Love 2.0 (4 page)

True connection is one of love’s bedrock prerequisites, a prime reason that love is not unconditional, but instead requires a particular stance. Neither abstract nor mediated, true connection is physical and unfolds in real time. It requires a sensory and temporal copresence of bodies. The main mode of sensory connection, scientists contend, is eye contact. Other forms of real-time sensory contact—through touch, voice, or mirrored body postures and gestures—no doubt connect
people as well and at times can substitute for eye contact. Nevertheless, eye contact may well be the most potent trigger for connection and oneness.

A smile, more so than any other emotional expression, pops out and draws your eye. That’s a good thing, too, because a smile can mean so many different things. Why, for instance, is your new coworker suddenly smiling at you? Is she being sincere or smug? Friendly or self-absorbed? Caring or just polite? Considering that Paul Ekman, the world’s leading scientist of human facial expressions, estimates that humans regularly use some fifty different types of smiles, the ambiguity of any given smile becomes more understandable. Plus, the differences between different types of smiles—a friendly smile, an enjoyment smile, a domineering smile, even a fake smile—can be subtle. Whereas scientists like Ekman use deliberate and formal reasoning to detect those subtle differences—most often with the aid of slow-motion video capture—without specialized training, all you have are your gut feelings to figure out what your coworker’s smile really means. Yet those gut feelings can be a powerful source of intuition and wisdom if you know how best to access them. Eye contact, it turns out, is crucial. New scientific evidence suggests that if you don’t make direct eye contact with your coworker, you’re at a distinct disadvantage in trying to figure out what she really feels or means.

Eye contact is the key that unlocks the wisdom of your intuitions because when you meet your smiling coworker’s gaze, her smile triggers activity within your own brain circuitry that allows you to simulate—within your own brain, face, and body—the emotions you see emanating from hers. You now know, through this rapid and nonconscious simulation, more about what it feels like to have smiled like that. Access to this embodied feeling, this information springing up from within you, makes you wiser. You become more accurate, for instance, at discerning what her unexpected smile means. You’re more attuned, less gullible. You intuitively grasp her intentions. She wasn’t
being friendly after all, she was gloating. She wasn’t looking to connect, but was instead self-satisfied. You don’t need to be a cynic to recognize that not all smiles are sincere bids for connection. Some smiles may even be flashed to exploit or control you. Just as you rely on your senses to discern nutritious from rotting food, so, too, can you rely on your senses to help you separate the honest from dishonest invitations for connection.

Once you have made eye contact, your conclusions about your co-worker’s smile, conscious or not, inform your gut and your next move. Without eye contact, it is much easier to experience misunderstandings, crushed hearts, and exploitation as you over- or under-interpret the friendliness of other people’s smiles. You can also miss countless opportunities for life-giving connection. Eye contact helps you better detect the sincere affiliative gestures within a sea of merely polite or decidedly manipulative smiles that bid for your attention. Love, then, is not blind.

Moments of
seemingly
shared positivity abound. You, and those in your midst, can be infused with one form of positivity or another, yet not be truly connected. You and everyone else in the movie theater, for instance, share the positivity emanating from the big screen; you and the person next to you in the lecture hall are fascinated by the same set of new ideas; you and your family members take in the same television comedy. Yet absent eye contact, touch, laughter, or another form of behavioral synchrony, these moments are akin to what developmental psychologists call
parallel play
. They no doubt feel great and their positivity confers broaden-and-build benefits both to you and to others, independently. But if they are not (yet) directly and interpersonally shared experiences, they do not resonate or reverberate, and so they are not (yet) instances of love. The key to love is to add some form of physical connection.

To be clear, the sensory and temporal connections you establish with others through eye contact, touch, conversation, or other forms of
behavioral synchrony are not, in and of themselves, love. Even holding hands, after all, can become a loveless habit. Yet in the right contexts, these gestures become springboards for love. The right contexts are those infused with the emotional presence of positivity.

Imagine that instead of me sitting alone at my home office computer searching for words in July 2011 and you sitting (am I right?) who knows where reading these words some years later, that you and I are sitting together at your local coffee shop talking these ideas over. Turns out, you’ve got a boatload of great questions. It doesn’t take long for our shared enthusiasm for what the latest science says about human nature and human potential to take hold of us. Although I’m fairly low-key by nature, this sort of conversation can get me pretty animated. My gestures and smiles convey not only my enthusiasm for the ideas but also my appreciation for your thoughtful questions and examples. I’m attuned to you, sympathetic to your input, and responding to all the subtle cues that reveal how effectively we’re communicating.

From my perspective, your smiles, nods, and other gestures of your own positivity and attunement don’t just exist “out there” in you. When we meet each other’s gaze, they also come to exist, in a very real way, inside me. Within milliseconds my brain and body begin to buzz with your enthusiasm and appreciation, and your attunement to me. The more this happens, the more I come to feel the same way as you, both enthused and appreciative, responsive and sympathetic. Soon enough these feelings surface on my face and emanate through my voice and gestures. As our eyes continue to meet, a parallel simulation process flows forth within you, as the dynamics unfolding within your brain and body begin to pattern mine. A back-and-forth reverberation stretches out between us.

Increasingly, with each passing micro-moment, you and I come to
feel the same way
. We’re in sync, attuned. Positivity resonance has established a connection between us, as your and my brain activity and biochemistry increasingly become one and the same. A positivity-infused
interweaving of our hearts and minds emerges, a momentary state scientists have called
intersubjectivity
. You can think of this as a miniature version of what
Star Trek
’s infamous Dr. Spock called a
mind meld
. Yet both expressions, in my view, are too focused on the mind, too heartless. For it’s vital, too, that the emotional tone of our momentary meld, our interweaving, is warm, open, trusting, and full of genuine care and concern for each other.

Some would call what is happening between us
rapport.
Yet the more I understand the science behind positivity resonance, the more I think this description misleads.
Rapport
sounds optional, superfluous. Something you’d be just as healthy with or without. Given the vital role that positivity resonance plays in our survival, such states warrant elevation. That’s why I call them
love
, our supreme emotion. Micro-moments like these are those essential nutrients of which most of us in modern life aren’t getting enough.

So what’s a smile for? Traditional views hold that smiles have evolved to reveal the inner state of the person who smiles. Indeed, when you call a smile a facial expression, you unwittingly subscribe to this view—that certain facial movements universally express a person’s otherwise unseen emotions. An opposing view shifts the spotlight onto the
recipient
of a smile and argues that smiles evolved not because they provided a readout of the positive emotion that the smiling person feels, but rather because they evoked a positive emotion in the person who meets the smiling person’s gaze. More recently scientists have taken this alternative view a step further, arguing that smiles have evolved to give us an implicit understanding—or gut sense—of the smiling person’s true motives. Building on these and other evolutionary accounts, I think it’s appropriate to widen the spotlight further still, to illuminate not just either the
smiler
or the
smilee
, but instead the emerging connection between the two people who come to share a smile. One person’s sincere, heartfelt smile can trigger a powerful and reverberating state between two people, one characterized by the trio
of love’s features: a now shared positive emotion, a synchrony of actions and biochemistry, and a feeling of mutual care. Put succinctly, smiles may well have evolved to make love, to create positivity resonance.

Love, then, requires connection. This means that when you’re alone, thinking about those you love, reflecting on past loving connections, yearning for more, or even when you’re practicing loving-kindness meditation or writing an impassioned love letter, you are not in that moment experiencing true love. It’s true that the strong feelings you experience when by yourself are important and absolutely vital to your health and well-being. But they are not (yet) shared, and so they lack the critical and undeniably physical ingredient of resonance. Physical presence is key to love, to positivity resonance.

The problem is that all too often, you simply don’t take the time that’s needed to truly connect with others. To the contrary, contemporary society, with its fast-changing technology and oppressive workloads, baits you to speed through your day at a pace that’s completely antithetical to connection. Feeling pressured to accomplish more each day, you multitask just to stay afloat. Any given moment finds you plotting your next move. What’s next on your never-ending to-do list? What do you need and from whom? Increasingly, you converse with others through e-mails, texts, tweets, and other ways that don’t require speaking, let alone seeing one another. Yet these can’t fulfill your body’s craving for connection. Love requires you to be physically and emotionally present. It also requires that you slow down.

My second-born was such a good sleeper that my husband or I could place him in his crib awake and he’d happily drift off to sleep all on his own. Our firstborn was altogether different. He needed to be in our arms while he drifted off. He also needed a particular motion, one that we couldn’t achieve in the comfort of a rocking chair, but only by walking. For at least the first year of his life, then, my husband or I would slowly pace across the tiny nursery, holding him in our arms, for up to thirty minutes or more. He trained us well. We learned that we could
only place him in his crib after he’d succumbed to a deep sleep. Anything less would lead to another long bout of pacing.

With so many things to juggle as new parents, not to mention our own sleep deprivation, my husband and I began to dread the time-sink of this bedtime ritual. We’d yearn to be released from the shadowy nursery so that we could tackle the mounting dishes and laundry, make headway on a few more work projects by e-mail, or collapse into our own bed. Then, my husband discovered a radical shift that changed everything. He gave up thinking about where else he could be and immersed himself in this parenting experience. He tuned in to our son’s heartbeat and breath. He appreciated his warmth, his weight in his arms, and the sweet smell of his skin. By doing so, he transformed a parental chore into a string of loving moments. When my husband shared his secret with me, we each not only enjoyed this bedtime ritual all the more, but our son also fell more swiftly into his deep sleep. Looking back, I now recognize that even though we were physically present with our son as we had walked him to sleep, at first we were not also emotionally present. I have no doubts that infants can pick up on mismatches between their parents’ outward actions and inner experiences. In our case, this mismatch had initially prevented the joys and benefits of cross-generational positivity resonance from emerging.

Our boys are now nine and twelve, and their bedtime rituals have changed accordingly. Yet it strikes me that, living less than a mile from our kids’ school, my husband and I still have the same opportunity for a walking connection with our kids each day. Yet in the mad dash to get the kids to school on time each weekday, it’s easy to find any excuse to drive. We all know the virtues of walking. It’s good for our bodies, our brains, as well as the environment. What often goes unrecognized, however, is the good it does for our relationships. It offers up the time, physical copresence, and shared movements to satisfy our and our kids’ daily craving for connection. Of course, we can still spoil this chance by being mentally and emotionally elsewhere, by letting headlines,
e-mails, and tweets draw us to favor our phones over our kids, for instance. Love grows best when you are attuned to the present moment, your bodily sensations, as well as to the actions and reactions of others. Sadly, when you are more attuned to technology, to-do lists, and mass media than to the unique and wondrous individuals in your day, you miss out.

Made For Love

Upon taking in world news on any given day, you can come away feeling that people in general are more fearful, aggressive, and greedy than ever before. As a global society, we’re also feeling more stress, gaining more weight, and being diagnosed with more chronic illnesses year by year. In the United States, life expectancies have actually declined for kids today, relative to their parents, for the first time in centuries. How many of these ills, I wonder, stem from our collective denial of who we are and how we got here?

Like all other living things, you are a collection of cells. The ways your cells form, the ways they operate and grow, and the ways they’ll be continually replaced by fresh cells until you take your last breath reflect the deeply encoded ancestral knowledge embedded within your DNA. You are a unique and ingenious animal, to be sure, but an animal nonetheless. Sometimes you forget this basic truth. You can get so caught up in the booming, buzzing world around you that your animal identity slips out of view. You forget how you—and every other human animal—got here, how we collectively arrived in this messy, overtaxed world that we inherited and will one day pass on.