Why We Love (13 page)

As I have said, the interactions between these chemical systems for lust and attachment are complex and variable. But there is data to suggest that as people grow like “two lovely berries moulded on one stem,” the chemistry of attachment can dampen lust. This is probably why men and women in long stable marriages tend to spend less time in their bedroom making love.

But what about romance? How does dopamine, the fuel of romantic love, affect levels of vasopressin and oxytocin, the brain’s intoxicants for attachment? Do deep feelings of union and attachment enhance or stifle romantic passion?

Romance
and
Attachment?

Nature isn’t tidy. She likes options. And there is no definite relationship between the neurotransmitters of romance and the hormones of attachment. As should be said of all these chemical interactions: it depends.

Under some circumstances, dopamine and norepinephrine can stimulate the release of oxytocin and vasopressin
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—and contribute to one’s growing feelings of attachment. But increasing levels of oxytocin (found in both men and women) can also interfere with dopamine and norepinephrine pathways in the brain,
decreasing
the impact of these excitatory substances.
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Hence the chemistry of attachment can quell the chemistry of romance.

There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence for this negative chemical relationship between attachment and romantic love. People around the world say the exhilaration of romance wanes as their marriage or partnership becomes increasingly stable, comfortable, and secure. Some even go to psychiatrists or marriage counselors to try to renew romantic passion in their relationship. Some seek romance outside their marriage instead. Some divorce. And many settle into a long-term partnership devoid of romantic bliss.

I have mixed feelings about this fate nature has decreed. First, many of us would die of sexual exhaustion if romantic love flourished endlessly in a relationship. We wouldn’t get to work on time or concentrate on anything except “him” or “her.” Moreover, as romantic love matures, it often expands into hundreds of complex and fulfilling feelings of attachment that produce an enormously intricate, interesting, and emotionally rewarding union with another living soul.

At the same time, I think you can keep the primal flame of romantic ecstasy alive in a long-term comfortable relationship, as I will discuss in chapter eight.

But to maintain that magic you have to play a few tricks on the brain. Why? Because romantic love did not evolve to help us maintain a stable, enduring partnership. It evolved for different purposes: to drive ancestral men and women to prefer, choose, and pursue specific mating partners, then start the mating process and remain sexually faithful to “him” or “her” long enough to conceive a child. After the child is born, however, parents need a new set of chemicals and brain networks to rear their infant as a team—the chemistry of attachment. As a result, feelings of attachment often dampen the ecstasy of romance, replacing it with a deep sense of union with a mate.

The Trellis of Love

In spite of this evolutionary trajectory of loving, in which romantic passion gradually transforms into feelings of deep attachment, these three brain circuits—lust, romantic love, and attachment—can ignite in any combination.

In the traditional Western course of events, you meet a man or woman. You talk and laugh and begin to “date.” Rapidly or gradually you fall in love. As the camaraderie escalates to bliss, your sex drive surges into higher action. Then after months or years of joyous times together, your raging romantic passion and raw sexual hunger begin to wane, replaced by what Theodor Reik called that warm “afterglow,”
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attachment. In this scenario, romantic love has triggered lust; then with time, these raw feelings of passion and desire have settled into a sinew of emotional union and commitment—attachment.

Lust, romance, and attachment can visit you in other sequences, however. You may begin a liaison with someone for whom you feel only sexual desire. For a few months you have sex irregularly. Then one day you begin to feel possessive. Soon you fall in love with “him” or “her.” And over time you become deeply emotionally entwined. In this case, lust has preceded romance, which then led to attachment.

Then there are couples who actually begin their relationship with feelings of attachment. They quickly achieve emotional union in the college dorm, at the office, or in their social circle. They become fast friends. With time, this attachment metamorphoses into romantic passion—which finally triggers lust.

Alas, many of us also have periods in our lives when these three mating drives—lust, romantic love, and attachment—do not focus on the same person. It seems to be the destiny of humankind that we are
neurologically
able to love more than one person at a time. You can feel profound attachment for a long-term spouse,
while
you feel romantic passion for someone in the office or your social circle,
while
you feel the sex drive as you read a book, watch a movie, or do something else unrelated to either partner. You can even swing from one feeling to another.

In fact, as you lie in the dark at night you can become engulfed by feelings of attachment to your spouse; then seconds later you feel crazy romantic passion for someone you just met; then you become aware of sexual craving as an unrelated image sweeps into mind. As these three brain circuits fire interactively, yet independently, you feel as if you are having a committee meeting in your head.

“Wild is love,” as the song goes. Lust, romantic love, and deep attachment can visit you in such different and unexpected combinations that many people have come to believe the mixture of sensations that draws you to another is mysterious, elusive, perhaps even heaven-sent. But once you begin to envisage lust, romantic love, and attachment as three specific mating drives, each producing many gradations of feeling that endlessly combine and recombine in countless different ways, love takes on tangibility. Even the elaborate love schemas of the classical Greeks make sense.

Types of Love

The ancient Greeks were the world’s masters at scrutinizing various kinds of love. They had over ten words to distinguish different types. Psychologist John Alan Lee reduced these overlapping categories into six.
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But to my mind, each appears to be a different blend of the three basic mating circuits in the brain: lust, romantic love, and attachment.

The most celebrated is
eros,
or passionate, sexual, erotic, joyful, high-energy love for a very special partner. I think eros is a combination of lust and romantic love.

Mania
is obsessive, jealous, irrational, possessive, dependent love. Most people are exceedingly obsessive, illogical, and possessive when they are passionately in love.

Ludus
(rhymes with Brutus) is the Latin word for game or play. This is playful, unserious, uncommitted, detached love. These lovers can love more than one person at a time. For them, love is theater, an art form. Ludus appears to be a variation of mild lust coupled with fun and frivolity.

Storge
(rhymes with “more gay”) is an affectionate companionate, brotherly, sisterly, friendly kind of love, a deep and special friendship that lacks a display of emotion. These people prefer to talk about their interests rather than their feelings. This is “love without fever or folly,” as Proudhon put it. To me, storge is a form of attachment.

Agape
is a gentle, unselfish, dutiful, all-giving, altruistic, often spiritual love—another form of attachment. These lovers regard their sentiments as a duty, not a passion. Some are even willing to give up the relationship when it is best for the beloved; hence they will surrender willingly to a rival.

Last is
pragma,
love based on compatibility and common sense: pragmatic love. This is “shopping list” love. Pragmatic lovers keep score; they look for the perks of the relationship as well as its flaws. These men and women are not moved to excessive sacrifice or emotion. For them, friendship is a core of the relationship. I don’t regard pragma as love at all.

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.
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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.
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To him,
infatuation
is composed of passion only.
Romantic love
is passion plus intimacy.
Consummate love
is passion, intimacy, and commitment.
Companionate love
has intimacy and commitment but is devoid of passion.
Empty love
has only commitment; one goes through the gestures of loving but only feelings of commitment hold the relationship together.
Liking
is based on intimacy; one feels no passion and no commitment. And
fatuous love
is often full of passion and commitment, but lacks intimacy.

The Mad Symphony of Romance

“Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such a variety of forms and shades, that you may say almost anything about it that you please, and it is likely to be correct.” So claimed Queen Victoria’s behavioral scientist, Sir Henry Finck.
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Romantic love certainly has subtle variations, as well as intricate and varied relationships with its kindred reproductive drives, lust, and attachment. Love is a symphony of feelings with many notes and chords.

To make matters even more complex, the brain network for romantic love melds with many more brain systems with circuits for other basic drives, as well as with many emotions, memories, and thoughts. All these ingredients add fantastic depth, nuance, and spice to our feelings of romance.

Certainly our emotions contribute to romantic passion. Human emotions lie along a continuum, from those that are so basic that they are almost impossible to hide (such as disgust) to those like envy that we can more easily conceal. The basic emotions are universal, inherited, involuntary, rapidly expressed, portrayed everywhere with the same facial poses, hard to fake, and often difficult to control.
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Among them are fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and surprise.

Certainly the drive to love commandeers all of these basic emotions at one time or another. As you feel an irresistible urge to phone “him” or “her,” you can become engulfed with fear that your lover has gone out with a rival, then overwhelmed with joy as he or she answers the phone and says, “I love you,” then pummeled by surprise and disappointment as this celestial being breaks the dinner date you had planned together.

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”
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because they are not fast-acting or associated with specific facial mannerisms; people in different societies express them in different ways and at different times; and men and women are often able to conceal and fake them. We tack on dozens of these complex emotions while we are in the throes of romantic love.

Calm, tension, contentment, anxiety, mild pain, mild pleasure, and other general bodily states also contribute to feelings of romantic love. As neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, these “background emotions” provide the landscape of the body, the persistent mood that accompanies us as stronger emotions and motivations ebb and surge.
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Only occasionally do these background states gush into your conscious mind. But these steady undercurrents of anxiety, pain, and pleasure certainly color our feelings for a beloved.

Most compelling, this trellis of emotions and motivations is hierarchically ordered in the brain. Fear can overcome joy, for example. Jealousy can stifle tenderness. The juxtapositions are manifold. But in this pecking order of basic and complex emotions, background feelings and powerful drives, romantic love holds a special place: close to the zenith, the pinnacle, the top. 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 calm, anxiety, fear, or anger; some are insatiably curious; others wonderfully amusing. Scientists say that about 50 percent of our temperament is inherited; the rest is molded by our upbringing and environment. But we all share this wondrous—and devilish—thing called romantic love.

How do you and I fish in the sea of varied human beings to find our “special” other? What makes us choose “him” or “her”?

5

“That First Fine Careless Rapture”:
Who We Choose

Somewhere there waiteth in this world of ours

For one lone soul, another lonely soul—

Each chasing each through all the weary hours,

And meeting strangely at one sudden goal;

Then blend they—like green leaves with golden flowers,

Into one beautiful and perfect whole—

And life’s long night is ended, and the way

Lies open onward to eternal day.