Why We Love (28 page)

In fact, one rarely has a thought without an accompanying feeling and urge; and one rarely has a feeling or want without an accompanying thought. For good reason, says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Without emotions and wants, we could not assign different values to different options. Our thoughts, our reasoning, our decisions would be flat, cold-blooded, lacking the vital emotional components we need to weigh variables and make choices.
79
We would be “souls on ice.”
80

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has even discovered that the brain has two highways for integrating emotions and reasoning: the “high road” and the “low road.”
81
And both are connected to the reward system in the brain, with its wants and drives. When the amygdala receives signals
directly
from the prefrontal cortex we control ourselves. We think before we feel and act. This is the “high road.” But the amygdala also receives data directly from sensory regions of the cortex that
bypass
the prefrontal cortex, the reasoning part of the brain. This is the “low road”; it is irrational, powerfully emotional, much larger than the “high road,” and very difficult to curb. This “low road” enables the lover to experience tremendous ecstasy and yearning when they see a beloved, even before they rationally think about “him” or “her.” But the “low road” can engulf the disappointed lover in
unthinking,
out-of-control rage as well—provoking them to impulsively shout at, hit, even slaughter a sweetheart.

There is a silver lining to this brain wiring. We humans
can
take the “high road.” The prefrontal cortex can and often does exercise control over the amygdala and the rest of the evolutionarily older brain systems that generate our emotions and urges.
82
As philosopher John Dewey said, “Mind is primarily a verb.” I agree. The human prefrontal cortex, the crowning achievement of life on earth, is built to
do
things—to assemble data in unique ways, reason, make decisions, and override our basic drives. As Aristotle put it, “The brain tempers the heat and seething of the heart.”

We can control the drive to love.

How will this powerful, mercurial, primordial force fare in our modern world?

9

“The Madness of the Gods”:
The Triumph of Love

Love—thou art deep—

I cannot cross thee—

But, were there Two

Instead of One—

Rower, and Yacht—some sovereign Summer

Who knows—but we’d reach the Sun?

Emily Dickinson

“Love Thou Art High”

“These days nothing is impossible in this world. A person can do anything. I offer a prayer today to Shree Pashupatibaba that just as our love develops more and more fully, so too may it grow and develop fully in the future, may it be able to blossom and blossom.” Vajra Bahadur wrote these words to Shila in a village in Nepal in the 1990s. It is one of hundreds of love letters that anthropologist Laura Ahearn collected when she lived in this community some hundred miles southwest of Katmandu.
1

For centuries, Nepalese parents had arranged their children’s marriages according to complex kin and caste connections. Often the bride and groom spoke for the first time on their wedding day. But along with electricity, Hindi romances in the movie hall, education, and literacy has come a new tradition: love letters. And since 1993, 90 percent of all who married eloped with someone they adored.

As trade, industry, communication, and education have seeped around the globe, many other men and women have shed their custom of arranged marriages to choose partners they love.
2
As you may recall, in a recent study of thirty-seven societies, from Brazil to Nigeria to Indonesia, men and women ranked love, or mutual attraction, as the primary criterion for choosing a spouse.
3
Only in India, Pakistan, and some other Muslim countries, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and a few other places where poverty is rife and the extended family is crucial to survival, do over 50 percent of men and women still marry at their parents’ bidding.
4
Even in these places, betrothed partners meet before their wedding day to approve or reject the match.
5

Not all of these arranged marriages are loveless.

On the contrary, in India people commonly say, “First we marry, then we fall in love.”
6
But most men and women around the world today choose their partners for themselves, what the Chinese call “free love.”

The Re-emergence of Romantic Love

The rise of romantic love in marriage, the ubiquitous celebration of this passion in movies, plays, poems, songs, and books, the worldwide flood of discussions about romance on television and radio, and the belief that romantic love is the foundation stone of male-female partnerships is the result of many social trends. But a few are particularly important. One is the ascent of individual autonomy and the concomitant surge of women into the paid labor market.

For millions of years our forebears lived in small hunting and gathering bands. Both sexes worked. As men “commuted” to do their hunting, women hiked far afield to gather vegetables and fruits—and women provided some 60 to 80 percent of the daily sustenance. Charismatic men, and probably some forceful older women, led the band. And tradition bound all to myriad social rules. But men and women were free to make most of their own personal decisions; individuals were relatively autonomous.

Life in contemporary hunting/gathering societies suggests that ancestral parents (to serve their social purposes) often chose their daughter’s first husband
7
Their obligations met, however, they put little pressure on the youngsters to sustain the match. Most of these betrothals failed. Then divorcees picked a second and often a third mate for themselves—because they could. Women were powerful, economically, sexually, and socially. And when spouses found that they could not live harmoniously together, each could afford to part. For millions of years our ancestors largely wed for love.

Some ten thousand years ago human life changed dramatically. As our forebears settled down to farm, individual autonomy and the economic balance of power between the sexes gradually eroded. Codified political and social hierarchies arose. And as men from England to China cleared and tilled the fields, bartered goods, and brought their produce to local markets, men soon owned the land, the livestock, and most of the family’s other wealth. No longer able to roam and collect the evening fare, locked into second-class jobs of gardening and keeping the home, lacking property and access to education, women lost their ancient status in cultures around the world.
8
Moreover, marriage became a business venture, an exchange of property, political alliances, and social ties.
9
Neither boy nor girl could wed for love.

Romance could not be stifled. The rich took concubines or second wives; the landless poor still wed for love.
10
And undoubtedly many men and women in arranged betrothals later fell in love with one another. People also celebrated love in myths and legends, dramas, songs, poems, and paintings. But the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, early Christians, Muslims, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and many others of the historical world usually married for duty, money, and alliances, not for love. Indeed, romantic love was feared in much of Asia and parts of Africa. This mercurial force could lead to suicide or homicide; even worse, it could upset the delicate web of social ties.

With the growth of trade and cities, and then the Industrial Revolution, more and more European and American men and women fled farm life. Unmoored from primordial local networks of blood relatives, more and more people were on their own.
11
And by the nineteenth century, many men and women began to wed for love—provided their parents agreed to the match.
12
“Cupid’s fiery shaft,” as Shakespeare called romantic love, had pierced the Western heart.

The steady entrance of women into the paid workforce throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries has spread the desire to wed for love far and wide. Expanding clerical jobs, the burgeoning of the legal profession, the rise of the health care industries, the flourishing global service economy, the emergence of nonprofit organizations, and the booming communications age have all drawn women into the marketplace.
13
As a result, women are gradually regaining economic power, as well as health and education, almost everywhere.
14
As they become more economically autonomous, these women want to live with partners whom they love.

“I do.” In a 1991 American survey, 86 percent of men and 91 percent of women reported that they would
not
say these words to someone they were not in love with, even if that person had every other quality they were looking for in a mate.
15
The Chinese of Hong Kong are equally determined to wed for love. In a survey done in the 1990s, only 5.8 percent of these men and women said they would marry someone they were not in love with.
16
Even more remarkable, some 50 percent of American men and women now believe they have the right to divorce if romantic passion fades.
17

Women are also refusing polygynous unions. Some 84 percent of societies worldwide permit a man to have more than one wife at a time. Traditionally only 5 to 20 percent of men actually acquired enough wealth and status to attract multiple wives. Yet women endured these unions: often it was better to be the second wife of a rich man than the first wife of a poor one. But as more women have regained economic power in recent decades, fewer are willing to weather the favoritism, jealousy, and bickering that sharing a husband brings. As eighteen-year-old Farima Sanati of Teheran, Iran, said, “A woman cannot bear these things.”
18

Not only is humankind regaining personal autonomy and social, political, and sexual equality; we also have more time.

Time to Love

Men and women are living longer. Anthropologists believe the natural human lifespan has not changed in at least a million years. But today far more people survive infancy, infectious childhood diseases, accidents, childbirth, and male-male violence; many more live into old age. In 1900, only 4 percent of Americans were over age sixty-five; today II percent survive to this age; by 2030 some 20 percent of all Americans will be over sixty-five; by 2050, 15 to 19 percent of the world population will be over age sixty-five as well.
19

Many older people now live alone, too, rather than with their children. And they are healthy. In fact, some demographers say we should begin to think of middle age as extending to age eighty-five, largely because 40 percent of men and women at that age are fully functional.
20
Humanity is gaining time to love.

Technology is helping. Testosterone creams and patches now keep the sex drive active. Viagra and other medications enable seniors, largely men, to perform in bed. Estrogen replacement therapy keeps women’s arousal mechanisms in gear. And with a host of other innovations, from plastic surgery and unguents to clothing of every imaginable texture, shape, and style, men and women can express their sexuality and fall in love almost until they die.

We start early, too. In hunting/gathering societies children often begin to play at sex and love as early as age five or six. But because girls are thin and get a great deal of exercise, a girl generally reaches puberty around age sixteen or seventeen and bears her first child around age twenty. Kids in our modern world also play “house” and “doctor” at a young age. But with our sedentary lifestyle and diet rich in fat, girls in advanced industrial societies now reach puberty around age twelve and a half. More and more get pregnant soon after that, beginning the adult cycle of romance long before expected.

Ageless Love

But nature likes opportunity. Indeed, we are built to love at any age.

Children fall in love. In one remarkable study of childhood romance, just as many youngsters aged five reported having been in love as did those aged eighteen.
21
I noticed this myself. I recently listened to an eight-year-old boy perfectly describe the symptoms of romantic love as he told me about an eight-year-old girl that he adored. He could not stop thinking about her. He recited details of her mannerisms and their times together. And he felt elated when she spoke to him at school.

Men and women in their seventies, eighties, even nineties, also feel love’s magic.
22
One friend of mine fell in love at age ninety-two. He wife had died five years before and he became enchanted with an old friend of the family. His only concern was that she was a younger woman, aged seventy-six. Interestingly, in a study of 255 adolescents, young adults, middle-aged men and women, and senior citizens, scientists found no overall difference in the intensity of their romantic passion; men and women loved just as strongly when they were sixty as when they were sixteen.
23
Older people do more varied and imaginative things together.
24
But age makes no difference in feelings of romance.

Why We Love

The ancient Greeks called romantic love the “madness of the Gods.” Why can this passion be triggered at any age?

Because the drive to love is a multipurpose mechanism.

When children fall in love, they are practicing courtship tactics, exploring how and when and where to flirt. Boys and girls learn what attracts a partner and what does not, how to say yes and no, and the feeling of being rejected. They are preparing for life’s most important act: pursuing a worthy mating partner.

Teenagers have a more difficult task. Courting time is upon them. They are taking on the primordial shapes for wooing. As they clumsily sift through their dating opportunities, they acquire knowledge about themselves and others and develop dislikes and preferences.
25