Love of family, and platonic love, are not so susceptible to scientific probing.. But since my first disastrous infatuation with a girl I believed to be my eternal soul mate, I've been convinced that romantic love is a profoundly physical rather than spiritual phenomenon..
In romantic love, our neurons and our hormones, our brains and our blood pressure, our stomachs and hearts, are in a state of upheaval.. And if we check out the behavior of our close primate relatives, we can detect links between human bonding of the romantic love type, and evolutionary survival pressures.. In fact, there's no area of physiology, or behavioral and evolutionary biology, that doesn't boast an explanatory claim to romantic love..
The feeling that romantic love is akin to being "besotted" lies deep in western folk memory.. From the ancient Greek myth of the centaur Nessus and his dangerous love potions, to E M Forster's lovesick Maurice's complaint that he is "drugged", our forebears have characterized romantic love as a potent substance.. But is it generated within, or outside, the body? Many of our ancestors cited external influences: drugged arrows, spells, planetary forces, charms, potions..
A medieval recipe for a "true-love powder" states: "Take elecampane, the seeds and flowers of vervain, and the berries of mistletoe.. Beat them, after being well dried in an oven, into a powder, and give it to the party you design upon in a glass of wine and it will work wonderful effect to your advantage.."
But Galen, the 2nd-century Greek "prince of physicians", insisted that the affliction was purely a matter of internal chemistry.. It's what happens, he asserted, when the crucial four bodily fluids, or humours — yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood — get into a muddle.. For Galen's followers, right down to Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, the theory of humoralism held good.. Galen was eventually displaced by 19th-century theories of cell biology, but modern physiologists nevertheless share his broad conviction that romantic love is induced by powerful natural bodily chemicals.. In our own day, the favoured chemical explanation focuses on a molecule called PEA: phenylethylamine, a kind of natural amphetamine that revs up the brain and the central nervous system.. PEA causes the experience of euphoria, hyperventilation, increased heart rate, dilated pupils, and secretions of odors that can seduce an unsuspecting love object.. The eye of the chemical storm is in the brain..
The brain in romantic love resembles a huge geological and meteorological event: earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis.. It's as if the ecosystem of the lover's brain, the pulsing grey-blue-green planet in the skull, suffers a drastic depletion of the protective cortical ozone layer, triggering neuronal global warming with consequent atmospheric storms..
The notion that reason goes to pot in romantic love fits with a popular mind-brain theory first proposed in the 1970s.. The outer brain, or cortex, which evolved late in evolution, is associated with rational thought and intelligence.. The midbrain, known as the limbic system, regulates the emotions.. But there's a deep inner core, located at the final bulb where the spinal cord enters the brain where lurk our darker, primeval, instinctive behaviors of territoriality, mating and reward-seeking..
But whether the nature of romantic love is revealed by nurture rather than nature, by evolution rather than hormones, psychodynamics rather than behaviourism, there are significant lessons to be learnt from the science of statistics.. Divorces, steadily on the increase these past five decades, now run at a rate of more than 50% in the highly concentrated residential districts of the southeast of England. The figures do not include the failed heterosexual partnerships that never reached marriage, nor homosexual partnerships, but the statistics reinforce the message that we should be sceptical about romantic love as a prelude to lasting love.. And yet, statistics also reveal that, despite the scepticism, marriages are on the increase, at a rate of about 2% per annum.. The notion that romantic love is worth it, that it can transform to permanent attachment, is not only far from dead, it is evidently alive and well and thriving..
At a conference on love held about 30 years ago in the US, the delegates agreed that romantic love should be defined as "a cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance".. That, of course, is the problem of seeking to understand romantic love in clunking scientific language.. Science tells us much that is interesting about love.. But to describe what it is really like to fall in love, subjectively, personally, and to understand why we continue to embark on its exciting, as well as painful and hazardous, journey, we must turn to other kinds of human discourse: poetry, fiction, memoir, and real-life experience..
In romantic love, our neurons and our hormones, our brains and our blood pressure, our stomachs and hearts, are in a state of upheaval.. And if we check out the behavior of our close primate relatives, we can detect links between human bonding of the romantic love type, and evolutionary survival pressures.. In fact, there's no area of physiology, or behavioral and evolutionary biology, that doesn't boast an explanatory claim to romantic love..
The feeling that romantic love is akin to being "besotted" lies deep in western folk memory.. From the ancient Greek myth of the centaur Nessus and his dangerous love potions, to E M Forster's lovesick Maurice's complaint that he is "drugged", our forebears have characterized romantic love as a potent substance.. But is it generated within, or outside, the body? Many of our ancestors cited external influences: drugged arrows, spells, planetary forces, charms, potions..
A medieval recipe for a "true-love powder" states: "Take elecampane, the seeds and flowers of vervain, and the berries of mistletoe.. Beat them, after being well dried in an oven, into a powder, and give it to the party you design upon in a glass of wine and it will work wonderful effect to your advantage.."
But Galen, the 2nd-century Greek "prince of physicians", insisted that the affliction was purely a matter of internal chemistry.. It's what happens, he asserted, when the crucial four bodily fluids, or humours — yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood — get into a muddle.. For Galen's followers, right down to Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, the theory of humoralism held good.. Galen was eventually displaced by 19th-century theories of cell biology, but modern physiologists nevertheless share his broad conviction that romantic love is induced by powerful natural bodily chemicals.. In our own day, the favoured chemical explanation focuses on a molecule called PEA: phenylethylamine, a kind of natural amphetamine that revs up the brain and the central nervous system.. PEA causes the experience of euphoria, hyperventilation, increased heart rate, dilated pupils, and secretions of odors that can seduce an unsuspecting love object.. The eye of the chemical storm is in the brain..
The brain in romantic love resembles a huge geological and meteorological event: earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis.. It's as if the ecosystem of the lover's brain, the pulsing grey-blue-green planet in the skull, suffers a drastic depletion of the protective cortical ozone layer, triggering neuronal global warming with consequent atmospheric storms..
The notion that reason goes to pot in romantic love fits with a popular mind-brain theory first proposed in the 1970s.. The outer brain, or cortex, which evolved late in evolution, is associated with rational thought and intelligence.. The midbrain, known as the limbic system, regulates the emotions.. But there's a deep inner core, located at the final bulb where the spinal cord enters the brain where lurk our darker, primeval, instinctive behaviors of territoriality, mating and reward-seeking..
But whether the nature of romantic love is revealed by nurture rather than nature, by evolution rather than hormones, psychodynamics rather than behaviourism, there are significant lessons to be learnt from the science of statistics.. Divorces, steadily on the increase these past five decades, now run at a rate of more than 50% in the highly concentrated residential districts of the southeast of England. The figures do not include the failed heterosexual partnerships that never reached marriage, nor homosexual partnerships, but the statistics reinforce the message that we should be sceptical about romantic love as a prelude to lasting love.. And yet, statistics also reveal that, despite the scepticism, marriages are on the increase, at a rate of about 2% per annum.. The notion that romantic love is worth it, that it can transform to permanent attachment, is not only far from dead, it is evidently alive and well and thriving..
At a conference on love held about 30 years ago in the US, the delegates agreed that romantic love should be defined as "a cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance".. That, of course, is the problem of seeking to understand romantic love in clunking scientific language.. Science tells us much that is interesting about love.. But to describe what it is really like to fall in love, subjectively, personally, and to understand why we continue to embark on its exciting, as well as painful and hazardous, journey, we must turn to other kinds of human discourse: poetry, fiction, memoir, and real-life experience..
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