Love

The Biology Behind the Heart

Anthony Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351508179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Love is a little word with a universe of meanings and has engaged people's interest throughout human history. The need to give and receive love lies deep within human nature. Philosophers, poets, theologians, sociologists, and scientists have all attempted to explain its exact origin, but is it an evolutionary adaptation, or a social construct?Walsh discusses that the nature of and need for love has biological origins. He draws upon Darwin's sexual selection theory to define the perceptions of love by infants through the process of experience-dependent brain wiring. He observes that mother love makes a child capable of loving and that father love makes a child feel worthy of love. He appraises the origin and purpose of romantic love in his discussions on sexual reproduction by looking at chemical and neurological responses to love and the influence of love on one's physical and mental health.With frequent quotes from literary masters like Shakespeare to orient one's scientific and humanistic understanding of love, Walsh goes on to explore various styles of romantic love, including monogamy, promiscuity, bartering love, and betrayed love; the effects of a skewed sex ratio on dating and mating practices; and the age-old quest for a perfect society populated by perfect people obeying the biblical command to "love one another."

1

What Is This Thing Called Love?

I tell thee, love is nature’s second sun Causing a spring of virtue where she shines.

—George Chapman, sixteenth-century English poet

Defining the Undefinable

By wide acclaim love is the noblest, most powerful, beautiful, exquisite, and meaningful experience of humanity. By it we are born, through it we are sustained, and for it we will sacrifice life itself. Love insulates the child, brings joy to youth, and comfort and sustenance to the aged. Its boundless power cures the sick, raises the fallen, comforts the tormented, and inspires composer, painter, and poet to the pinnacles of creativity. Love is “nature’s second sun,” it “springs eternal in the human breast,” and it “moves the sun and other stars.” Plato called it the first creation of the gods, and Erich Fromm the last hope for the problems of human existence. Philosophers as far apart in space, time, and philosophy as Zoroaster and Schopenhauer declared love to be the ultimate universal law. It provides lucrative grist for the mills of recording companies and publishing houses from which they grind out unending formula songs and novels declaring the joys and the anguish of our perennial passion. Lusty love, love lost, love found, love requited and unrequited, secret love, shouted love, painful love, ecstatic love, neurotic love, perverted love, sacrificial love—the list goes on. With nobler motives poets too milk this nectar of the gods to the final impassioned sigh. We are all of us, or so it seems, in love with love.

In 1956 psychoanalyst Erich Fromm published a phenomenally successful little book called The Art of Loving. It was a beautiful exploration of the philosophical, religious, and psychological aspects of love. One could not read this book without feeling uplifted, but it was lacking in hard scientific evidence to support Fromm’s assertion that love “is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, the society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction—self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love humanity could not exist for a day.”¹

I hope I have not been overly arrogant by emphasizing science in this book; for most people the “art of love” is so much more appropriate than the “science of love.” As Shakespeare inquires in The Merchant of Venice: “Tell me where is fancy bred/Or in the heart or in the head?” Romantics are happy to enshrine love as bred in the heart, where it can remain the most mysterious of emotions, irrational and inexplicable. Love is traditionally viewed as one of those great intangibles that many prefer to leave to the poet’s pen lest they be somehow diminished by the cold stare of science. The romantic’s response to having something beautiful explained in its particulars is exemplified by William Word-sworth’s lines in The Tables Turned, supposedly written in response to Isaac Newton’s explanation of the beauteous rainbow in terms of the soulless physics of refracted light:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things

We murder to dissect.

Does the value of love really reside in our inability to understand it; or does its value reside in the impact it has on our lives? There are those who enjoy the mystery of a thing more than the thing itself, but surely science enhances rather than diminishes the appreciation of the charms nature yields to science. Newton’s unweaving of the rainbow’s prismic charms aided scientists in the development of the Hubble telescope that has produced images of far-off galaxies that are so exquisitely beautiful that they would have sent romantic poets into raptures of delight. Wordsworth eventually came to realize that rainbows are no less beautiful when understood as refracted light, and he became an ardent admirer of Newton.

We need to understand love as science reveals it to us, just as we need to enjoy its blessings because the confusions, contradictions, and misconceptions about its nature have cost humanity dearly. As long as we consider love to be some syrupy spiritual mystery that either strikes us or does not, we may search in vain for it. If we miss out on love, we miss an aspect of human existence that is truly essential. Love is not just the icing on the cake of human existence; in a very real sense it is existence itself. The human species might never have evolved countless ages ago had not evolution injected the bounties of love into our biological inheritance. Families, bands, tribes, and nations have fractured under the unbearable weight of lovelessness. Poor souls deprived of love become emotionally barren creatures plodding aimlessly through their joyless lives throwing dark shadows on the lives of others around them.

So, what is this thing called love? Sir Philip Sidney, sixteenth-century English poet, courtier and soldier shouted in response to this question, “Fool, look into thy heart, and write!” Sidney’s agitated reply implies that somewhere in the deep recesses of the mind we should all know the answer, and that it will be revealed to us if we will only engage in a little free association poetry. Poetry has long been considered the only true language of love and thus the only medium that can answer this question. Poetry adds beauty to human understanding, but love is too important a topic to be monopolized by romantics. Love is so much more than the heart-pumping passion of two souls and four gonads caught in a magical maelstrom. The nineteenth-century British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in an insight more scientific than poetic, expressed his thoughts on love thusly:

That profound and complicated sentiment which we call love is the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative and sensitive. . . . The sexual impulse, which is only one, and often a small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and external nature, as a kind of expression of the rest, a common basis, an acknowledged and visible link.²

As I interpret Shelley, he is saying that the romantic and sexual impulses commonly accepted as exhausting the meaning of love are specific manifestations of a more general and fundamental principle. These impulses are instantiations that point toward and participate in, but by no means exhaust, the richness of meaning contained in the verb “to love.” There are those who would not agree with Shelley’s definition, for anyone’s definition of love is open to criticism. Perhaps love is too profound, too expansive, and perhaps too ineffable to be captured by any definition. The great existentialist philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich thought so because for him there is no higher principle by which it may be defined. This is a beautiful thought, but not very helpful to scientific exploration.

US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once confessed that he could not define obscenity, but was certain that he knew it when he saw it. Perhaps it is like this with love; we all know what love is, but then some philosophical curmudgeon comes along and demands that we define it. Fortunately, we do not need a comprehensive and universally agreed upon definition in order to explore the nature and effects of love any more than we need a hard and fast definition of obscenity to study it. Nevertheless, we do need a definition so that we are all reading from the same sheet of music. I will simply say for the time being that love is an emotionally driven force that motivates active concern for the well-being of another. This definition ignores numerous nuances and edits out many qualifiers, but be assured that they will all appear in due course. My definition owes much to Shelley, but it is couched in terms of love’s manifestations rather than its essence. It is a broad definition of how we relate to others, which covers a wide range of subneeds, attitudes, sentiments, and behaviors.

Passionate and Compassionate Love

We should differentiate between the two broad types of love discussed in this book—passionate and compassionate. Passionate love and compassionate love are two parts of a coherent whole, each feeding on the nourishment of the other. Stripped to the barest essentials, romantic love is concentrated passion focused on a single target; various other forms of love are compassion, which is more diffuse and less frenzied. Both forms of love are parts of a more general love principle rooted in our biology; a principle that moves us to exert physical and psychic energies to move toward unity and growth. The Greeks viewed romantic love as a combination of erotike (sexual passion) and eros, an ennobling feeling, which Euripides said could make “a poet even of a bumpkin.” In romantic love the needs and demands of the self and of the beloved are emphasized to the exclusion of all others. On the other hand, compassionate love acknowledges the needs and demands of others outside the romantic love relationship. As I use the term here, compassion is a combination of the Greek terms agape (a selfless concern for the well-being of others; a broad love of all humanity) and philia (friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood, a warm feeling of we-ness).

My exploration of love presents the wisdom of many disciplines and the thoughts of many authors who share a deep belief that love is indeed the glue of human existence. Until relatively recently, love was infrequently studied by researchers of human behavior, for the word sits too uneasily on scientist’s tongues. Scientists who study human nature and human behavior prefer to leave what they may consider to be a mystical, ineffable, and unmeasurable concept to the humanities while they focus on the negative face of humanity—on violence, prejudice, war, crime, and hatred (defining these things, incidentally, doesn’t seem to be much of a problem). These are all manifestations of love’s absence, deficiency, or betrayal, and are, of course, immensely important problems that demand our attention. In my own research I have explored the consequences of love’s absence on criminality, hypertension, self-esteem, intellectual development, and coping with multiple sclerosis. These, and the studies of others, have convinced me that in our world of confusion and alarm we must probe the nature of love and learn how to generate and sustain it.

Humankind has always known that love was good for it. All great philosophers and religious leaders have preached the same message of love. What science has done is to verify and explain the particulars of these insights through a systematic examination of the mechanisms and processes by which love or its absence affects our physical, psychological, and spiritual being. This is what this book is about. If love is truly a human need (in the strictest sense of the word), it must be demonstrated that negative things happen to us if we don’t get it, positive things happen to us when we do, and the precise mechanisms by which these effects are manifested.

An Overview of the Many Faces of Love

It is not the threat of death, illness, hardship, or poverty that crushes the human spirit; it is the fear of being alone and unloved in the universe. Only when we are loved and can give love in return do we feel whole. We are incomplete beings without love, and we yearn to be connected When we are incompletely connected we feel a deep emotional and spiritual emptiness. Apart from the purely survival needs dictated by our nature, love is important above all things to the human animal. The need for love envelops our personal, biological, sexual, social, and spiritual existence. When we have it we feel happy, complete, and fully alive. It beautifies our lives, it empowers our being, it ennobles us, it enriches us in every way, and it imbues our minds and hearts with a sense of the fullness of life. It is indeed “nature’s second sun,” for all our needs, both the critical and the merely desirable, revolve around its warming rays.

For all our praise of love, we find it difficult to get a firm grasp on its nature. We are constrained by the attitudes and ideas our cultures bequeath us and by the language in which they are expressed. Each generation is impregnated by the intellectual seed of thinkers long gone to their reward. Like every other idea of importance, love has been strained through the sieve of received ideas. Each cultural perspective on love has something to tell us. It would seem desirable, therefore, to offer an overview of what love has meant to inhabitants of times and places other than our own.

Wherever philosophers have put pen to paper to ponder love, they have seen it as coming from one of three sources: the human mind, the gods, or the deeply rooted nature of the species. The first two views see love as something external to the nature of humanity, as something that is either socially constructed or as something bequeathed to us courtesy of supernatural beneficence. The idea of “social construction” of love has certain relevance as far as romantic love as the basis for marriage is concerned, but we are not limiting ourselves to romantic love. Love as a gift of the gods is not an idea that sits well with the sophisticated modern reader. Yet this has been the way many cultures, lacking science, have viewed it. Something so central to human life has to be explained for the curious in some fashion, and it has been only in the last century or so that science has put its hand to the task. That love—our noblest sentiment—should be seen as a gift of gods—our most awe-inspiring conception—attests to the importance and value that the ancients placed on love. But let’s first look at the notion of love as an invention of the human intellect.

Love: Natural or Social Construction?

When we speak of love (or anything else) as a social construction, it is meant that it is not something natural, but rather it is something that someone, somewhere, just dreamt up. Broadly stated, social constructionism maintains that concepts, practices, beliefs, and sometimes facts, are artifacts of a particular time and place and are defined into existence rather than discovered. These artifacts (constructions) are said to be contingent on human representations for their existence rather than on some inherent property those things possess. Social constructionism is like a universal sponge soaking up every concept from A to Z and squeezing them back out in mutated form and is popular in the humanities and among social scientists who gravitate toward such schools of thought as Marxism, radical feminism, and postmodernism. These approaches to knowledge share a blend of skepticism, nihilism, relativism, a penchant for almost incomprehensible prose, and give every indication that they are driven by an unrelenting hostility to the notion that anything relating to humans, including love, is natural.

In agreement with Aristotle, Spanish philosopher Jorge Santayana objected to the notion that love is not natural long ago: “In Aristotle the conception of human nature is perfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.”³ On a more scientific note, anthropologists William Janowiak and Tom Paladino argue that if the “love-as-social-construct” notion were true there would be no neurological basis for love. As we shall see, there are a multitude of bases lodged in the human brain, suggesting that the universal longing for love “arises from forces within the hominid brain that are independent of the socially constructed mind.”⁴ Just as the loftiest cathedrals need the deepest foundations; love as the loftiest cathedral of the human mind, body, and soul, must likewise be assembled and erected on the deepest of foundations. Nature prepared love’s hallowed ground and welded the resulting edifice deep within our beings over eons of evolution.

But let me also acknowledge that at one level all things, including the gifts of nature, are socially constructed. Nature does not reveal herself to us ready sorted and labeled, so humans must do it for her. Social construction in this weak sense means that humans have perceived a phenomenon, named it, and categorized it according to some rule (also socially constructed) that takes note of similarities and differences among the things being sorted and classified. Because things...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 What Is This Thing Called Love?
• 2 Love as a Gift of the Gods: The Yearning for Oneness
• 3 The Human Brain and Love
• 4 Mother Love and Darwin’s Sexual Selection Theory
• 5 Touching Hearts; Touching Minds
• 6 Father Love: The Right Hand of the Equation
• 7 Lovelessness and Lawlessness
• 8 Love and Physical Health and Illness
• 9 Mental Health and Illness
• 10 Self-Love: The Basis for Love of Others
• 11 Romantic Love: Its Origin and Purpose
• 12 The Chemistry of Romantic Love
• 13 Love Styles: How Do You Love Me?
• 14 Monogamy and Promiscuity
• 15 Love as Exchange and Barter
• 16 Ecstasy and Agony: Love and Betrayal
• 17 Loving by the Numbers
• 18 Expanding the Circle: The Ethics of Universal Love
• References
• Index