Love 2.0 (5 page)

The history of your cells is one of adaptation, of change. Adaptation is both quick and slow. It’s quick because in a heartbeat your actions adapt to your ever-changing circumstances—you leap away from dangers, for instance, and lean in toward opportunities. As particular
dangers and opportunities recur, your body begins to anticipate them. Springtime, for instance, opens up opportunities to walk barefoot. As you take those opportunities, calluses emerge to protect your feet and your metabolism rises as you become leaner from increased activity. Adaptation is extremely slow, on the other hand, because the wisdom in you that guides your quick responses to dangers, opportunities, and any ensuing physiological adjustments was sculpted, little by little, over millennia by the discerning chisel of Darwinian natural selection. Your animal ancestors were the ones whose quick actions saved their skin. That’s how fear, anger, disgust, and other negative emotions evolved over countless generations. Yet your animal ancestors were also the ones whose opportunistic actions added to their reserves of resources—their toolkits—upon which they drew to navigate and survive future threats, so that they might live long enough to successfully raise their young. That’s how love and other positive emotions evolved.

Prominent within your ancestor’s toolkit—among the life-saving and life-giving resources upon which they could time and again draw—were the strong bonds that they’d forged with those with whom their genetic survival was yoked: their mates, kin, and coalition members. These were the ones in whom they could place their trust and loyalty, the ones to whom they became irresistibly drawn. Without bonds, an ancient animal died young or failed to reproduce. With bonds, an ancient animal stood a chance to become one of your ancestors.

Because bonds made the difference between life and death for your ancestors, so did opportunities to build bonds. Those opportunities presented themselves within safe moments of connection. And just as walking triggers callus formation and raises metabolism, the good feelings that arise when connecting with others trigger biochemical changes that reshape the lenses through which those others are seen, increasing their allure. Ancient animals enticed in this way into repeated moments of positivity resonance built more bonds. It’s their
DNA that lives on within your own cells, that forms the wisdom of your body. Love is a product of human evolution. In this very literal way, you were made for love.

This means that you didn’t need to learn everything about love anew, from your own firsthand experience. From birth, your body knew how to seek out love, to stoke it, and to gain pleasure and sustenance from it. Your brief yet recurrent blasts of positivity resonance with others accrued to build the very bonds that have kept you alive to this day, enabling you now to be reading these words.

Human culture tempts you to turn away from your animal origins, to divorce yourself from the rat pups that wrestle playfully with one another by day and then later drift peacefully to sleep in one heaping pack, piled one upon the other, or from the zebras that groom each other during quiet moments of safety on the savanna. Yet these ancient, animal forms of love, enacted through touch and mutual care, still live on in you, in your cells. Your thirst for positivity resonance emerges from deep within. Bids for love, to be sure, take new heights in humans. Creatively using uniquely human forms of communication, you can caress your beloved through the spoken words of a poem or inspire him through the rhythms of song and dance. You’ve got more resources for connection to draw on than does a rat pup or zebra. Yet your need for love is one and the same. Resting in this wisdom you can see past even abundant bickering, nastiness, greed, and fear. You can spot and hone in on life-giving opportunities for positivity resonance. As I’ll share in
chapter 3
, science now reveals that when you become attuned to your body’s definition of love, your cells get the message. They defend you from illness and enable you to grow healthier and thrive.

The world you face each day will forever present you with a wild mix of good and bad news. By nature’s design, your body is equipped to handle it all—to defend against true threats and to uncover and create nourishing micro-moments of love, not just with mates and kin, but perhaps most consequentially, with those outside your family circle.
More than any other time in human history, after all, your own genetic survival may well hinge on the love you share—and the bonds you form—with complete strangers.

What About Intimates?

Love is a many-splendored thing. This classic saying is apt, not only because love can emerge from the shoots of any other positive emotion you experience, be it amusement, serenity, or gratitude, but also because of your many viable collaborators in love, ranging from your sister to your soul mate, your newborn to your neighbor, even someone you’ve never met before. Even when you don’t share the same language, you and another have so much in common. Barring brain damage or one of a handful of neurological disorders, you each share the nervous and endocrine systems that make positivity resonance possible. Love, then, becomes possible with any human connection.

At the level of positivity resonance, micro-moments of love are virtually identical regardless of whether they bloom between you and a stranger or you and a soul mate; between you and an infant or you and your lifelong best friend. The clearest difference between the love you feel with intimates and the love you feel with anyone with whom you share a connection is its sheer frequency. Spending more total moments together increases your chances to feast on micro-moments of positivity resonance. These micro-moments change you. They forge new coalitions with strangers, advance your acquaintanceships into friendships, and cultivate even deeper intimacy in your most cherished relationships. Each micro-moment of positivity resonance knits you in a little tighter to the social fabric of your community, your network of relationships, and your family.

Whereas the biological synchrony that emerges between connected brains and bodies may be comparable no matter who the other person
may be, the triggers for your micro-moments of love can be wholly different with intimates. The hallmark feature of intimacy is
mutual responsiveness
, that reassuring sense that you and your soul mate—or you and your best friend—really “get” each other. This means that you come to your interactions with a well-developed understanding of each other’s inner workings, and you use that privileged knowledge thoughtfully, for each other’s benefit. Intimacy is that safe and comforting feeling you get when you can bask in the knowledge that this other person truly understands and appreciates you. You can relax in this person’s presence and let your guard down. Your mutual sense of trust, perhaps reinforced by your commitments of loyalty to each other, allows each of you to be more open with each other than either of you would be elsewhere.

Within these safe environs of intimacy, love can spring up in the most unlikely moments. More than a decade ago, for instance, I was driving through my then-hometown with my husband, finding my way to a corner store I’d been to only once or twice before. Coming up on the back side of the store, I turned left into what I figured was the back entrance, planning to make my way around the parking lot to the storefront. Only it wasn’t really an entrance. It was just a short gravel road that led nowhere. I stopped the car and stared at the distant storefront. I’m sure I was only frozen like that for a matter of seconds, but my husband found it amusing. “Stuck on a gravel road?” he chided. We shared a laugh at my stunned response. I can’t tell you how many times in the years since Jeff has resurrected this phrase to gently tease me for being a bit slow to figure out an unexpected situation. Knowing me so well, he gets that surprises can make me deer-in-the-headlights stuck for a moment (or six). Yet instead of taking this recurrence as a character flaw to overlook, or as cause for annoyance or criticism, he has made it our running inside joke. Ever an alchemist, he transforms predicaments like these into micro-moments of love. Love that not only brings me swiftly back into action but also reinforces the safety of our bond.

This silly example points to yet another thing that your intimates uniquely offer you: shared history. Earlier this year I took a late-night cab ride at a conference with my former office mate from graduate school, whom I’d just run into for the first time in nearly a decade. Although we’d lost touch for so long, within a matter of minutes, we were laughing uproariously in the back of that cab about old times, conjuring up our old goofy sayings and antics. In the short commute to our respective hotels we were transported back to the late 1980s as well, and to the fun times we’d had together. Wiping the tears of laughter away as we said our good-byes, we dreamed up ways we might reconnect again in the future.

Your intimates offer you history, safety, trust, and openness in addition to the frequent opportunity to connect. The more trusting and open you are with someone else—and the more trusting and open that person is with you—the more points of connection each of you may find over which to share a laugh, or a common source of intrigue, serenity, or delight.

What About Babies?

Appreciating the deeply shared understanding and care that supports the micro-moments of love you feel with intimates can make you wonder whether newborns have the wherewithal to truly engage in love. While (most) parents love (most of) their newborns, are their newborns truly capable of loving them back? With their limited capacities, how can newborns muster up the selfless focus on others seemingly required by love? The trick is, they don’t need to muster at all. Under the right prenatal conditions, newborns arrive thirsty for connection with caring adults, trusting and open. From close range, they seek out your eye contact, body contact, and even synchronize their movements, to the extent they can, with yours. Ever the empiricist, I tested this claim out
within minutes after my first son was born. As I held him skin to skin on my chest, we simply gazed at each other. Then I stuck my tongue out at him. It didn’t take but a moment for him to mirror me by sticking out his own tongue. I replicated my experiment some three years later when my second son was born and got the same result, a silly mother-son synchrony immortalized both times by my husband on film.

Recasting love as positivity resonance makes it easy to identify micro-moment after micro-moment of love blossoming between infants and their responsive caretakers. Developmental science has shown that the attentive, infant-caregiver dance is absolutely vital to normal human development. As we’ll see in
chapter 3
, infant-caregiver synchrony runs deeper than visible behaviors; it coordinates biological synchrony as well. Babies live off this stuff. We all do. Like babies, we were all designed to thrive on love. Positivity resonance is a vital nutrient.

This makes the fate of babies who, for whatever reasons, are deprived of positivity resonance all the more heart-wrenching. Sadly, not all children have the loving nourishment they need. Some, even as their other physical needs are met—for shelter, food, clothing, and such—have far too little experience sharing positive emotions with others. Love’s absence, research shows, can compromise nearly all aspects of children’s development—their cognitive and social abilities, their health. At one extreme, the stark and pervasive deprivation experienced by Romanian orphans reveals the painfully long shadow cast by early emotional neglect. Even among those orphans adopted and raised by loving Western families, developmental problems can persist for decades. More commonplace and poignant, however, is the unintentional emotional neglect that emerges within ordinary, even financially prosperous families.

A huge untreated source of such neglect comes from depression, which is estimated to affect 10–12 percent of postpartum moms, yet is similarly harmful when it plagues fathers or other infant caregivers.
Widely viewed as a disorder of the positive emotional system, depression smothers the sparks of positivity and positivity resonance like a heavy, wet blanket thrown over a waning campfire. It flattens people’s emotional experiences. Do you know the feeling of the lead apron the dental assistant drapes over you before an X-ray? Well, imagine all your clothes were made of that leaded material. How sluggish would that make you? How unmotivated to move? Your biggest wish when feeling depressed can be just to curl up alone in your bed. Sleep may be the only relief in sight. Now imagine caring for a newborn in this depressed state. Sure, you’d muster up the energy to change diapers and provide necessary feedings. But studies show that what a depressed caregiver does not do well is synchronize. Depression itself slows down your body movements and speech output. For the infant in your care, this translates into less behavioral contingency between the two of you, and less predictability. When synchrony does emerge, odds are it’s laced not with positivity, but negativity—be it anger or indifference. Depression, then, not only impairs your ability to experience and express your own positive emotions but also impairs your ability to connect with the preverbal being in your care. With the two key scaffolds of positivity and connection missing, positivity resonance—so badly needed for both of you—simply can’t emerge.

The damages done to the developing child have been duly cataloged by developmental scientists. The list includes long-lasting deficits that can derail kids well into adolescence and beyond, first, in their use of symbols and other early forms of cognitive reasoning that undergird successful academic performance, and next, in their abilities to take other people’s perspectives and empathize, skills vital to developing supportive social relationships. More generally, behavioral synchrony between infant and caregiver sets the stage for children’s development of self-regulation, which gives them tools for controlling and channeling their emotions, attention, and behaviors, tools vital to success in all domains of life.

The range of lifelong benefits that lovingly reared infants extract from the recurrent micro-moments of positivity resonance they share with attentive caregivers shines a spotlight on the immense value of these fleeting and subtle states. Although the typical springboards for the loving moments you share with intimates are surely different from the peekaboo games infants play with their caregivers, this painstaking infant research underscores that a deep or complex understanding of the other is hardly necessary for love. Any moment of positivity resonance that ripples through the brains and bodies of you and another can be health- and life-giving, regardless of whether you share history together. Studies of successful marriages also bear this out. Couples who regularly make time to do new and exciting things together—like hiking, skiing, dancing, or attending concerts and plays—have better- quality marriages. These activities provide a steady stream of shared micro-moments of positivity resonance. Intimacy and shared history are hardly preconditions for taking a hike.