Why We Love (4 page)

A Sexual Connection

“I would rather die a hundred times than be without your sweet lovemaking. I love you. I love you desperately. I love you as I love my own soul.”
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So declared Psyche to her husband, Eros, in
The Golden Ass,
the second-century novel by Apuleius. “Burning with desire,” the tale continues, “she leaned over and kissed him impulsively, impetuously, with kiss after kiss after kiss, fearful he would waken before she had finished.”
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Poetry from around the world attests to the lover’s intense craving for sexual union with the beloved, another basic characteristic of romantic love.

In the Song of Solomon, the woman calls out, “O north wind, awake. / South wind, rise up. / Blow on my garden / and let my spices flow. / Let my love enter his garden / and eat his sweet fruit.”
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Inanna, queen of ancient Sumeria, was enraptured by Dumuzi’s sexuality, saying, “O Dumuzi! Your fullness is my delight!”
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But the sweetest to my ear is the anonymous old English poem that wails, “Western wind, when wilt thou blow? / The small rain down can rain,— / Christ, if my love were in my arms / And I in my bed again!”

Freud, as well as many scholars and laymen, maintained that sexual desire is a central component of romantic love.
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Hardly a new idea. Those who study the Kama Sutra, the love manual of fifth-century India, know that the word “love” comes from the Sanskrit, “Lubh,” meaning “to desire.”

It certainly makes sense that feelings of romantic love are intertwined with sexual craving. After all, if romantic passion evolved among our forebears in order to motivate them to focus their mating energy on a “special” individual
at least until insemination had been completed
(as I will maintain in subsequent chapters), then romantic passion must be linked with sexual desire.

The results of my survey support this proposition. A substantial 73 percent of the men and 65 percent of the women daydreamed about having sex with their beloved (Appendix, #34).

Sexual Exclusivity

Lovers also crave sexual exclusivity. They do not wish to have their “sacred” relationship sullied by outsiders. When someone hops in bed with “just a friend,” they often don’t much care if this bed partner is also coupling with another. But once a man or woman falls in love and begins to yearn for emotional union with a sweetheart, they profoundly want this mate to remain sexually faithful—to them.

Many of the world’s love stories reflect this sexual possessiveness, as well as the lover’s desire to maintain his or her sexual fidelity. For example, while estranged from Iseult the Fair, Tristan wed another woman with a similar name, Iseult of the Fair Hands—largely because this woman bore much of his beloved’s appellation. But Tristan could not bring himself to consummate the marriage. When, in the Arabian legend, Layla was betrothed to someone other than her beloved Majnun, she, too, avoided the wedding bed. And some 80 percent of the men and 88 percent of the women in my survey agreed with the statement, “Being sexually faithful is important when you are in love” (Appendix, #42).

Of all the properties of romantic love, this longing for sexual exclusivity is the most interesting to me. It probably evolved for two essential reasons: to protect ancestral men from being cuckolded and raising another’s child; and to protect ancestral women from losing to a rival a potential husband and father to her children. This craving for sexual exclusivity enabled our forebears to protect their precious DNA as they expended almost all their time and energy courting someone they adored.

But along with a drive to ensure sexual fidelity during courtship came a less appealing trait of romantic love, Shakespeare’s “green ey’d monster,” jealousy.

Jealousy: The “Nurse of Love”

In his book on the rules of courtly love, Capellanus wrote, “He who does not feel jealousy is not capable of loving.” He called jealousy the “nurse of love” because he believed it nourished romantic fire.
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This insightful cleric, as usual, had it right. In every society where anthropologists have studied romantic passion, they report that both sexes get jealous, very jealous.
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As the I Ching, the Chinese book of wisdom written over three thousand years ago, warned, “A close bond is possible only between two persons; a group of three engenders jealousy.”
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Emotional Union Trumps Sexual Union

But even the desire for sexual intercourse and the craving for sexual fidelity are less important to the lover than the longing for emotional union with the beloved. The love-stricken man or woman wants the beloved to call and say, “I adore you,” to bring flowers or some other token gift, to invite them to a ball game or the theater, to laugh and hug and shower them with attention. The lover aches to have his or her love returned. This yearning for emotional togetherness far surpasses the desire for mere sexual release.

Seventy-five percent of the men and 83 percent of the women in my survey agreed with the statement, “Knowing that __________ is ‘in love’ with me is more important to me than having sex with him/her” (Appendix, #50).

Involuntary, Uncontrollable Love

“Behold a deity stronger than I, who, coming, will rule me from that time forward. Love quite governed my soul.”
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Dante wrote these words in the thirteenth century to describe the moment he first saw Beatrice. He knew the dominating force of romantic love. Indeed, at the core of this obsession is its power: romantic love is often unplanned, involuntary, and seemingly uncontrollable.

How many lovers have felt this magnetic pull?

Billions, probably.

“The Jade Goddess,” the twelfth-century Chinese romance, says of Chang Po and Meilan, “The more they tried to stop the love that had been awakened, the more they felt themselves in its power.”
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And in twelfth-century France, Chrétien de Troyes wrote of Guinevere in
Lancelot,
“In spite of herself she was forced to love.”
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But insights into the irresistible nature of romantic attraction have not been confined to the literary imagination. An American business executive in his fifties wrote of an office colleague, “I am advancing toward the thesis that this attraction for Emily is a kind of biological, instinct-like action. That it is not under voluntary or logical control. It directs me. I try desperately to argue with it, to limit its influence, to channel it, to deny it, to enjoy it, and, yes, damn it, to make her respond! Even though I know that Emily and I have absolutely no chance of making a life together, the thought of her is an obsession.”
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Even the sober-sided American Founding Father, George Washington, knew the pull of romantic love. In 1795 he wrote a letter to his step-granddaughter advising her to beware lest love become “an involuntary passion.”
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Contemporary men and women also feel the helplessness that accompanies this experience. Sixty percent of the men and 70 percent of the women in my survey agreed with the statement, “Falling in love was not really a choice; it just struck me” (Appendix, #49).

A Transient State

But as love arrives unbidden, it can also steal away. As Violetta, in Verdi’s tragic opera
La Traviata,
sings, “Let’s live for pleasure alone, since love, like flowers, swiftly fades.”

Plato knew this aspect of the god of love, saying, “By nature he is neither immortal nor mortal. Sometimes on a single day he shoots into life … then dies, and then … comes back to life again.”
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Love is fickle, volatile, inconstant; it can expire, then rekindle, then fade away again.

How long does love’s magic last?

No one knows. A team of neuroscientists recently concluded that romantic love normally lasts between twelve and eighteen months.
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As you will see in chapter three, our study of the brain suggests love can last at least seventeen months. But I would bet that love’s duration varies dramatically, depending on the cast of characters involved. Most people have felt a passing infatuation that lasted only days or weeks. And as you know, when there is a barrier to the relationship, this flame can burn for many years. Adversity stimulates romantic ardor.
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But this fire in the heart does tend to diminish as partners settle into the daily joys of togetherness, often replaced by another elegant circuit in the brain: attachment—the feelings of serenity and union with one’s beloved.

Love’s Many Forms

Of course, romantic love can take a variety of forms. You can wake up alone in the middle of the night with feelings of abandonment and despair. Then you get a call or e-mail from your lover in the morning and your hopes begin to soar. Then you meet your sweetheart for dinner and talk and laugh and your ecstasy turns to sensations of security and peace. After supper you climb into bed to read together and soon you are overcome by lust. Then in the morning your beloved dashes off, forgetting to say good-bye, even breaks a forthcoming date or calls you by another’s name—and you plunge into despondency again.

“What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels / What wild ecstasy?” John Keats clearly knew that romantic love is a tumult of wildly different motivations and emotions that mix to form myriad states of mind. Compassion, ecstasy, desire, fear, suspicion, jealousy, doubt, awkwardness, embarrassment: at any moment this kaleidoscope of feelings can shift, then shift again.

“Passions are liken’d best to floods and streams,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh.
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We swim these tides. But psychologists generally distinguish between two basic types of romantic love: reciprocated love—associated with fulfillment and ecstasy; and unrequited love—associated with emptiness, anxiety, and sorrow.
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Almost all of us know both the agony and elation of romantic love.

We are not alone. In his book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
Charles Darwin hypothesized that human beings share many of their feelings with “lower” anirnals.
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Indeed, many furred and feathered beings who share this planet seem to feel some version of romantic passion.

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Animal Magnetism:
Love among the Animals

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

William Butler Yeats

“The Wild Swans at Coole”

As February blizzards cloak the meadows of Hokkaido, Japan, in winter white, a male red fox begins to fixate on a vixen, gazing at her intently, following obsessively. Pausing as she rests, he leaps to lick and nibble at her face, then frolics at her side as she lopes along. A skunky fragrance emanates from his urine in the snow. It is mating time. And as this musky odor wafts through the brittle cold, the couple court and copulate over and over for about two weeks. Then they scent-mark their territory in the woods and fields and excavate several dens where they will rear their young.

Do foxes love?

Excessive energy, focussed attention on a partner, dogged pursuit, and all the tender licks and nibbles that foxes bestow on one another are certainly reminiscent of human romantic love. And foxes are but one of many species that show aspects of romance.

At the beginning of the breeding season or a mating bout, many choose specific partners, then center their attention on this “special” individual, often to the exclusion of all around them. Devotedly, they follow “him” or “her.” They stroke, kiss, nip, nuzzle, pat, tap, lick, tug, or playfully chase this chosen one. Some sing. Some whinny. Some squeak, croak, or bark. Some dance. Some strut. Some preen. Some chase. Most play. On the grasslands of Africa’s Serengeti, in the jungles of Amazonia, on the tundras of the Arctic, creatures great and small show excessive energy as they woo. Adversity heightens their pursuit—just as barriers intensify romantic passion in people. And many become possessive—jealously guarding this mate from other suitors until their breeding time has passed.

These courtship traits are similar to some characteristics of romantic passion in humans. So I think animals love. Most creatures probably feel this magnetism for only seconds; others appear to be infatuated for hours, days, or weeks. But animals feel some sort of attraction to “special” others. Many even fall in love at first sight. From this “animal attraction” I believe human romantic love would eventually emerge.

Animal Attraction

“It was evidently a case of love at first sight, for she swam about the new-comer caressingly … with overtures of affection.”
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Charles Darwin was describing a female mallard duck who had become infatuated with a male pintail duck—a duck of a different species. We all make mistakes.

Darwin believed that animals feel attraction to one another. A male blackbird, a female thrush, a black grouse, a pheasant, these and many other birds, he reported, “fell in love with one another.”
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In fact, Darwin maintained that all the higher animals share “similar passions, affections and emotions, even the more complex ones, such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude and magnanimity.” They “even have a sense of humour; wonder and curiosity.”

Darwin is among very few scientists who have maintained that animals feel love for one another. Naturalists regularly describe anger and fear in other creatures. They see animals frolic and believe these beasts are feeling joy. They describe expressions of surprise, timidity, curiosity, and disgust. They even report moments of empathy and jealousy. Yet scientists rarely say that animals love, even though descriptions of animal courtship are filled with references to behaviors that are akin to human romantic passion.