Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (34 page)

Why does love change? Is it because we or our beloved constantly change, or because our sensory perception is betrayed by our emotions? Or is the reason simply that our eyes constantly need novelty to sustain our desire?

In the Capgras syndrome, nothing is apparently wrong with the visual perception of the beloved
per se
. The problem lies in the
interpretative
aspect of the visual recognition – in other words, in the judgement we make of the visual information through our emotions.

In his Sonnet 148, William Shakespeare evokes the antagonism between sight and emotional judgement:

O me, what eyes hath love put in my head,

Which have no correspondence with true sight!

Or, if they have, where is my judgement fled,

That censures falsely what they see aright?

Exploring the Capgras syndrome offers insights into one of the fundamental aspects of love: the disparity between the person we think we fall in love with, and who they really are. Such disparity may also reveal itself between lovers who have been together for a long time, but it originates critically in the initial stages, when the euphoria of love may make us fabricate an entirely distorted projection of the other, based on the person we wish and idealize our partners to be.

One problem is that we often want to go back to the experience of the passion of the early days. We long for the feverish, incendiary love condition of the start. We wish we could for ever be like Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet are the epitome of enduring romantic love. The two young Italian sweethearts did not have the chance to regret the end of their passion for each other, because they died before their sentiment could wilt or dissipate.

Every year, Valentine’s Day is a ritual by which lovers commemorate their mutual romantic feelings. For those who have been together for a while, it is an excuse to reignite the euphoric passion of the early days of their relationship. Long-term lovers are well aware that they can reinvigorate attraction by introducing novelty – whether through sex, or by changing hair styles, wearing new clothes, buying flowers or in general surprising the other. By doing so, they are teasing the dopaminergic neurons, satisfying their need for novelty. They are turning the old into new. In the case of the Capgras delusion, any attempt to employ the stimulation of dopaminergic neurons to strengthen or revive attraction would mean to actually let the new seem old.

Winds of commitment

So far, I have talked about love as a kind of infatuation which may reveal itself as an illusion. But boundless longing – and even crystallization – does not always end in nothing. It may mature and develop into something else.
¹⁷

What keeps a relationship going over time? What cements a bond after the early passion?

If Romeo and Juliet’s boundless love had continued, it most likely would have taken the regular course of any other relationship. I am not saying they would have ended up hating each other or separating, but their bond would have most probably matured into a form of attachment very different from the ardent, magnetic attraction of their first encounter. Two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, have been hypothesized to play the principal role in the more mature phases of love, in the quiet whereabouts of long-term attachment.

Oxytocin and vasopressin are small hormones called neuro- peptides that are produced in the hypothalamus but are projected and function in other parts of the brain by binding to receptors. The molecular confirmation of the role of these two hormones in influencing attachment was discovered, believe it or not, in voles, also known as field mice.

Two species of
Microtus
vole display remarkable differences in their respective behaviour. Voles of the species that lives primarily on prairies (
Microtus ochrogaster
) are highly sociable and monogamous. Husband and wife spend most of their time together, are jealous of their partners, and they also cooperate in taking care of their offspring. Mountain-dwelling voles (
Microtus montanus
) on the contrary are extremely antisocial and promiscuous. They engage in ‘extramarital’ sexual activities and often neglect or abandon their young ones soon after birth. It turns out that there is a difference in the number and distribution of receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin across the limbic brains of these two species, and that each hormone plays a slightly different role in males and females.
¹⁸

If you give a female vole of the prairie-dwelling species oxytocin, the hormone will work like Cupid’s arrow and she will become attached to the nearest male that comes her way. Oxytocin exerts its effects by interfering with dopamine reward mechanisms: it binds to receptors in the nucleus accumbens which is one of the reward areas. Female voles of the mountain species have fewer oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens.

In male voles, vasopressin plays a bigger role. In the prairie species it is vasopressin that by binding to receptors in the ventral pallidum – another reward area just below the nucleus accumbens – stimulates pair bonding, aggression towards male rivals and paternal instincts. The higher the number of vasopressin receptors in male prairie voles, the stronger their social attitudes would be.

Voles are one thing, but what about humans? A study looking at a gene associated with the production of vasopressin receptors has reported that men with a particular form of this gene that results in their having few vasopressin receptors in the brain are twice as likely as men with more receptors to stay unmarried or to experience more crises during relationships, with higher risk of divorce.
¹⁹
Of course, this is only a correlation and carrying a particular form of a gene is only one of the ingredients contributing to a behavioural tendency.

In sum, it’s hard to say with precision, but maybe something was wrong with Madame M’s levels of dopamine and oxytocin, because even though she instigated novelty by creating new identities for her husband, she was never carried away by them. Difference, for her, lacked the qualities of the original.

Choosing a partner

Falling in love with the wrong partner – someone who does not requite our feelings or is not suitable to make us happy – is not a course we would rationally choose, or willingly, for that matter.

Yet, it is something we do. In some cases, we may even do it repeatedly before we find the right soulmate. Without realizing, we systematically follow a pattern of failure. Paradoxically, those who to the objective observer appear blatantly wrong and implausible partners for us, may in fact, for some non-evident reason, appear highly desirable to us, simply fitting a pattern of mismatch.

What makes us fall for the wrong person, or what makes another human being eligible for a union with us, depends on a variety of factors. Some are rooted in childhood.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

As Philip Larkin accurately observed in his lapidary poem entitled ‘This Be The Verse’, referring to the inevitable, unintended, powerful influence parents have on us.
²⁰
Indeed, our patterns of approaching, loving and attaching to others are the shadow of ways of loving learnt during childhood, primarily from our parents. Early-life experiences and relationships do affect our adult personality, especially in the realm of intimacy and affection. These ideas germinated with Freud, but were later extensively explored by the British psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907–91), who wrote: ‘When an individual is confident that an attachment figure will be available to him whenever he desires it, that person will be much less prone to either intense or chronic fear than will an individual who for any reason has no such confidence.’
²¹
For Bowlby such confidence is built during crucial years of infancy, childhood and adolescence.

Years after Bowlby’s observations, a significant body of research has confirmed this.

If, on one hand, parents are distant, self-involved and neglectful, the child will consider those attributes acceptable and rewarding and will most likely look for them in his or her partner as an adult. If, on the other hand, children grow up in the presence of warm, gentle, loving and reliable parents, as adults they will most likely develop and appreciate those qualities in others. A mother, or another caregiver, who is responsive to her children’s moods and needs is likely to teach them to be loving and seek love. Children learn that when they are in need of help, they can express their needs, and their request for help will be heard. They learn that they are worthy of love and attention and won’t be fearful of separation.

Once this dynamic of trust is established early on, children will rely on it throughout their lives and will likely expect it from and create it with the people they meet. So as children we can acquire specific habits, tastes and preferences for relationships, and these will characterize our adult lives, even our romantic lives.
²²

Today, neuroscience is trying to bring these psychological findings to a further level by exploring how early experience is wired on to the brain to steer adult behaviour. In other words, how early parental care gets under our skin.

This fascinating aspect of life and biology has been greatly investigated in animal models, such as rodents, specifically rats and mice, and studies have concentrated in particular on the long-term consequences of the disruption of the maternal–infant relationship. I spent a large portion of my post-doctoral work studying these phenomena in the laboratory of Cornelius Gross at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

Part of my job was to observe for several hours a day mother mice looking after their pups. In mice, the crucial window in the pups’ development is their first three weeks of life. What they experience during those three weeks shapes their adult life drastically. If you have never done it, it may sound absurd, but you can tell whether a mouse is taking good or bad care of her newborns by watching her. Except for when she needs to eat or drink something, a ‘good’ mouse mother spends a lot of time with the litter in the nest. She gives them warmth by covering them with her body, assuming a sort of ‘blanket’ position over them when they all sleep together. She also licks them and grooms them. If one of the pups leaves the nest, she rushes to retrieve it. By contrast, a ‘bad’ mouse mother is less dedicated to her offspring. She is neglectful of them and spends considerably more time off the nest. When the babies are asleep, she is not very good at covering them with her body and she doesn’t care very much for it. She also doesn’t bother licking or grooming them. A strong outcome of this difference in mothering style is that the pups raised by a bad mother grow up to be more fearful than those raised by a good mother, as Bowlby would have expected.
²³
However, pups born to a bad mother are less fearful as adults if adopted at birth by a more caring mother. Astonishingly, the girls among the group adopted by a good mother go on to acquire her maternal behaviour, displaying a caring attitude towards their own pups, despite their ‘bad’ genetic origins.

This means that maternal behaviour is transmitted across generations. Parents behave to their children in large part in the same way their own parents behaved towards them.

Philip Larkin conveys this in the second part of his poem:

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

The fact that the pup of a bad mother can acquire caring maternal behaviour from a good mother is evidence pointing to these long-term effects being mediated by early environmental influence. The most intriguing question in this exciting field of research is: what are the molecular mechanisms by which these early environmental effects in childhood are carried on into adulthood? The answer is epigenetic modification. If genetics is the study of how traits are passed on from one generation to the next via the genome, epigenetics is about traits being passed on across generations independently of the genetic information stored in the DNA. It turns out that the quality of maternal care can impart changes in gene expression that modify the adult behavioural characteristics of a mouse and, through the effects of these changes on its own maternal behaviour (in the case of female mice), propagate these changes across generations.

Although at an early stage of discovery, science has even identified some of the specific genes whose expression is modified, and by what molecular epigenetic mechanisms. One of the molecular mechanisms is methylation. This is the addition of a methyl group – a molecule consisting of one carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms, CH
₃
– to a cytosine base of DNA. Basically, the methyl group acts like a molecular tag that marks the DNA at particular locations. It binds to DNA regions that are responsible for turning on and off the expression of genes.

 • • • 

I have gone to considerable lengths in the quest to verify the ultimate message that the bond between children and their parents builds a consistent model for the establishment of future relationships. Watching those mothers take care of their pups wasn’t always fun. I monitored a couple of dozen mice for four hours a day in the dark, meticulously recording in a notebook each and every move they made. Such are the pleasures of science. I remember finding myself at once amused and puzzled by the mice whose maternal behaviour I used to scrutinize. As I stood in front of those cages, I inevitably made fresh comparisons between what I was measuring and what I remembered of my own mother’s parenting style, as well as my grandmother’s warmth. Was Nonna Lucia warm enough to my mother? How much time did my mother spend hovering over my cradle? Did she ever assume the blanket position? Did she ever lick me, for that matter? In the lab, colleagues and I used to make jokes about those mice and tried to guess the parenting styles of our respective mothers based on our interpersonal relationships and our failures and successes in love.