A Natural History of Love (28 page)

Mother is the home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean…. Mother’s love is unconditional, it is all-protective, all-enveloping; because it is unconditional it can also not be controlled or acquired. Its presence gives the loved person a sense of bliss; its absence produces a sense of lostness and utter despair. Since mother loves her children because they are her children, and not because they are “good,” obedient, or fulfill her wishes and commands, mother’s love is based on equality. All men are equal, because they all are children of a mother, because they all are children of Mother Earth.

A father’s love, on the other hand, is more distanced, and often has conditions attached to it. Fromm characterizes it as earned or deserved love, pointing out that fathers subconsciously say to their children: “I love you
because
you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me.” Fatherly love tends to punish and reward, to set limits, make demands, expect obedience. A child may or may not deserve his or her father’s love. It is a love that judges, and therefore a love that can be lost. Mother love is the love of the ancient earth-ecstasy religions, when people worshiped the fecundity of the wide-hipped land, the sultry heat of the summer sun, the all-embracing spirit of the earth. They worshiped a goddess who poured forth her love as she poured forth her children, nursing them with water from her breasts, cradling them against her flowing haunches. But, by the time of the Old Testament, god had become a father figure who issued demands, expected obedience, and judged his children, punishing or rewarding them according to their actions. We admire monarchies and crave political leaders because it’s impossible for us not to wish to return to childhood and certainties. We seem to yearn eternally to recover that parenting. Part of the nature of being a child is being ruled by tyrants and obeying laws that aren’t tailor-made.

Of course, both are important to a child’s well-being—feeling that she will always be completely loved, no matter how foolish or ugly or sinful she may be; and feeling that she’s worthwhile and valuable as an individual. From mother’s love, a child learns how to love; from father’s love, a child feels worthy of love. This doesn’t mean that a deeply loving single parent can’t raise an emotionally healthy child, or that abuse doesn’t sometimes happen in a two-parent home, but it strongly argues in favor of both parents helping to shape a child’s sense of self.

Throughout much of the animal kingdom, fathers guard or provide food for their young but are not intimately involved with child rearing. The idea of “motherhood” and “fatherhood” as roughly equal roles is a human invention. In our early evolution, Mother needed to stay with her infant, nursing and protecting it. Father needed to be free to hunt and fight to protect mother and child. This was a major part of his job description. Violence was an important element in his life; combat was one of his trades. What kept the ancient family in balance was a division of tasks. Females evolved a greater drive to nurture and make peace, males evolved a greater drive to battle and dominate. Contemporary men still feel those dammed-up urges. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that 85 percent of all violent crimes in the United States are committed by males. Indeed, there is a strong link between males and crime in cultures throughout the world. Females enter the crime statistics in a big way only when their hormones change during and after menopause. I know many unwarlike men who feel great tenderness for their children and friends. I know single fathers who are raising their children with sensitivity. But, in general, men continue to commit most of the violent crime in the world, and women do most of the nurturing and loving.

In one study, researchers took women of various ages, some of whom had children and others not, and showed them photographs of babies. Their pupils automatically dilated, signaling interest and emotion. The same physiological response did not happen in men—
unless
they were fathers with small children. This is even the case with rats—the fathers become more attentive parents after they’ve spent time with their pups and gotten used to them; mothers respond instantly. Such studies as these suggest that females are predisposed to feel an instinctive, automatic concern for children; but men learn to feel that way only when they have children of their own. Even so, fathers desert their infants twenty times as often as mothers do. Unlike expectant fathers, pregnant women undergo hormonal upheavals that prepare them for child rearing. Bathed in a chemical glow, they don’t need to think about how or why or when to love their babies. The sky is blue. The ground is underfoot. They cherish their babies. What could be simpler?

THE CUDDLE CHEMICAL

Oxytocin, a hormone that encourages labor and the contractions during childbirth, seems to play an important role in mother love. The sound of a crying baby makes its mother’s body secrete more oxytocin, which in turn erects her nipples and helps the milk to flow. As the baby nurses, even more oxytocin is released, making the mother want to nuzzle and hug it. It’s been called the “cuddle chemical” by zoologists who have artificially raised the oxytocin level in goats and other animals and produced similar behavior. Oxytocin has many functions, some of them beneficial for the mother. The baby feels warm and safe as it nurses, and its digestive and respiratory systems run smoothly. The baby’s nursing, which also coaxes the oxytocin level to rise in the mother, results, too, in contractions of the uterus that stop bleeding and detach the placenta. So mother and baby find themselves swept away in a chemical dance of love, interdependency, and survival.

Later in life, oxytocin seems to play an equally important role in romantic love, as a hormone that encourages cuddling between lovers and increases pleasure during lovemaking. The hormone stimulates the smooth muscles and sensitizes the nerves, and snowballs during sexual arousal—the more intense the arousal, the more oxytocin is produced. As arousal builds, oxytocin is thought to cause the nerves in the genitals to fire spontaneously, bringing on orgasm. Unlike other hormones, oxytocin arousal can be generated both by physical and emotional cues—a certain look, voice, or gesture is enough—and can become conditioned to one’s personal love history. The lover’s smell or touch may trigger the production of oxytocin. So might a richly woven and redolent sexual fantasy. Women are more responsive to oxytocin’s emotional effects, probably because of the important role it plays in mothering. Indeed, women who have gone through natural childbirth sometimes report that they felt an orgasmic sense of pleasure during delivery. Some nonorgasmic women have found it easier to achieve orgasm after they’ve been through childbirth; the secretion of oxytocin during delivery and nursing melts their sexual blockade. This hormonal outpouring may help explain why women more than men prefer to continue embracing after sex. A woman may yearn to feel close and connected, tightly coiled around the mainspring of the man’s heart. In evolutionary terms, she hopes the man will be staying around for a while, long enough to protect her and the child he just fathered.

Men’s oxytocin levels quintuple during orgasm. But a Stanford University study showed that women have even higher levels of oxytocin than men do during sex, and that it takes more oxytocin for a woman to achieve orgasm. Drenched in this spa of the chemical, women are able to have more multiple orgasms than men, as well as full body orgasms. Mothers have told me that during their baby’s first year or so they were surprised to find themselves “in love” with it, “turned on” by it, involved with it in “the best romance ever.” Because the same hormone controls a woman’s pleasure during orgasm, childbirth, cuddling, and nursing her baby, it makes perfect sense that she should feel this way. The brain may have an excess of gray matter, but in some things it’s economical. It likes to reuse convenient pathways and chemicals for many purposes. Why plow fresh paths through the snow of existence when old paths already lead part of the way there? New fathers feel gratified by their babies, too, and their oxytocin levels rise, but not as high.

How about cuddling among other animals? At the National Institute of Mental Health, neuroscientists Thomas R. Insel and Lawrence E. Shapiro have been studying the romantic lives of mountain voles, promiscuous wild rodents that live alone in remote burrows until it’s time to mate, which they do often and indiscriminately. Mother voles leave their pups soon after birth; father voles don’t see their pups at all; and when a researcher removes a pup from its nest it doesn’t cry for its mother or seem particularly stressed. They have nothing like what we might call a sense of family. What the researchers have found is that mountain voles have fewer brain receptors for oxytocin than their more affectionate and family-oriented relatives, the prairie voles. Despite this, but just as one might predict, the oxytocin levels of the mountain voles do climb steeply in mothers right after birth, while they’re nursing their pups. Such a study makes one wonder about the complex role that oxytocin plays in human relationships. Are oxytocin levels lower in people characterized as “loners,” in abusing parents, in children suffering from the solitary nightmare of autism?

THE INFATUATION CHEMICAL

First, a small correction of something we take for granted. The mind is not located in the brain alone. The mind travels the body on an endless caravan of hormones and enzymes. An army of neuropeptides carries messages between the brain and the immune system. When things happen to the body—like pain, trauma, or illness—they affect the brain, which is a part of the body. When things happen in the brain—like shock, thought, or feeling—they affect the heart, the digestive system, and all the rest of the body. Thought and feeling are not separate. Mental health and physical health are not separate. We are one organism. Sometimes hunger pangs override morality. Sometimes our senses wantonly crave novelty, for no other reason than that it feels good. Sometimes a man does indeed
think with his dick
. Because we prize reason and are confused about our biology, we refer to our body’s cravings and demands as our “baser” motives, instincts, or drives. So it is craven to yearn for sex, but noble to yearn for music, for example. Depraved to devote hours to finding sex, but admirable to devote hours to searching out beautiful music. Perverted to spend an afternoon fantasizing and masturbating repeatedly, but wholesome to spend the same afternoon enraptured by music. When love becomes obsession, the whole body hears the trumpet blast, the call to arms.

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances,” Carl Jung wrote, “if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” When two people find each other attractive, their bodies quiver with a gush of PEA (phenylethylamine), a molecule that speeds up the flow of information between nerve cells. An amphetaminelike chemical, PEA whips the brain into a frenzy of excitement, which is why lovers feel euphoric, rejuvenated, optimistic, and energized, happy to sit up talking all night or making love for hours on end. Because “speed” is addictive, even the body’s naturally made speed, some people become what Michael Liebowitz and Donald Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute refer to as “attraction junkies,” needing a romantic relationship to feel excited by life. The craving catapults them from high to low in an exhilarating, exhausting cycle of thrill and depression. Driven by a chemical hunger, they choose unsuitable partners, or quickly misconstrue a potential partner’s feelings. Sliding down the slippery chute of their longing, they fall head over heels into a sea of all-consuming, passionate love. Soon the relationship crumbles, or they find themselves rejected. In either case, tortured by lovesick despair, they plummet into a savage depression, which they try to cure by falling in love again. Liebowitz and Klein think that this roller coaster is fueled by a chemical imbalance in the brain, a craving for PEA. When they gave some attraction junkies MAO inhibitors—antidepressants that work by disabling certain enzymes that can subdue PEA and other neurotransmitters— they were amazed to find how quickly the therapy worked. No longer craving PEA, the patients were able to choose partners more calmly and realistically. Other studies with humans seem to confirm these findings. Researchers have also found that injecting mice, rhesus monkeys, and other animals with PEA produces noises of pleasure, courting behavior, and addiction (they keep pressing a lever to get more PEA). All this strongly suggests that when we fall in love the brain drenches itself in PEA, a chemical that makes us feel pleasure, rampant excitement, and well-being. A sweet fix, love.

The body uses PEA for more than infatuation. The same chemical soars in thrill-seeking of any kind, because it keeps one alert, confident, and ready to try something new. That may help explain a fascinating phenomenon: people are more likely to fall in love when they’re in danger. Wartime romances are legendary. I am part of a “baby boom” produced by such an event. Love thrives especially well in exotic locales. When the senses are heightened because of stress, novelty, or fear, it’s much easier to become a mystic or feel ecstasy or fall in love. Danger makes one receptive to romance. Danger is an aphrodisiac. To test this, researchers asked single men to cross a suspension bridge. The bridge was safe, but frightening. Some men met women on the bridge. Other men encountered the same women—but not on the bridge—in a safer setting such as a campus or an office.

The men who met the women on the trembling bridge were much more likely to ask them out on dates.

THE ATTACHMENT CHEMICAL

While the chemical sleigh ride of infatuation carries one at a fast clip over uneven terrain, lives become blended, people mate and genes mix, and babies are born. Then the infatuation subsides and a new group of chemicals takes over, the morphinelike opiates of the mind, which calm and reassure. The sweet blistering rage of infatuation gives way to a narcotic peacefulness, a sense of security and belonging. Being in love is a state of chaotic equilibrium. Its rewards of intimacy, warmth, empathy, dependability, and shared experiences trigger the production of that mental comfort food, the endorphins. The feeling is less steep than falling in love, but it’s steadier and more addictive. The longer two people have been married, the more likely it is they’ll stay married. And couples who have three or more children tend to be lifelong spouses. Stability, friendship, familiarity, and affection are rewards the body clings to. As much as we love being happily unsettled, not to mention dizzied by infatuation, such a state is stressful. On the other hand, it also feels magnificent to rest, to be free of anxiety or fretting, and to enjoy one’s life with a devoted companion who is as comfortable as a childhood playmate, as predictable if at times irksome as a sibling, as attentive as a parent, and also affectionate and loving: a longtime spouse. This is a tonic that is hard to give up, even if the relationship isn’t perfect, and one is tempted by rejuvenating affairs. Shared events, including shared stresses and crises, are rivets that draw couples closer together. Soon they are fastened by so many it becomes difficult to pull free. It takes a vast amount of courage to leap off a slowly moving ship and grab a lifebuoy drifting past, not knowing exactly where it’s headed or if it will keep one afloat. As the “other women” embroiled with long-married men discover, the men are unlikely to divorce, no matter how mundane their marriages, what they may promise, or how passionately in love they genuinely feel.