Science of Lurv
SCIENCE OF LURV
(Cupid arrows and serenades are romantic bunkum. It’s all about our primal wiring…)
(C) David Astle
You don’t tiptoe into love….or saunter, or segue, or negotiate: you fall. Head over heels in fact. The plunge is part of the package, the vertigo, the velocity.
Famed for their amour, the French call love at first sight a coup de foudre – or lightning strike – while every other metaphor for passionate love verges on pyromania. Falling. Burning. Chemistry. Electricity. We carry torches for our flames and trigger fireworks. Love is risky stuff.
Fittingly our brains catch fire too. While ballads and Hallmark cards insist the heart is the romantic organ, the brain in love amounts to a kiln. Spying that perfect stranger across a beer garden – kaboom – your neurons ignite. According to research conducted by Dr Helen Fisher at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 2003, our brain under the throes of infatuation resembles a Roman candle.
Fisher and her team slid some 17 lovers into MRI tubes (those magnetic-resonance crypts popular with Dr House) to analyse brain patterns. One by one, each subject was shown a photo of their beloved, allowing science its first glimpse of the “neural constellations” of the besotted ape.
Dopamine is the culprit. Known as the reward chemical, this neurotransmitter surges the lover’s caudate nucleus, the primal nub found on either side of the brain. Much like a cocaine rush (in theory and in profile), the romance buzz can release untold energy in the system. It’s why Romeo can skip meals and Juliet can admire the yonder dawn without ever getting sleepy.
To prove the point, neurobiologists tampered with prairie voles a year later. As a breed, the vole is stubbornly faithful. When voles mate, they mate for life. Yet prick a little shot of dopamine into Mrs Vole’s brain stem and she’ll jump the first he-vole she sees post-op, despite what history she shares with Mr Vole.
Which pops the question: is passionate love an emotion or a drive? While fear and anger are primal feelings, love in its hottest guise resembles a mania. Notably, regions in the brain more commonly associated with “feeling” (such as the insular cortex) hardly rate a flicker when it comes to boy meeting girl. Lovestruck, our brains lurch from neutral to fixated in a heartbeat.
Gold Coast psychologist Dr Bob Montgomery describes the state of romantic love as “naïvely positive”. Its opposite is cynicism. We enter a state of suspended hope and idolatry – cherishing an earlobe, a voice, our idol’s aura – all the while the brain burning. Flushed with dopamine the chase is on.
Not that sex is the lover’s sole desire. Romantics are as keen to discover that perfect stranger, as uncover them. Why else do we quiz the friend-of-friend or Google the new interest’s name? Smitten, a secret admirer will store any tidbit their beloved lets slip – a favourite book, a hobby, a phobia – much as voles stows pine cones.
For Jo Lamble, a relationships counselor in Sydney, her dopamine overdose occurred on a Sydney beach when she was 19. “I saw this guy walking along the sand – a friend of a friend. He was wearing these daggy home-made board shorts. He was tall and athletic and I felt quite sick, this anxious mix of pleasure and pain.”
Lamble can’t put her finger on it. Why did this bloke seem – and prove – The One? (Jo and Andrew have been married for 15 years.) Maybe his homemade board shorts were the big attraction, as Jo herself made her own patchwork miniskirts in the same era. “It didn’t feel like lust. Though probably deep down I thought this’ll be good for the gene pool! I didn’t just want to go and jump him. I wanted to talk to him, to be with him, to find out everything I could.”
A study by New York’s Cornell University in 2003 focused on the enigma of partner selection. As members of the animal kingdom we seek those with brightest breeding prospects. For men, we look for a pleasing waist-to-hip ratio, ideally where the waist is 70% of the hip’s circumference. (Such primal appeal is captured in the contours of Marilyn Monroe, Monica Belluci, and Megan Gale.)
For women, himboes with rugged strength and broad chests (think Viggo Mortensen, Brendan Fraser, half the AFL ranks…) present fine fling-material. Yet coupling for the longer term demands the man’s health, wealth and status. With one eye on the future we choose the partner who can provide on all levels: materially, parentally, emotionally.
While the jury remains out on the “opposites attract” truism, it seems those choosiest in finding Ms or Mr Right commonly deem to own the very traits they’re seeking. (Think the “catch” blessed with looks, status etc who’s still at large in the market.) In other words, those with a lofty self-impression are destined to some extended downtime in the passion stakes, biding their time until an alpha ape enters the canopy. For them, love’s blind idealism is a far tougher ask owing to a magnified self-image.
At a deeper level, returning to the skittish brain, humans are prone to responding to such basic cues as scent. Exposing a group of women to blokes’ sweaty T-shirts, a research team in Switzerland in 2000 learnt that partner preference may be more primal than first imagined. Instinctively, each woman favoured the male smell that promised an immune system different from her own. Appeal, in other words, rests in the prospect of combined defences offering more resilience to an offspring. At small-talk stage, singles may be sniffing out genetic winners, where one guy’s pong may be another man’s mojo.
So why all the lunacy? Why the midnight sweats when we meet our potential partner? The temptation is to label the madness part of the human experience, yet passionate love is no worldwide phenomenon.
Anthropologists William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer examined 166 languages around the globe, revealing some 19 lack any concept of romantic love. Affection? Yes. Companionship? Check. But the mega-crush is another affair. Some cultures, including the Guugu Yimidhirr people of Cape York, have not even a place for love in their vocab.
“That it’s not universal,” says psychologist Dr Bob Montgomery, “should also tell you it’s not something built into our biology. Humans have a capacity for passionate love, but clearly it’s not genetically based. It’s not necessary.”
Montgomery cites the equivalent success of arranged marriages versus our own custom, where bride finds groom through what sociologists tag “assortative mating” (the mix-and-mingle jungle of seeking another). Says Montgomery, “The long-term success of both [marriage models] is about the same. You don’t have to go through passionate love to reach good compannionate love.”
CS Lewis, of Narnia fame, pointed his finger at troubadours and Camelot lore for cooking up the whole romantic figment. French Renaissance author, La Rochefoucauld sided with the allegation, stating “some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love.” In many ways the theory still flies, with bubblegum pop, chick-lit and teen movies accused of sustaining the passion myth.
English writer Alain de Botton, whose novel On Love charts the dizzy rise and slump of a relationship, suspects the deeper human urge may be longing as much as love itself. “If the fall into love happens so rapidly,” he writes, “it is perhaps the wish to love has preceded the beloved – the need has invented the solution.”
Cleopatra, in other words, might well have adored adoration itself as much as Marc Antony, who reciprocated it. The drug is passion – less than the other half.
Lamble identifies the trait as an addiction to novelty, a constant quest for new thrills, often at the expense of making pro-relationship decisions. “My line is: Drop the quest.” Better, she believes, to love the familiar more deeply than yearn for the unknown.
In his own practice, Montgomery knows people who make a career out of passionate love. “What happens is the love diminishes within each relationship. Novelty by definition cannot last. As passion wears off, that’s when you start a more realistic appreciation of your partner.”
Studies show red-hot romances can range from 6 months to 4 years – depending on such variables as proximity, mutual rapture, each person’s romantic history and compatibility. (Curiously, Helen Fisher of dopamine fame has linked this same finite period to the time it took our Cro-Magnon cousins to entrust a weaned child to the clan, and return to the challenge of suiting.)
During this cooling-off term, as rumpled sheets turn to rinse cycles, the dopamine ebbs in the brain, marking the return of the control drug known as serotonin. Usually in ready supply, serotonin is viewed as the mood regulator – the brain-cop that checks rashness and obsession. Neuroscience is only now beginning to see the links between sufferers of compulsive disorders – whose brains are scarce in serotonin – and your common romantic fool.
Conversely, as dopamine recedes, and serotonin resumes control, a third neurotransmitter climbs in the equation: oxytocin. Nicknamed the awww-factor, oxytocin is the chemical that floods a suckling mother, and an empathetic long-term couple. Oxytocin fuels fondness over passion, affection versus infatuation. An agent of rapport, oxytocin is present in the passion period, and seen to strengthen in the successful long haul.
So if Cupid’s arrow strikes your flesh, best to take your passion with a grain of salt. Revel in the all-consuming present, at the same time imagining the future. If Romeo and Juliet never took the self-murder option they may have entered a less melodramatic bond. According to the Sternberg Triangle – a template for many relationship counselors where each side marks a phase of couplehood – love shifts from passion to intimacy and finally, commitment. We need to embrace each change in order to achieve it.
Eating by candlelight, drinking each other’s words, new lovers are wise to face the “second-hour question”. Montgomery explains, “We all know what those in passionate love will do in the first hour, but once that hour is over what are you going to do for the second? If the answer is no idea, I’d say put on the brakes and find out.
“You may not necessarily agree with other, but can you understand each other? Can you share important decisions? You should enjoy passionate love, as well as use it as an information-gathering period.” And if that sounds like market research, at least it’s of the hands-on variety.
[Sunday Life, July 2006]