroscience and experience in the laboratory had little or nothing to offer to make sense of what was going on or what I was feeling – except that I knew my brain was definitely orchestrating the production of more hormones than normal.

 • • • 

You may be wondering: did I find him, or ever see that beauty again?

Of course I did, and relatively fast. Love is an incendiary passion, but also a powerful motivator. I embarked on a resolute mission to find him. I returned to the city centre and the area around the cinema a few times hoping to bump into him again. I asked friends for any clues, roamed all the libraries in town, carefully screened all the bars I went to. And, of course, sieved all the classical music concerts to find the cello again, in case he played in the town or university orchestra. All that fuss for a once-seen man!

Eventually my persistence and incessant search proved fruitful. Unexpectedly, of all places, the stranger appeared again in one of Heidelberg’s open-air swimming pools. Who would have foretold? I remember I had been swimming for an hour already and that I was ready to leave, but when I saw him emerge from the changing rooms, I obviously decided to stay longer, with a strong determination to talk to him.

It took one more mile of front crawl, but in the end, we settled on a date.

The madness did not recede. If anything, it increased, unearthing a thin edge of anxiety, too. The day of our meeting, I was electrified. Like I explained in the previous chapter, the expectation of pleasure and reward is already a generous source of well-being. In Germany this is common knowledge:
Vorfreude ist die schönste Freude
, they say: Anticipation is the best joy.
It brings excitement. Like a bee finding the best garden in which to forage, I felt I had spotted the best flower.

In the midst of all of this and eager for good advice and tips on how best to behave I left the lab early in the afternoon and plunged into Plato’s books on love, convinced that I would find inspiration in those pages.
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To my good fortune, the ancient Greeks could actually tell me a great deal about some of the dynamics of love, even in the twentieth century. In
Phaedrus
, Plato offers a clear idea of the madness of love. He grants it divine origins and a favourable, important role in our lives. As a divine gift, love can only generate good and makes us search for goodness. It is ranked alongside the experience of being possessed by the Muses of poetry, a ‘Bacchic frenzy’ – that is a madness similar to being drunk or on a high – without which no poet can, on the basis of linguistic erudition or craft alone, compose any good poetry.

Even nobler than the madness inspired by the Muses of art and poetry, the kind of divine possession felt by a lover is a madness manifested when we see or are reminded of true beauty. Plato uses an apt image to visualize the condition of love. Love is so exhilarating that it makes us desire to spread wings and rise up. We want to fly high. Unable to do so, we are set into some kind of unremitting motion; we flutter and quiver and ‘gaze aloft’, wanting to elevate ourselves, and this makes us look as if we had gone mad. The Athenian philosopher also discusses what makes a lover ‘successful’. What measured combination of skilful conversation, wit and charm should one employ to best seduce and conquer the beloved? And does it make sense to love someone who doesn’t requite our passion? Love is a relentless impulse that generates an inner struggle. To exemplify this tension, Plato used an allegory that has by now become widely celebrated. He said that the mind (in his words the soul, or
nous
in Greek) is comparable to a charioteer driving a pair of winged horses. One of the horses is noble, of good nature, docile and obedient. The other, of opposite bloodline, is irrational, undisciplined and harder to tame.

The allegory is appropriate for matters of love. Charged with poetry and philosophical authority, the image used by Plato reflects a central dilemma in the protocol of love that has persisted throughout time and still haunts lovers nowadays: shall we follow our instinct to seek pleasure – including the pursuit of bodily consumption – or shall we let reason and judgement control our actions? Applied to the early phases of love and courtship this might read: is it helpful to let madness get the better of us, or is it wiser to save our best sentiments for when we are certain that we have conquered him or her? In modern terms: shall we play hard to get, or shall we take the initiative?

A common misunderstanding of Platonic love is that it is entirely void of erotic expression. Love, according to Plato, brims with desire, initially for physical beauty. But this desire evolves and matures. Over time, it will free itself of the tyranny of the senses and will contemplate other, more elevated forms of beauty such as personal and moral beauty, even if trapped in an ageing body. Ultimately, love will ascend to its highest stage, comparable to a savant’s passionate quest for and acquisition of knowledge. Love becomes shared and mutual exploration and can produce beautiful sentiments and ideas.

On the evening of our first date, the stranger and I set our imaginations into motion. We envisioned entire scenes of our immediate and lasting future. We would be having dinners together, go to exhibitions and travel to an exotic destination to mark the start of an enduring relationship. We would work and create together. We also dreamed of evenings on the couch, of expeditions to the farmers’ market, hikes on the local hills, a road-trip among the vineyards, endless conversations and mutual entertainment. We had no doubt that together we would discover the highest form of love and that we were sanctioning the start of what we thought would bloom into a perfect relationship.

Prime sight

What a lasting effect that stranger had on me, or what a powerful ‘external stimulus’ worthy of approach he was, I should say. I had only seen him for less than five minutes and I decided to pursue him. As George Bernard Shaw put it: ‘Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.’ A few glances have the power to induce an overwhelming mental and physical response. Can we fall for someone we only briefly saw and about whom we know almost nothing?

Sight is traditionally primal to love and poets have endlessly emphasized its essential role in directing the trajectory of Cupid’s arrow. In Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, Apollo, the god of light, after seeing the nymph Daphne is aflame with love for her and pursues her, even though she has no interest in him. After sneaking into a gathering of the Capulets, when Romeo sees Juliet for the first time he instantly falls in love with her and says: ‘Did my heart love ’til now? Forswear it sight / For I ne’er saw true beauty ’til this night.’

Apollo, Romeo, and I myself at the entrance of the cinema theatre, seem to be at the mercy of an erratic, whimsical force that ignites our passions beyond our control. It is no surprise that Cupid, the god of love and the son of Venus and Jupiter, is represented as a child, who arbitrarily shoots his arrows to match two people, almost at random. With or without Cupid’s help, how do we get struck by one specific person and not another? Consider the situation of a party. If we are open to finding a lover, the first thing we do when we enter the crowded room is to scan it quickly to identify and focus on the person we consider a possible match for us.

Long before neurology came into the picture, the science of optics inspired poetic representations of love. For poets at the vibrant court of the great Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in thirteenth-century Sicily, the ignition of love resided in an optical incident. In his court, where scientists and artists of all kinds gathered, Frederick had a talented notary and poet, Jacopo da Lentini (1210–60), who is generally credited with the invention of the sonnet, his preferred form when writing about love. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I too love sonnets and it is a nice coincidence that I grew up not far from Lentini, Jacopo’s home town and also the birthplace of the sonnet. One of Jacopo’s most famous sonnets goes like this: