Why We Love (21 page)

The procedure I described was the same as the one we used with our subjects who were happily in love. Each participant would alternately look at a photograph of his or her rejecting beloved and a neutral photo that generated no positive or negative feelings; between these tasks the subject would do the mind-cleansing job of counting backward from a large number in increments of seven. Meanwhile, the fMRI machine would record their brain activity.

I found the pre-interviews difficult to do. I was deeply moved by each story that I heard. It seemed to me that all these heartbroken men and women were deeply depressed. I had expected this. But many were also angry, and it was this unforeseen aspect of romantic rejection that made me come to realize the awful power of this passion.

I first saw this scalding “love hatred,” as dramatist August Strindberg called it, directly after my brain scanning session with Barbara.

Love Hatred

We had scanned Barbara’s brain when she was madly and happily in love with Michael. Like all of the other subjects who were blissfully in love, Barbara had emerged from the first experiment sparkling. Her eyes danced. She giggled softly. She had gotten off the fMRI table gracefully, enthusiastically, full of optimism. And she had commented on how pleased she had been to spend that quiet time looking at the photograph of Michael, reviewing her memories of their times together. But for Barbara this euphoria would not last. Five months later Michael left her.

I learned this one morning when I walked into the psychology lab at SUNY Stony Brook and found her sobbing at a large conference table. I was horrified to see this lovely young woman so broken. Her hair was matted. She had lost weight. Her face was colorless and streaked with trails of tears. She acted as if she were carrying heavy weights on her arms; she hardly moved. And she told me she was “miserable;” that her “self-esteem was shot.” “My thoughts,” she said, “always go back to Michael … I have a lump of unhappiness in my chest.” Indeed, she had spent that morning sitting on her bed, staring.

I was so touched by her sorrow that I had to leave the room. But as I stood in a darkened nearby office to collect myself, I came to realize that Barbara might be able to offer some incredibly valuable scientific information: she could show us what happens in the brain when someone has recently been profoundly disappointed in love.

So I apologetically asked Barbara if she would be willing to be scanned again, this time as a subject who had been rejected in love. I warned her that thinking about her relationship while in the brain scanner might trigger powerful feelings, and I assured her that I would talk with her after the brain scanning session to settle her down (if necessary) and that I would also like to call her at home a few days after the procedure to make sure the experiment hadn’t caused her further despair. Nevertheless, I explained, this scanning session might help others who were suffering the way she was. I hesitantly suggested we do the experiment the same day.

That sweet girl agreed.

As we walked toward the scanning lab, Barbara dragged; she looked as if she were drowning in despair.

This was just the beginning. Although I had anticipated that Barbara would be upset, I was staggered by what happened directly after the experiment ended. Barbara leapt off the scanning table and bolted out the door, then out of the building altogether. She didn’t give me time to talk with her or wait to collect her $50.00 compensation for participating in the project. I was even more stupefied a half hour later when she returned to get the money. She was wildly distraught. I implored her to sit with me in the waiting room. She did. There she began to talk.

She told me that while she had looked at Michael’s picture during the experiment, she had recalled all of their arguments. “I will never get over him,” she burst out; then she exploded into sobs. As she wept, I noticed something else about Barbara: she was furious at me. She glared at me between her tears. Suddenly she shrieked, “Why do you want to study this?” On she railed as I stared at her, too stunned to speak. Gradually I realized something important: the experience had triggered in Barbara what psychologist Reid Meloy calls “abandonment rage.”
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Barbara was not angry at me; she was furious at Michael. She had attacked me because I was available.

Was the brain circuitry for passionate romantic love, I asked myself, somehow directly connected to the brain networks for what psychologists call hate/rage?

I had long believed that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference. Now I came to suspect that love and hate/rage might be intricately connected in the human brain, and that indifference might run along an entirely different circuit. Moreover, perhaps this brain link between love and hate/rage could help explain why crimes of passion—such as stalking, homicide, and suicide—are so common around the world: when an attachment is ruptured and the drive to love is thwarted, the brain can easily turn this powerful force to fury.

Abandonment Paranoia

“No doubt this way is best. No doubt in time I’d learn / To hate you like the rest / I once loved.”
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Poet W. D. Snodgrass knew the same rage that Barbara felt. Indeed, I saw this bitter anger in several other jilted subjects as they emerged from the brain scanning machine.

I also saw paranoia—in a beautiful young woman named Karen. Karen’s boyfriend, Tim, had deserted her three months earlier. They had been dating for almost two years and planned to marry. They had picked out both an engagement and a wedding ring. So when he left her for a woman at his office, she was stunned. “I lost fifteen pounds in two weeks,” Karen moaned. She was still having a hard time sleeping. “I think about him constantly,” she told me. “Everything makes me sad. I don’t care what I look like, or who I’m with. I don’t care about anything at all. It’s terrible; it hurts so much.” She had put all of Tim’s pictures in a box and hidden them in her closet. And she was considering taking antidepressants.

My day with Karen turned bizarre. She seemed dejected when I met her at Grand Central Station in New York City the morning of the scan. But she was convivial, indeed charming, on the two-hour train ride to Stony Brook. When we got to the psychology lab, however, her mood changed from chatty to despondent. On the way to lunch she was teary-eyed. She didn’t eat any of her pizza or drink any of her Coke—not a bite or swallow. And she lagged behind as we walked to the scanning lab. Later she told me that the experience had started to overwhelm her. She had begun to feel that she shouldn’t have volunteered, that she hated Tim, and that she didn’t want to be reminded of him. “This is all a big mistake.”

Karen didn’t tell me this prior to the scanning session, however. We scanned her brain without incident. But when she emerged from the machine, she was highly agitated. Then it started: she turned on the radiologist, accusing the astonished man of inserting the name “Tim” into the sounds of the MRI machine. “Tim; Tim; Tim; Tim.” She told us she repeatedly heard Tim’s name as she was looking at his photograph. I assured her over and over that we had not deceived her; that we could not possibly tinker with this complex multimillion-dollar machine even if we wanted to; and that I wouldn’t dream of terrorizing her by inserting Tim’s name into the sounds of the scanner.

She didn’t seem to believe me until we got back onto the train—some two hours and several beers later. Finally, when I thought I had regained her trust, I warily asked her if anyone in her family was paranoid. “Yes,” she offered, “my mother.” I didn’t pursue the conversation further.

I questioned every participant immediately after they emerged from the MRI machine. I wanted to know how they felt as they looked at the photograph of their beloved, what went through their minds as they gazed at the neutral photograph, and how they felt as they performed the count-back task. Apparently as Karen looked at the photograph of Tim, her melancholy and disappointment had turned to rage. Her anger must have then triggered paranoia—because, as she told me later, only after she got angry did she think she heard Tim’s name constantly repeated.

Rage, paranoia; only vaguely had I anticipated these reactions. But I had fully expected our rejected subjects to emerge from the scanning machine unhappy. I was right. One young woman cried so hard during the experiment that she soaked the pillow we use to secure each subject’s head. In fact, I saw this anguish in almost all our love-scorned subjects. And with each encounter I could not escape thinking about the countless other men and women in every corner of the world who have suffered the same despair.

Love Despair

“Mother, I cannot mind my wheel; / My fingers ache, my lips are dry; / Oh! If you felt the pain I feel! / But oh, who ever felt as I!”
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To answer Sappho’s desperate query made over twenty-five hundred years ago: millions have felt the sorrow of rejection in love.

From the Americas to Siberia, thousands have left lyric remembrances of their heartache. An Aztec Indian left these melancholy words in the sixteenth century: “Now I know / why my father / would go out / and cry / in the rain.”
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“I look at the hand you held, and the ache is hard to bear,” a Japanese poet wrote.
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And Edna St. Vincent Millay left these wrenching lines: “Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart / I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain, / And lie disheveled in the grass apart, / A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain.”
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Anthropologists have collected evidence of this sorrow, too. A forsaken Chinese woman confided, “I can’t bear life. All my interests in life have disappeared.”
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“I was lonely and really sad and I cried. I stopped eating and didn’t sleep well; I couldn’t keep my mind on my work,” a scorned Polynesian woman moaned.
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Up the Sepik River in New Guinea, rejected men compose tragic love songs they call “
namai,
” songs about marriages that “might have been.”
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And in India, brokenhearted men and women have formed a club, the Society for the Study of Broken Hearts. Each year, on the third day of May, they celebrate National Broken Hearts Day, swapping stories and consoling one another.
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Rejection by a sweetheart plunges a lover into one of the most profound and troubling emotional pains a human being can bear. Sorrow, anger, and many other feelings can sweep through the brain with such vigor that one can hardly eat or sleep. The degrees and shades of this powerful malaise must be as varied as human beings are. Yet psychiatrists and neuroscientists divide romantic rejection into two general phases: “Protest” and “Resignation/despair.”
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During the protest phase, deserted lovers obsessively try harder to win back their beloveds. As resignation sets in, they give up entirely and slip into despair.

Stage I: Protest

As a person begins to realize a beloved is thinking of ending the relationship, they generally become intensely restless. Overcome by longing and nostalgia, they devote almost all their time, their energy, and their attention to their departing mate. Their obsession: reunion with their lover.

Many of our scanning subjects found it difficult to sleep. Several had lost weight. Some trembled. Others sighed as they spoke to me of their sweethearts during the prescanning interview. They all reminisced, fixating on the troubled times, repeatedly searching for clues as to what went wrong and pondering on how to patch up the crumbling partnership. And all of them told me they never stopped thinking about their “rejecter”; every waking hour they were plagued by thoughts of “him” or “her.”

Spurned lovers also take extraordinary measures to reconnect with their former partner, revisiting mutual haunts, phoning day and night, writing letters, or incessantly e-mailing. They plead. They make dramatic entrances into a beloved’s home or place of work, then storm out, only to return and renew their appeal for reconciliation. Most become so focussed on this missing partner that everything reminds them of their sweetheart. As poet Kenneth Fearing put it, “tonight you are in my hair and eyes, / And every street light that our taxi passes shows me / You again, still you.”
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Most of all, rejected people yearn for reunion. So they protest, relentlessly seeking the slightest sign of hope.

Frustration Attraction

“Love is a sickness full of woes / All remedies refusing; / A plant that with most cutting grows, / Most barren with best using, / Why so?” The seventeenth-century poet Samuel Daniel pinpointed this peculiarity of romantic love: as adversity intensifies, so does romantic passion. This phenomenon is so common in literature and in life that I coined a term for it: “frustration attraction.” And I suspect that frustration attraction is associated with brain chemistry.

As you know, dopamine is produced in factories in the “basement” of the brain, then pumped up to the caudate nucleus and other brain regions where it generates the motivation to win designated rewards. If an expected reward is delayed in coming, however, these dopamine-producing neurons
prolong
their activities—increasing brain levels of this natural stimulant.
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And very high levels of dopamine are associated with intense motivation and goal-directed behaviors, as well as with anxiety and fear.
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The Roman dramatist Terence unknowingly summed up this chemistry of frustration attraction, saying, “The less my hope, the hotter my love.”

Psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon maintain that this protest response is a basic mammalian mechanism that activates when
any
kind of social attachment is ruptured.
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They use the example of the puppy. When you remove the puppy from its mother and put it in the kitchen by itself, it begins to pace. Frantically, tirelessly it combs the floor, scratches at the door, leaps at the walls, barks and whines in protest. Baby rats that are isolated from their mother hardly sleep because their brain arousal is so intense.
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