This is part 9 of a series on the evolution of human mating behavior, comparing evidence for promiscuity and pair-bonding in our species. Please see the introduction here.

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I want love to roll me over slowly,
Stick a knife inside me, and twist it all around.
I want love to grab my fingers gently,
Slam them in a doorway, put my face into the ground. – Jack White (Love Interruption) [1]  

“Everything is a double-edged sword… Even single-edged swords are a double-edged sword. Because you can cut something with it, but the other edge is kind of flat and it doesn’t cut very well.” – Louis CK (comedian)

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Yesterday’s post looked at the neurobiology of romantic love, asking whether evolutionary perspectives are sufficient to explain this highly significant part of what it means to be human. It also raised the question as to why love seems to be a painful experience for so many people.

Before going further, it’s important to remember that while humans are undoubtedly evolved, biological organisms, we are also animals with complex behavior, language, and culture. Others have said this better than I can. To Jon Marks (2010), we are “biocultural ex-apes,” while Agustin Fuentes wrote that “human behavior is almost always ‘naturenurtural’ ” (2012:16). Just as human modification of the environment can affect natural selection (Hawks et al 2007; Laland et al. 2010), so can culture profoundly influence the way we interpret powerful emotional impulses, including those related to desire and love.

A good guess is that much of the neurobiology of romantic love is pretty consistent across different populations and individuals. However, we also know that variation is the norm in biology and that our neurobiology is in constant interaction with our physical and social environments as we grow and develop. Specifically regarding sexuality, Anne Fausto-Sterling called it “a somatic fact created by a cultural effect (2000: 21).” Greg Downey and Daniel Lende help us understand how this process might unfold, referring to the brain as “our most cultural organ,” adding that:

“brains can be grown into different configurations, not because we are, at birth, fundamentally and irreducibly different, but because we become ‘en-brained’ as a result of our own distinctive combinations of genes, epigenetic influences, environmental factors, experiences, learning, and even understandings of ourselves.” (2012: 32)

I take the lessons from Downey and Lende to heart. In the search for broad patterns it’s easy to forget that context and individual, subjective experiences assuredly count for something, and that individuals will experience romantic love in their own particular … idiom. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.” For example, individuals have different attachment styles, which recent longitudinal data suggest is correlated with early life experiences (maternal sensitivity, father absence, social competence, and best friendship quality) as well as with one of the serotonin receptor genes (Fraley et al 2013).  Again, it’s complicated. Just as it is possible for some people to be resistant to certain recreational drugs (Ersche et al, in press), some may be more or less susceptible to falling in love. Therefore, individual experiences can provide some insight into the various ways people love.

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The Fog of Love

“Clouds cover love’s barbed wire snares.” The Black Keys

At her site ‘Brain Pickings,’ Maria Popova did a great service for her readers by compiling a series of quotes on romantic love from literature over the last few centuries, spanning Shakespeare to Susan Sontag. Going through them, it is apparent how difficult love is to comprehend and describe, particularly when one is in the middle of it. Even the great authors seem to flail at converting the visceral into the verbal and fall back on metaphor, suggesting love has an incomprehensible, ineffable quality to it. It has been referred to by some as “a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will” (Stendahl); “mysterious” (Sontag); “a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality” (Charles Bukowski); or “a temporary madness” that “erupts like volcanoes and then subsides” (Louis de Bernières).[2]

Still, opinions on romantic love are quite divergent. To some, it is a temple, or higher law. The online dating site Christian Mingle advertises itself as a way to “Find God’s match for you” through love. On the other hand, here is author Neil Gaiman’s view:

 “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ or ‘how very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.” 

So. That’s another perspective.

Gaiman is not alone. We have words like ‘lovesick,’ ‘heartache,’ or ‘broken heart’ to evoke what it feels like when love goes badly – when it’s unrequited, forbidden, suppressed, lost suddenly, or slowly turns to rust. Many of the quotes in Popova’s compilation contain similar notions of confusion and suffering, describing love as “confused adoration,” a flood from the heart and “full of tears” (James Joyce); or an untamed force with the potential to destroy, enslave, and leave us lost and confused (Paulo Coehlo).

These themes also exist in cynical, cross-cultural proverbs about love and in modern songs. For example, ‘The Guardian’ put together a list of over 100 songs about heartbreak. And I’m sure it’s an incomplete list. In my own superficial delving into popular culture, I can find examples that emphasize the perplexed irrationality of love, describing it as crazy, crazy, or crazy and stupid. Still others have themes of despondency, such as feeling broken and mentally overwhelmed (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), bleeding (1, 2, 3, 4), or being trampled, falling apart, being left in the dark, having the lights go out, or a private internal death (this list could go on). While some of these lyrics are obviously exaggerated for effect, it seems clear that romantic love does not always lead to the expected Valentine’s Day experience. You won’t find many of the sentiments above on a Hallmark card.

Whether the outcome of romantic love is positive or negative, it should be obvious that it is an incredibly powerful emotional experience and not something to be toyed with. The psychologist Barbara Fredrickson (2013) refers to it (actually, love in a general sense) as “our supreme emotion.” In fact, Damasio and Carvalho (2013) refer to love not as an emotion at all, but a drive that evolved to satisfy a basic instinctual need, like hunger, thirst, libido, or parental care. By comparison, emotions include things like disgust, fear, anger, sadness, joy, and shame and are triggered by an external stimulus.

Even the evolutionary anthropologist/ psychologist Robin Dunbar, in his book “The Science of Love and Betrayal”, acknowledged this inability to firmly grasp what love is, suggesting it is deeply seated and occurs at a level of consciousness that is not easy to articulate:

 “the emotions that well up and create our inner feelings are not well connected to the conscious, language-accessible brain… This ought, I think, to alert us to the fact that all this falling in love stuff might arise from a bit of deeply buried emotional machinery that we don’t acquire just by reading Mills & Boon novels. Rather, it is something that is very ancient, something that we inherited from our ancestors before they acquired language…It reinforces the fact that we are just not very good at describing what’s going on inside us. We feel our emotions, but we do not always understand them.” (p. 29-30)

The question is why those feelings are often beyond our immediate understanding. I think it’s helpful to remember that nature did not half-ass our emotions (or drives), and that of all these emotional experiences love seems to be ‘the big one.’

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“A Bundle of Careful Compromises”

O, I loved too much, and by such and such, is happiness thrown away.  – Patrick Kavanagh, On Raglan Road

In their book “Why We Get Sick,” Randolph Nesse and George Williams asked: “Why, in a body of such exquisite design, are there a thousand flaws and frailties that make us vulnerable to disease? … Why hasn’t it shaped ways to prevent nearsightedness, heart attacks, and Alzheimer’s disease? (1994: 3). Their answer was that “the body is a bundle of careful compromises.” Evolution has given us a patchwork of serendipitous mutations that were just good enough to get the job done, a series of hacks and shortcuts laid over prior hacks and shortcuts. Matt Cartmill recently put it this way: “Evolution doesn’t act to yield perfection. It acts to yield function.” As a result, the human body today is a wonderful, functional work of nature, but it is also susceptible to the aforementioned diseases, as well as bad backs, weak ankles, and love that is sometimes painful. Even Helen Fisher referred to the neurobiology of love as capricious and fickle. It is a compromise.

While romantic love is a real thing – and potentially beautiful – it often falls short of our cultural expectations. And why should it conform to our expectations? It was here first. From a functional point of view, the intrusive thinking and idealization of one’s partner that are integral to romantic love are highly effective ways of forcing our hand to pursue the bond or to keep it alive. Love would not be very good at its job if it was left to rational choice, or if we knew where the ‘off’ switch was. Instead, it is much more effective because it seems to grab us by the throat. But that’s also where the pain seems to come in. To Helen Fisher, the earliest and most intense part of romantic love is something like an addiction – “a blissful dependency when one’s love is returned, a painful, sorrowful, and often destructive craving when one’s love is spurned” (2004: 53).

Last November, Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about suffering in romantic relationships (I Heart Unpredictable Love). His specific focus was on-again/ off-again love affairs, and he argued that one reason people are drawn to them is that our neurobiology is particularly susceptible to unpredictable rewards.

The reason this happens is simple. The brain’s reward circuit has evolved over millions of years to enable us to recognize and extract various rewards from our environment that are critical to our survival, like food and a suitable sexual mate. Unlike predictable stimuli, unanticipated stimuli can tell us things about the world that we don’t yet know. And because they serve as a signal that a big reward might be close by, it is advantageous that novel stimuli command our attention….

If you are involved with someone who is unpredictably loving, you might not like it very much — but your reward circuit is sure going to notice the capricious behavior and give you information that might conflict with what you believe consciously is in your best interest.

This is reminiscent of something Robert Sapolsky described about research on monkeys who were given a reward for completing some task. When the reward was given out only 50% of the time (compared to 100%), the uncertainty caused a much larger surge in dopamine, as the monkeys anticipated getting the reward. As Sapolsky put it “ ‘maybe’ is addictive like nothing else out there.” Many have noted how the role of dopamine has been oversimplified, and that it has many functions. Among those functions, it is more appropriate to see it as having a ‘pay attention’ effect than a pleasure effect. I’m speculating here, but it’s possible that there could be a similar mechanism in play with ‘maybe’ romantic relationships – will (s)he or won’t (s)he? – to the point that people get stuck and end up writing song lyrics like those mentioned above. This sounds a lot like the author Paulo Coehlo’s quote: “Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.” Or, we could call it ‘Bono syndrome.’

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Consequences of Compromised Love: Loss, Rejection, and the Tripartite Conundrum

‘Maybe’ is not the only path to suffering for love. There is also loss and rejection. Kross et al (2011) noted that somatosensory brain systems overlapped in people who experienced social rejection and physical pain, suggesting that the former developed in evolution “by coopting brain circuits that support the affective component of physical pain.” By contrast, some research suggests that being in love can actually reduce physical pain in experimental situations (Younger et al 2010).

Then there is loss. One large Finnish study showed that risk of mortality increased substantially soon after the death of a spouse, particularly in men (Martikainen & Valkonen, 1996). Similarly, in an American study, Mostofsky et al. (2012) reported that the risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack) increased 21-fold within the first day of learning of the death of a significant person (e.g., spouse, child, parent, sibling, friend). This risk declined each subsequent day, but stayed elevated for at least a month. The authors speculated that there could be a number of causes for this, including depression, anger, anxiety, loss of sleep and appetite. Another factor may be something called “broken heart syndrome” (aka stress myocardiopathy), which is apparently a real phenomenon marked by an abnormal electrocardiograph and dysfunction of the left ventricle following sudden stress (Wittstein, 2007).

For those spouses who outlived their mate for a substantial period, the surviving partner was less happy for at least eight years after the loss compared to when their spouse was alive (Aamodt & Wang, 2008: 117). Even prairie voles that have their mate removed show signs of apathy and despondency, performing lethargically in mazes and even seem to give up when placed in water floating “listlessly as if they didn’t care whether they drowned.”

Lastly, and perhaps the one that we seem to struggle with the most, is what William Jankowiak called “The Tripartite Conundrum.” This deserves a post (or a book) unto itself, but to summarize: as we saw in the previous post, the neurobiology of desire, romantic love, and companionate love overlap but are somewhat independent of each other. This likely has consequences for our emotions and behavior as well. Helen Fisher put it this way:

“It seems to be the destiny of humankind that we are neurologically able to love more than one person at a time. You can feel profound attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic passion for someone in the office or your social circle, while you feel the sex drive as you read a book, watch a movie, or do something else unrelated to either partner. You can swing from one feeling to another.” (2004: 94)

That independence of the three (sex, romantic love, and attachment) can lead to conflict and pain. For example, Jankowiak did a study of people in the U.S. who said they were in love with more than one person (one being the romantic love, the other as the companionate love). When he asked if it was the happiest time of their lives, they replied that it was ‘hell.’ But this was one sample. Taking a biocultural view, I think this depends on how individuals and cultures perceive these phenomena, and how these emotions (or behaviors) fit with cultural and relationship expectations. For example, one of the few published papers on consensual non-monogamy challenged the notion that relationship satisfaction was any better or worse than in monogamous ones, though data are certainly lacking (Condon et al 2012).  

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Perennial as the Grass

For the sake of symmetry, let’s end this essay the way it began, with lyrics from Jack White.

A lot of people get confused, and they bruise
Real easy when it comes to love
They start putting on their shoes and walking out
And singing “boy, I think I had enough”  (White Stripes, Denial Twist)

With all the above evidence, it is clear that there is a tax on romantic love, and it can be a painful one. But it would be misguided to focus only on the tax. In our bundle of compromises, we grumble about our back pain, near-sightedness, propensity to choke when eating, or any other of our physical shortcomings. But we don’t wish to remove our spines, eyes, or esophagus. It’s just part of the package of being an evolved animal. Instead, we try to work around our physical vulnerabilities.

The same goes for love. Instead of walking out and saying “boy, I think I had enough,” it may be helpful to recognize the ways that love is compromised by our evolution. Sometimes it lasts; sometimes it hurts. I don’t think we should reduce love to “only” a psychological phenomenon (though I wouldn’t call it a mystical force either). We often revolve our lives around love, travel great distances, take risks, make sacrifices, and reorder priorities for it, so it is without a doubt more than something that exists in our heads. At the same time, the psychological part of love in our heads is a critical component that we don’t have full control over. When we face loss, rejection, or get hurt in any number of ways, it might help to remember that all relationships (not just romantic) are finite. Some last a lifetime; others are much shorter. Selfishly, we may want them to last forever, but we know that they can’t. All relationships are severed by time, death, distance, or circumstance. However ephemeral or lasting, they are still among life’s highlights.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. – Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

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References

Aamodt S, Wang S. 2008. Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life. Bloomsbury. Link

Conley TD, Ziegler A, Moors AC, Matsick JL, Valentine B. 2012. A critical examination of popular assumptions about the benefits and outcomes of monogamous relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review. Link

Damasio A, Carvalho GB. 2013. The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14, 143-152. Link

Downey G, Lende DH. 2012. Neuroanthropology and the encultured brain. In Lende DH, Downey G (eds.) The Encultured Brain p. 23-65. Cambridge: MIT. Link

Dunbar R. 2012. The Science of Love and Betrayal.  Faber and Faber Link

Ersche KD, Jones PS, Williams GB, et al. In Press. Distinctive personality traits and neural correlates associated with stimulant drug use versus familial risk of stimulant dependence. Biological Psychiatry. Link

Fausto-Sterling A. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Basic Books. Link

Fisher H. 2004. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Putnam. Link

Fraley RC, Roisman GI, Booth-Laforce C, Owen MT, Holland AS. 2013. Interpersonal and Genetic Origins of Adult Attachment Styles: A Longitudinal Study From Infancy to Early Adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Feb 11.  Link

Fredrickson BL. 2013.  Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become. Penguin. Link

Fuentes A. 2012. Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature. University of California Press. Link

Hawks J, et al. 2007. Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 104(52):20753-8. Link

Jankowiak W. 2008. Intimacies: Love & Sex across Cultures. Columbia Univ Press. Link

Kross E, Berman MG, Mischel W, Smith EE, Wagerd TD. 2011. Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain PNAS 108(15):  6270–5. Link

Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Myles S. 2010. How culture shaped the human genome: bringing genetics and the human sciences together. Nat Rev Genet 11(2):137-48.  Link

Marks J. 2010. Off human nature. American Anthropologist 112(4): 513. Link

Martikainen P, Valkonen T. 1996. Mortality after the death of a spouse: rates and causes of death in a large Finnish cohort. American Journal of Public Health 86(8): 1087-93. (Link)

Mostofsky E, Maclure M, Sherwood JB, Tofler GH, Muller JE, Mittleman MA. 2012. Risk of acute myocardial infarction after the death of a significant person in one’s life: the Determinants of Myocardial Infarction Onset Study. Circulation 125(3): 491-6. (Link)

Nesse R, Williams GC. 1994. Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. Vintage: New York. Link

Wittstein IS. 2007. Broken heart syndrome. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine 74 (Suppl 1) S17-S22. (Link)

Younger J, Aron A, Parke S, Chatterjee N, Mackey S. 2010. Viewing pictures of a romantic partner reduces experimental pain: Involvement of neural reward systems. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13309. Link

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