Why We Love (14 page)

Sir Edwin Arnold

“Somewhere”
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“She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. She … [was] famine, fire, destruction and plague … the only true begetter. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires before they withered … her body was a miracle of construction.… She was unquestionably gorgeous. She was lavish. She was a dark, unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much … those huge violet blue eyes … had an odd glint.… Aeons passed, civilizations came and went while these cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon.”

So thought Richard Burton when he first saw nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. Why does a man walk into a room full of attractive women, speak to several he finds charming, then fall head over heels in love with one? Why does a woman with several suitors see a man for only moments before her brain circuits fire up with romantic passion? Why does one person ignite these primitive brain circuits while another perfectly lovely human being leaves us totally unmoved? Why “him”? Why “her”?

Timing

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Yeats asked. Perhaps you have been swept away by someone at a party, in the office, or on the beach; then later wondered whether you just got caught up in the excitement of the moment. Your craving to love and to be loved altered your vision—transforming a frog into a prince or princess. You confused the dancer with the dance.

Love can be triggered when you least expect it—by pure chance. The perfect partner can sit right next to you at a party and you might not notice him or her if you are exceptionally busy at work or school, enmeshed in another relationship, or otherwise emotionally preoccupied.

But if you just entered college or moved to a new city by yourself, recently recovered from an unsatisfactory love affair, began to make enough money to raise a family, are lonely or suffering through a difficult experience, or have too much spare time, you are ripe to fall in love.
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In fact, people who are emotionally aroused, be it by joy, sadness, anxiety, fear, curiosity, or
any
other feeling, are more likely to be vulnerable to this passion.
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I suspect this is because all agitated mental states are associated with arousal mechanisms in the brain, as well as with elevated levels of stress hormones. Both systems elevate levels of dopamine—thus setting up the chemistry for romantic passion.

Proximity

“Ah, I have picked up magic in her nearness,” wrote poet Ezra Pound. Quite right; proximity can also spark this rapture. We tend to choose those who are around us.
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This was elegantly expressed by Terry, a man from Canada who recently wrote me the following e-mail:

Dear Dr. Fisher, When I was in my “dating” years, I had certain expectations with respect to the woman I would marry. She had to be this, that and the other thing too! What I overlooked was a beautiful, caring, unselfish woman with wonderful goals literally living in my back yard! She met none of my “expectations” but we started dating, lived together, fell in love and were married a year later. It’s been 15 years now and our relationship has grown tremendously and continues to grow every day. I guess what I’m trying to say is, take a step back and look around you. Don’t micro-analyze every detail. Maybe your soul mate is closer than you think :).

Many other hidden forces play a role in whom you choose. Among them: mystery.

Mystery

Both sexes are often attracted to those they find mysterious. As Baudelaire wrote, “We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.” The sense that one has a slippery grip on an elusive, improbable treasure can trigger romantic passion.

The reverse is also true. Familiarity can deaden thoughts of romantic love—as life on one Israeli kibbutz has shown. Here children grew up together in a common house where they lived, slept, and bathed with other youths of all ages. Boys and girls touched and lay together playfully. By age twelve, however, they became tense with one another. Then as teenagers, they developed strong brother-sister bonds. But none of those who started life in this common cradle married a fellow kibbutznik.
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So scientists now think that at a critical time in childhood, sometime between ages three and six, boys and girls who live in close proximity and get to know each other well lose the ability to fall in love with one another.

This repugnance for mating with the familiar is common among mammals. Almost all individuals of all species on record have a sexual aversion to closely familiar others; they prefer to mate with strangers. So males (or females) usually leave home at puberty to find sex partners in other groups. If a young male remains in his natal community, as male rhesus monkeys do, he often behaves like a child around his mother, snuggling in his sweetheart’s arms instead of courting her to copulate. And in one recorded case of attempted incest among chimpanzees, a sister violently repelled her brother—screaming, kicking, and biting him before she wiggled away and fled.

You and I inherited this natural repulsion for copulation with close family members and other individuals we know well, a distaste that undoubtedly evolved to discourage in-breeding—the destructive act of mixing one’s DNA with close kin. As a result, we are more likely to become attracted to someone from outside our family or the group in which we were raised—someone with a touch of mystery.

Nature has even given us the brain wiring to find strangers exciting. Mysterious people are novel. And novelty is associated with elevated levels of dopamine—the neurotransmitter of romance.

Do Opposites Attract?

Nevertheless, “that first fine careless rapture,” as Robert Browning called romantic love, is generally directed toward someone much like one’s self. Most people around the world do feel that amorous chemistry for unfamiliar individuals of the
same
ethnic, social, religious, educational, and economic background, who have a similar amount of physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, and similar attitudes, expectations, values, interests, and social and communication skills.
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In fact, in a new study of mate selection in America, evolutionary biologists Peter Buston and Stephen Emlen report that young men and women think of themselves as particular types of marriage partners and choose people with the same traits, ranging from financial and physical assets to intricacies of personality.
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If a woman is blessed with a trust fund, for example, she seeks another from the upper class. Handsome men seek beautiful women. And those devoted to family and sexual fidelity select someone with these attributes. The mirror speaks. Men and women also gravitate to lovers who share their sense of humor, to those with similar social and political values, and to individuals with much the same beliefs about life in general.
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Remarkably, scientists have established that many of these traits, including your occupational interests, what you do in your leisure hours, many of your social attitudes, even the strength of your faith in God, are influenced by your genes.
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So genetic types gravitate toward one another; we tend to be attracted to people like ourselves.

Anthropologists call this human propensity to be drawn to someone like yourself “positive assortive mating” or “fitness matching.” The specific kind of person you actually choose, however, has been changing somewhat. The world is seeing more interracial marriages, for example. In the United States these weddings have increased some 800 percent since 1960.
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But even in this time of the global village, that fire in the mind is still most likely to ignite when you meet an unfamiliar man or woman who is quite similar to you ethnically, socially, and intellectually.

Like our attraction to unfamiliar people, this preference for partners like oneself is probably evolutionary baggage. Why? Because a fetus and its mother are foreigners to each other. If they share a similar chemical makeup, the mother will have an easier time carrying the infant in her womb. In fact, mates who are genetically similar experience fewer natural abortions and bear more and healthier babies.
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It is not advantageous to be too alike, however. And humans seem to have evolved at least one mental mechanism to assure that we choose a partner who is slightly different—chemically at least. This discovery stems from what has become known as the “sweaty T-shirt” experiment. When women were asked to smell men’s sweaty T-shirts and report on which they thought were the most “sexy smelling,” they chose T-shirts of men with immune systems that were unlike but compatible with their own.
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Unconsciously these women were attracted to individuals who could potentially help them produce genetically more varied young.

So opposites attract—within the limits of one’s ethnic, social, and intellectual sphere.

Symmetry: The “Golden Mean”

Another biological taste we have inherited from the animal kingdom is our tendency to choose well-proportioned mates. Bodily symmetry can help to trigger romantic love, as the ancient Greeks theorized. Almost twenty-five hundred years ago Aristotle maintained that there were some universal standards of physical beauty. One, he believed, was balanced bodily proportions, including symmetry. This accorded with his high respect for what he called the golden mean, or moderation between extremes.

Modern science supports Aristotle’s notion. Symmetry is beautiful—to insects, birds, mammals, all of the primates, and people around the world.
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Female scorpion flies seek mates with uniform wings. Barn swallows like partners with well-proportioned tails. Monkeys are partial to consorts with symmetrical teeth. If you walk into a village in New Guinea and point to the most beautiful man or woman sitting around the campfire, the natives will agree with you.
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And when researchers used computers to blend many faces into a composite “average” face, both men and women liked the average face better than any of the individual ones.
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It was more balanced. Even two-month-old infants gaze longer at more symmetrical faces.
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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats’s words have puzzled many. But as it turns out, the beauty of symmetry does tell a basic truth. Creatures with balanced, well-proportioned ears, eyes, teeth, and jaws, with symmetrical elbows, knees, and breasts, have been able to repel bacteria, viruses, and other minute predators that can cause bodily irregularities. By displaying symmetry, animals advertise their superior genetic ability to combat diseases.
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So our human attraction to symmetrical suitors is a primitive animal mechanism designed to guide us to select genetically sturdy mating partners.
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And nature has taken no chances; the brain naturally responds to a beautiful face. When scientists recorded the brain activity of heterosexual men ages twenty-one to thirty-five as they looked at women with beautiful faces, the ventral tegmental area (VTA) “lit up.”
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A similar response occurred in our scanning study: those subjects who gazed at photos of better-looking partners showed more activity in the VTA. And the VTA is rich with dopamine—the neurotransmitter that provides the energy, elation, focussed attention, and motivation to win a reward.

Not surprisingly, symmetrical men and women often have many suitors to choose from. As a result, exquisitely good-looking women tend to marry higher status men,
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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis being a crowning example of this matching process.

Highly symmetrical men also get reproductive perks. They begin to have sex some four years earlier than their lopsided peers; they have more sex partners and more adulterous affairs as well.
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Women also achieve more orgasms with symmetrical men,
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even when this relationship is not emotionally satisfying to them. And when a woman has an orgasm with a well-proportioned man, her orgasmic contractions suck up more of his sperm.
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I suspect these sexual responses occur because as the woman looks at her symmetrical lover, the ventral tegmental area in her brain produces dopamine—which (in a series of interactions) triggers testosterone and enhances the sexual response.

Because symmetry enhances one’s choices in the mating game, women go to extraordinary lengths to achieve it or at least a semblance of it. With powders they make the two sides of the face more similar. With mascara and eyeliner, they make their eyes appear more alike. With lipstick they enhance one lip to match the other. And with plastic surgery, exercise, belts, bras, and tight jeans and shirts, they mold their forms to create the symmetrical proportions men prefer.

Nature helps. Scientists have found that women’s hands and ears are more symmetrical during monthly ovulation—a time when it is reproductively important to attract a man.
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Women’s breasts become more symmetrical during ovulation too.
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Moreover, young men and young women are often quite symmetrical; we become more and more lopsided as we age.

“Waist to Hip” Ratio

The golden mean of balance also applies to other bodily proportions.

To a group of American men, psychologist Devendra Singh displayed an array of line drawings of young women and asked which body types they found most attractive.
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Most chose women whose waist circumference was about 70 percent of their hips. This experiment was then redone in Britain, Germany, Australia, India, Uganda, and several other countries. Responses varied, but many informants favored this same general waist-to-hip ratio.