Love

The word love covers a lot of territory, including the following emotions:

• The awe, respect and need that you feel for your parents as a child.
• The adoration and infatuation that you feel when you have a crush.
• The deep attachment you feel for a long-term mate.
• The intense devotion to your child that you feel as a parent.
• The strong affection you feel for close friends.
• The diffuse feeling of gratitude, well-being and affection that you may feel as a part of spiritual transcendence.

These are quite different feelings, even though they do overlap. 

So much has been written about love — most works of literature have love as a theme, generally a central theme — that you'd think the subject has been covered completely.  Certainly, human of experience of love in all its heights and depths has been described from every angle, but we're still trying to figure out the whys and hows. 

In her recent book, Why We Love, Helen Fisher reviews what we know about romantic love, and tries to extend our understanding a bit.  Although it's a book that can't live up to all its ambitions, Fisher valiantly tries to make sense of what we've figured out so far, and successfully suggests how much more there is to figure out.  Particularly if you're interested in the brain chemistry of love, it's a book worth reading. 

For most of us, love is what makes the world go round.  It's at the heart of all the most important, most beautiful, most painful, most mystical experiences of our lives — what more is there really to say? 

I offer here a few practical observations about love that I hope may be useful, based on my own and my friends' life experience. 

Sex is a Spark to Light the Torch of Infatuation

The trouble with casual sex is, sex doesn't tend to stay casual.  As my partner has often advised friends and aquaintances, make up your mind about someone before you have sex with them more than two or three times, because after that, you may well have begun to lose your heart whether you want to or not. 

Is that true of guys too (those philandering, happy-go-lucky, any-orifice-is-a-good-orifice animals)?  Actually, yes, in my observation.  I think it's why guys tend to be leary of commitment and scared of their own emotions — they're just as easily trapped into emotional attachment as women, but their social, and maybe biological, programming is to have sex somewhat indiscriminately.  This means that if they don't fight their tendency to become emotionally attached, they end up falling in love with and marrying someone who just happened to be available when they were horny, and they don't get to exercise good judgment in choosing a mate.  As I've remarked elsewhere, mate selection is probably the single most important decision we ever make from an evolutionary standpoint. 

Infatuation is a Torch to Light the Mating Fire

Courtship emotions are so hot and delightful — when we speak of "falling in love" and being "in love," we're talking about that period of hopeless infatuation at the beginning of a relationship.  While you're in it, the most important thing in the world by far is the person you're in love with — at that point, that person really seems to embody for you a divine ideal.  You have a very hard time seeing their faults, or imagining that your relationship with them is flawed in any way. 

As everyone knows, the "honeymoon period" doesn't last forever (weeks, months, or maybe even a year).  When it's over, you're returned to a more mundane reality in which the person you were so madly in love with turns out to be quite human too.  At that point, you're again free to evaluate more or less rationally whether the relationship is likely to work over a longer period, and at that point many relationships come to an end. 

What infatuation tends to promote, though, is open, intimate, incredibly hot and tender sex, which in turn creates more infatuation.  You want more than anything to be really, really close to this person you love.  You throw caution to the winds and offer them your heart on a platter, and fuck them with your soul wide open. 

When the fires of courtship die down and you see your lover clearly again, it often happens that you find love hasn't died at all — it's been transformed into something less intense but even more powerful. 

Sex Promotes Pair Bonding

Humans do almost universally want to mate, at least in my observations.  A practice that falls recognizably into the category of marriage seems to exist in every known culture.  Whether you're straight or gay, young or old, wild or conservative, you probably have a built-in desire to form a deep, intimate, lasting, primary sexual relationship with another person. 

That doesn't necessarily mean you have to do it, or if you do that it has to look some particular way, but it's worth recognizing that humans seem to like pair bonding a lot, and they just naturally tend to fall into it if they stay together in a sexual relationship for more than a year (see the relationships page for more about this).

Parental Nurturance Has its Own Hormones

If you're a woman giving birth, or a man present at the birth of your child, the whole world can change.  The center of the universe, the focus of everything, can suddenly shift onto a small, wrinkled, inconvenient creature.  Unexpectedly, all those key ambitions at work, all those luxurious vacation plans, even basic creature comforts like sleep, suddenly seem completely unimportant compared to the wants and needs of this little being. 

Such a shift doesn't only happen to mothers — it affects fathers too, if they're lucky (it makes parenting so much easier).  A father reports:

When my first child was born in 1981, I walked out of the delivery room feeling like a teenager again, with some wild hormone coursing through my body.  It wasn't a teenage hormone, though — I'd never experienced it before.  I suddenly couldn't care less about anything but that baby. 

Later, I happened to read an article in Nature by A.F. Dixson and L. George that associated high levels of prolactin in male marmoset fathers with their nurturing behavior to their offspring.  Aha, I said to myself, it is a hormone!  And prolactin makes sense, because it's clearly associated with nurturance in mothers.  (For an update on prolactin and marmosets, see Carsten Shradin et al, "Prolactin and Paternal Care: Comparison of Three Species of Monogamous New World Monkeys" in Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2003, Vol. 117.2, 166-175).

Endocrinologists have begun to confirm that prolactin is one of the factors that can transform human males into nurturing fathers.  A recent article in the New Scientist on cooperative parenting nicely summarizes current thinking on the subject:

In 2000, a team of researchers led by Anne Storey from Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada, revealed that this is indeed the case (Evolution and Human Behavior, vol 21, p 79). Their results were more positive than anyone had expected. In men who were cohabiting with pregnant women, prolactin rose steadily, increasing 20 per cent on average during the three weeks before their partner gave birth. Also, at the time of birth the men's testosterone levels dropped dramatically, by up to 33 per cent. What's more, it made "surprisingly little difference" to the result whether the cohabiting male was the father of the expected child, or knew that he was not, suggesting that the changes are a cooperative adaptation, and not straightforward kin selection.

The big question now is, if men have always had the potential for a prolactin surge, why does it seem to have remained relatively dormant over so much of the world and for so many thousands of years?

The lesson here is not new. It is that while hormones play a key part in determining our actions, their function is often to make certain courses of behaviour possible, rather than inevitable. So prolactin provides, in both males and females, the capacity to respond protectively towards young. But that capacity - like the capacity to speak - is conditional on an individual's life experience. Someone who has never heard speech will never learn to talk; moreover, even if they do hear speech but only after a certain critical period in their development, they will also never learn to talk. Perhaps the same applies to fostering behaviour, whether in monkeys or people - it has to be primed. And what primes it could be witnessing loving behaviour towards infants at a critical period in their own development. It has been suggested that is why people who have suffered neglect or abuse in childhood often grow up to be child abusers themselves, even though they may have experienced kinder treatment in the interim. (From the New Scientist, 25 August 2005, "The Rise of the House Father" by Elaine Morgan).

This is a good argument for making sure fathers are intimately involved in the birth and early care of their children, so as to stimulate as much as possible the production of whatever makes parental inconveniences so incredibly much easier to cope with.