Why We Love (22 page)

And these psychiatrists believe, as I do, that this protest reaction is associated with elevated levels of dopamine, as well as with norepinephrine. Rising levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, they say, serve to increase alertness and stimulate the abandoned individual to search and call for help.

Indeed, protest can be quite effective in love relationships. Those doing the abandoning often feel deeply guilty about causing the breakup.
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So the more the rejected partner protests, the more the departing one is likely to reconsider and return to the relationship. Many do, at least temporarily. Protest works.

Not always, however. And sometimes the romantic rift can cause the abandoned partner to panic.

Separation Anxiety

Like the impulse to protest, this panic response is common in nature; it is called “separation anxiety.”
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When a mother leaves a baby bird or infant mammal, these tiny creatures often become profoundly disturbed. Their discomfort starts with a pounding heart. The baby cries and makes sucking gestures. These “distress calls” are frantic and frequent. Abandoned puppies and baby otters whimper, even sob. Baby chickens cheep. Infant rhesus monkeys dolefully give out a “hoo-hoo” sound. When baby rats are separated from their mother, they emit ceaseless ultrasonic cries.
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Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp believes that separation anxiety is generated by the panic system in the brain—a complex brain network that makes one feel weak, short of breath, and panicky.
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A related brain system also kicks into action: the stress system. Stress begins in the hypothalamus where corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) is secreted and travels to the nearby pituitary; here it initiates the release of ACTH, adrenocorticotropin hormone. This travels through the bloodstream to the adrenal gland (which sits atop the kidney) and commands the adrenal cortex to synthesize and release cortisol, the “stress hormone.” Cortisol then activates myriad brain and bodily systems to counteract stress. Among them, the immune system revs up to fight disease.
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Despite this bodily readiness, disappointed lovers tend to get sore throats and colds. Short-term stress also triggers production of dopamine and norepinephrine and suppresses serotonin activity
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—the combination of elixirs associated with romantic love.

How ironic: as the adored one slips away, the very chemicals that contribute to feelings of romance grow even more potent, intensifying ardent passion, fear, and anxiety, and impelling us to protest and try with all our strength to secure our reward: the departing loved one.

Abandonment Rage

The attempt to win back one’s sweetheart, a craving for “him” or “her,” separation anxiety, and panic at the impending loss: all these reactions make sense to me. But what causes rejected people to get so fiercely angry? Even when the parting lover honors his or her responsibilities as a friend (and often co-parent) and leaves the relationship with compassion and honesty, many rejected people swing violently from feelings of heartbreak to utter fury. English poet John Lyly commented wisely on this phenomenon in 1579, “As the best wine doth make the sharpest vinegar, so the deepest love turneth to the deadliest hate.”

Why so?

Because love and hate are intricately linked in the human brain. The primary circuits for hate/rage run through regions of the amygdala downward to the hypothalamus and on to centers in the peri-aqueductal gray, a region in the midbrain.
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Several other brain areas are also involved in rage, including the insula, a part of the cortex that collects data from the internal body and the senses.
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But here’s the key: the basic brain network for rage is closely connected to centers in the prefrontal cortex that process reward-assessment and reward expectation.
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And when people and other animals begin to realize that an expected reward is in jeopardy, even unattainable, these centers in the prefrontal cortex signal the amygdala and trigger rage.
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Known to psychologists as the “frustration-aggression hypothesis,” this rage response to unfulfilled expectations is well known in animals. For example, when a cat’s brain circuits for reward are artificially stimulated, they feel intense pleasure. If this stimulation is withdrawn, however, they bite. And each time the pleasure is withdrawn, the cat gets angrier. Likewise, scorned lovers just get more and more furious. “All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling,” wrote Blaise Pascal. Pascal clearly knew how victimized we can be by our emotions.

Fury need not be directed at the lost reward, however.
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An enraged monkey will vent his ire on a subordinate monkey rather than attack a superior. In the same way, a rejected lover might kick a chair, throw a glass, or get angry at a friend or colleague rather than strike an errant sweetheart.

So romantic love and abandonment rage are well connected in the brain. And when you think about it, these passions have much in common. They are both associated with bodily and mental arousal; both produce excessive energy. Both drive one to obsessively focus one’s attention on the beloved. Both generate goal-directed behaviors. And both cause intense yearning, either for union with a sweetheart or for revenge against a jilting loved one.

No wonder our scanning subject, Barbara, turned on me. Barbara must have felt deep romantic love for Michael as she looked at his photograph in the fMRI machine; then her thwarted passion turned to frustration, which triggered hate and rage. I just happened to be a convenient target.

“One of the relics of early man is modern man,” wrote psychiatrist David Hamburg. Why did our ancestors evolve brain links that enable us to hate the one we cherish?

The Purpose of Abandonment Rage

Rage is exceedingly expensive, metabolically. It stresses the heart, raises blood pressure, and suppresses the immune system.
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So in ancestral times this link between romantic love and abandonment rage probably evolved to solve an important problem related to mating and reproduction.

At first, I suspected that this brain wiring might have emerged for an entirely different courtship purpose: to fight rival suitors.

“The season of love is that of battle,” Darwin wrote.
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Indeed, many male animals do two things at mating time: They court. And they fight competitors. Male sheep, male sea lions, and males of many other species
must
fight one another to win the right to woo. So I reasoned that perhaps attraction and hate/rage became closely connected in the mammalian brain in order to enable suitors to easily switch back and forth between attraction for a potential mate and rage at a rival. But this theory didn’t hold up under closer scrutiny.

Combative male suitors strut and pose and attack one another like gladiators in a duel for love and honor. And when the match is over the winner regularly displays feelings of triumph while the loser slinks off in ignominy. But neither shows fury. There is even sound biological evidence that the neural system for male-male courtship competition is independent of the rage system in the brain. This rivalry is associated with elevated levels of testosterone and vasopressin instead.
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So human abandonment rage did not evolve from the emotion/motivation systems that mammals use to fight rivals.

Then why does the human brain
easily
enable an abandoned lover to hate the person that he or she adores?

Psychiatrist John Bowlby argued in the 1960s that the anger that accompanies the loss of a loved one is part of nature’s biological design to regain the lost attachment figure.
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Undoubtedly this rage sometimes serves this purpose. But fury is not a likeable trait; I can’t imagine it often entices a lover to return to a disintegrating relationship.

So I have come to think that abandonment rage evolved to serve another purpose: to drive disappointed lovers to
extricate
themselves from dead-end matches, lick their wounds, and resume their quest for love in greener pastures.

Moreover, if the rejected person has produced babies during this bankrupt partnership, abandonment rage may give them the energy to fight for the welfare of their children. You certainly see this behavior in contemporary divorce proceedings. Well-adjusted men and women turn vicious to acquire resources for their abandoned young. In fact, an American judge who regularly presides over trials of violent criminals reports that he is much more worried about his personal safety during divorce proceedings, particularly when child custody is an issue. He and other judges have even installed panic buttons in their chambers to push for help in case arguing spouses become violent.
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I am not surprised that abandonment rage sometimes erupts into violence. Jilted men and women have wasted priceless reproductive time and energy on a partner who is deserting them. They must start their courtship search again. Moreover, their reproductive future has been jeopardized—along with their social alliances, their personal happiness, and their reputation. Their self-esteem is severely damaged. And time is dribbling by. Nature has given us a powerful purgative mechanism to help us
release
a rejecting mate and get on with living: rage.

Alas, this rage does not necessarily cancel out one’s love, one’s longing, or one’s sexual desire for a departing partner.

In an interesting study of 124 dating couples, psychologists Bruce Ellis and Neil Malamuth found that romantic love and what they call “anger/upset” respond to different kinds of “information.”
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One’s degree of anger/upset oscillates in response to events that
undermine
one’s goals, such as infidelity or lack of emotional commitment by the partner. One’s feelings of romantic love fluctuate, instead, in response to occurrences that
advance
one’s goals, such as a partner’s social support and happy times in bed together. Hence love and anger/upset, though closely linked, are independent systems; they
can
operate simultaneously. In short, you can be terribly angry but still be very much in love. Such was Barbara.

Eventually, however, all these feelings wane. The focussed attention on the failing partnership, the drive to win back the beloved, the showdowns, the separation anxiety, the panic, even the rage: all dissipate with time. Then the rejected person must deal with new forms of torture—resignation and despair.

Stage II: Resignation

“I am exhausted by longing,” wrote the eighth-century
A.D
. Chinese poet Li Po. Eventually the disappointed lover gives up. Their beloved is gone forever and they are spent. Many plummet into hopelessness. They toss in bed and cry. Drugged by the potent liquor of sorrow, some just woodenly sit and gaze into a void. They hardly work or eat. Perhaps they feel an occasional urge to renew pursuit of their lost love or a passing flash of anger. Generally, they feel deep melancholy. Nothing pries them from their anguish—except time.

Loss of a loved one usually triggers deep sadness and depression in the human animal, what is known to psychologists as the “despair response.”
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In my love survey discussed in chapter one, 61 percent of men and 46 percent of women said that they went through periods of despair when they thought their beloved might not love them (Appendix, #53). And in a study of 114 men and women who had been rejected by a partner within the past eight weeks, over 40 percent were experiencing “clinically measurable depression”; of these, some 12 percent displayed moderate to severe depression.
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People can also die of a broken heart. They expire from heart attacks or strokes caused by their depression.
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Men and women tend to handle love-sadness differently.

Men are often more dependent on their romantic partners,
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probably because men, as a rule, have fewer ties to relatives and friends. Perhaps because of this, men are more likely to turn to alcohol, drugs, or reckless driving than to their kin or buddies when they despair over a rejecting mate.
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Moreover, men are less likely to reveal their pain, containing their sorrow within their inner mental core.
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Some even score low on scales of depression because they have effectively masked their suffering, even from themselves.
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Though many cloak their sorrow, interviews with rejected men, and observation of their work performance, their daily habits, and their interactions with friends, often reveal that they are ill—psychologically and physically.
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Men also show their sorrow in the most dramatic way one can: men are three to four times more likely than women to commit suicide after a love affair has decayed.
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As poet John Dryden put it, “Dying is a pleasure, / when living is a pain.”
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Women often suffer differently. In cultures around the world, women are twice as likely as men to experience major depression.
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They become depressed for many reasons, of course, but a common one is abandonment by a lover. And in studies of romantic rejection, women report more severe feelings of depression, particularly hopelessness.
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Rejected women sob, lose weight, sleep too much or not at all, lose interest in sex, can’t concentrate, have trouble remembering commonplace daily things, withdraw socially, and contemplate suicide. Locked in a dungeon of despondency, they barely manage life’s basic chores. Some write out their grievances. And many women talk, moping for hours on the phone with any sympathetic ear, retelling all. Although this chatter gives women some relief, these replays of shattered dreams often backfire. As a woman dwells on the dead relationship, she feeds the ghost—often inadvertently retraumatizing herself.
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