A Natural History of Love (24 page)

Accordingly, romantic love is a biological ballet. It is evolution’s way of making sure that sexual partners meet and mate, then give their child the care it needs to be healthy and make loving attachments of its own. This isn’t a simple or fast process. The human brain is so complex, the mind so ingenious, that biology and experience work hand in hand. People usually undergo a series of crushes, infatuations, and loves between infancy and adulthood. They learn to make magnetic attachments, whose power they feel in their cells, in their bones. Thinking about the loved one steers their every thought, and they would die rather than break the force field of their devotion. It is as if they were two stars, tightly orbiting each other, each feeding on the other’s gravity. Because nothing and no one in time or creation seems to matter more, a broken relationship rips the lining from the heart, crushes the rib cage, shatters the lens of hope, and produces a drama both tragic and predictable. Wailing out loud or silently, clawing at the world and at one’s self, the abandoned lover mourns.

How do we learn to grieve? Society provides customs and rituals, but it’s a behavior the body knows by heart. First we protest and refuse to accept the truth; we keep thinking the loved one will magically return. Next we sob a torrent of tears. Then we sink into despair; the world sags under the dead weight of our pain. And at long last we mourn. In time, we gather our strengths like so many lost buttons and begin searching for a likely attachment once again.

But suppose a child is orphaned or abused? When, through malevolence or circumstance, the early bond between parent and child is damaged, the psychological repercussions are profound. Such a person may end up with marital problems, personality disorders, neuroses, or difficulty in parenting. A love-thwarted child spends its life searching for that safe, secure relationship and absolutely loving heart which is its birthright. As an adult, missing cues that might lead to just such a relationship, it judges people harshly, trusts no one, and becomes exiled and alone. A child that’s unsafe, or rejected, or deprived of affection, feels anxious, becomes obsessively clingy, and doesn’t take many chances. Assuming that it will be spurned,
that it is the sort of person one could only reject
, it may try to be self sufficient and disinherit love, not risk asking anyone ever to truly care. Such a child becomes afflicted with itself, and needs no other accuser, no other lynch mob. It feels as if it has been caught red-handed in the midst of a felony—its life. Is there no salvation for such a damaged child? Studies show that even one continuously sympathetic caregiver in childhood can make the difference between a seriously disturbed adult or someone who is nearly invincible. Ideally, there would be a parent whom the child perceives as its partisan, apologist, patron, devotee, grubstaker, well-wisher, and admirer rolled into one. But the minimum is one reliable guardian angel—not necessarily a parent, just someone who is always there, cheering in the dugout, steadfast through both strikeouts and home runs.

Cornell psychologist Cindy Hazan and her colleagues have gone so far as to chart the direct parallels between the many stages of childhood attachment and adult romantic love. What they found is that childhood experiences do trigger, and sometimes garble or distort, the love relationships made later. But nothing is cast in stone. As the child grows, it forges new attachments and some of these may dilute bad childhood experiences. This is an important conclusion, because it suggests that abused children—who are, essentially, loving disabled—may still be helped later in life. As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it’s a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell—of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up-sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets. Some arrive pathologically disheartened by a childhood filled with hazard, molestation, and reproach.
Mutilés de guerre
, they are invisibly handicapped, veterans of a war they didn’t even know they were fighting. What battlefield could be more fierce, what enemy more dear?

*
Darwin writes that the facial expressions adults use when they feel grief seem to be the result of two warring emotions: wanting to scream like an abandoned child, and trying not to let that scream out.

THE LOVING IMPAIRED

DISABLING LOVE

Among the many handicaps that can befall human beings, few are sadder than the inability to feel love. Because we imagine love to be wholly psychological, we don’t even have a word for people who are biologically unable to love. But there are some unlucky souls who, through trauma to part of the brain, cannot feel emotion. For this minority of misfits, there are no telethons, no acronyms, no government agencies. We sometimes think of loving as a luxury, little more than a high-thrill hobby like bungee jumping. So why lament its absence? Veterans of bad breakups and torturous affairs might even envy people who aren’t vexed by love.

Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, reports a curious case, in which a man we’ll call John had been living a normal life as accountant, husband, and father. At thirty-five, John had a benign tumor removed from the front of his brain. The operation was a success, but soon afterward his personality changed dramatically. He divorced his wife, became involved with a prostitute, acted irresponsibly at work, lost one job after another, became penniless—all without feeling anything, not even bewilderment or concern. It was his brother who finally sought medical help for him after a decade of worry.

Using magnetic resonance imaging to peer inside John’s brain, Damasio found that the ventromedial region of the frontal cortex was damaged. This injury had most likely occurred during the tumor operation, and it leads us to a small portion of gray matter between the eyebrows, which seems to be a factory for emotions. At this crossroads in the brain, we find incoming sensory information and outgoing messages to the autonomic nervous system that controls the involuntary workings of the body: heartbeat, breathing, sweating, pupil dilation, and blood pressure. Sweaty palms, racing pulse, and labored breathing, as well as other sensations, often combine to signal that an emotion is taking place. If you’re scuba diving at night for the first time and become separated from your dive buddy, the emotion might be fear of death. If you meet someone special whom you’re desperate to know better, the emotion might be fear of acting stupid and being rejected. In effect, this region of the brain acts like a city in the jungle, connecting the dark interior of our lives to the civilized strain of the outside world.

Damasio hooked John up to a machine similar to a lie detector, and presented him with a barrage of emotionally charged slides, sounds, and questions. Some were violent, some pornographic, some unethical. John had
no response
to any of them. A field of flowers registered no differently than a murder.

When I learned of this study, I thought immediately of the film
Blade Runner
, directed by Ridley Scott. Suffocating, ferocious, poignant, its musical and visual melodies stay with one for some time. In the film’s futuristic megacity that Los Angeles has decayed into, the streets are dripping with split water mains, pools of grease, and waves of blowing newspapers. Overhead, electronic billboards fill the sky with visual racket. In Chinatown, the press and stench of people and smoke and sin rival any hell anyone has ever imagined. Civilization has stopped evolving. Society is a corpse watching itself putrefy and decay. None of them realize they’re decaying, but when they kiss their bones rub. The streets are full of fluids that belong inside bodies. The streets swarm with the unknowingly embalmed. Anything can be bought or sold. People live there because they have something to hide or mischief to make, and so many throats are cut daily that an industry of knife sharpeners has arisen.

Harrison Ford plays a down-and-dirty police assassin, who has been sent into this underworld to locate humanoid robots that have escaped from the offworld and come to earth to find their inventor. The humanoids have learned they are programmed to die at a specified point and, though savage, bloodthirsty, and maniacal, they also think, form attachments, and don’t want to die. They need to know how long their lifespan will be. They need to confront their cold-blooded creator. In a large sense,
Blade Runner
is a movie about the terrifying quest for one’s humanity and soul, about facing one’s creator with hard questions about love, death, good, and evil.

How do Harrison Ford and other bounty hunters recognize the humanoids? By testing likely suspects, asking them a list of loaded questions in a monotone. Only human beings struggle with issues of compassion or morality or social responsibility. During this exam, Ford monitors the size of their pupils for involuntary clues. The autonomic nervous system makes the pupils swell when a human being faces (or even imagines) such piercing emotions as horror, sex, or violence. To be human is to be emotional, to have a body that is regularly ransacked by emotions of many kinds, including love. To lose all that is to lose the cauldron of one’s humanity, which is why John’s brother—in a typically human way—worried over the fate of his loved one.

THE HORROR OF THE IK

Trauma takes many forms. It can be as obvious as a blow to the head, or as subtle as long-term damage to a child’s self-esteem. If love is a natural, even essential human emotion, an automatic response to family that is crucial in child rearing, then it should be impossible to obliterate it in whole populations, right? One of the most curious accounts of the loving disabled was reported by anthropologist Colin Turnbull. In the 1970s, Turnbull spent two years living with the Ik (pronounced
Eek)
, a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in a remote, desolate mountain region of Uganda. He knew little about them beforehand, except that there were only two thousand of them left, and the odd fact that their language was more similar to classical Middle-Kingdom Egyptian than to any living language. Indeed, they were not his first or even second choice for research. But he settled happily among them, because it’s easier for an anthropologist to observe the workings of a society that is both small and isolated. He brought with him some expectations, based on anthropology’s understanding of how hunter-gatherer societies work. Usually the women gather the roots, berries, and other vegetables that are a crucial part of everyone’s diet, while the men go off on hunting parties from which they may or may not return with meat. Although the hunt figures magically in the life of the tribe, because it’s fraught with danger and excitement as berry-picking is not, the women’s foraging is regarded as equally important because it provides most of the daily food. Cooperation is vital for all, both in hunting and foraging. Depending as they do on the land for sustenance, such tribes usually have a deep mystical relationship with their environment. They display the sorts of qualities we treasure most in ourselves: hospitality, generosity, affection, honesty, and charity. In fact, these mean so much to us that we call them “virtues,” and if asked to define the highest hallmarks of being human, we would refer to them, perhaps adding compassion, kindness, and reason.