Why We Love : The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love

300 Pages·2005·1.362 MB·English

by  Helen Fisher

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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
To the Reader
1. “What Wild Ecstasy”: Being in Love
2. Animal Magnetism: Love among the Animals
3. Chemistry of Love: Scanning the Brain “in Love”
4. Web of Love: Lust, Romance, and Attachment
5. “That First Fine Careless Rapture”: Who We Choose
6. Why We Love: The Evolution of Romantic Love
7. Lost Love: Rejection, Despair, and Rage
8. Taking Control of Passion: Making Romance Last
9. “The Madness of the Gods”: The Triumph of Love
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Helen Fisher
Praise for Why We Love
About the Author
Copyright
For Lorna, Ray, Audrey,
and the rest of my family
(Hark close and still what I now whisper to you,
I love you, O you entirely possess me,
O that you and I escape from the rest, and go utterly off,
free and lawless,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea
not more lawless than we;)
That furious storm through me careering.
I passionately trembling;
The oath of the inseparableness of two together,
of the woman that loves me, and whom I love
more than my life, that oath swearing,
O I willingly stake all for you,

Walt Whitman
“From Pent-up Aching Rivers”
To the Reader
“What is love?” Shakespeare mused. The great bard was not the first to ask. I
suspect our ancestors pondered this question a million years ago as they sat
around their campfires or lay and watched the stars.
In this book I have tried to answer this seemingly unanswerable question.
Several things motivated me. I have loved and won and loved and lost; I have
certainly experienced the joy and agony of romantic love. Moreover, I am
convinced that this passion is a foundation stone of human social life, that just
about every human being who has ever lived has felt the ecstasy and the despair
of romantic love. Perhaps most important, a clearer understanding of this
whirlwind may help people find and sustain this glorious passion.
So in 1996 I began a multipart investigation to unravel that mystery of
mysteries, the experience of “being in love.” Why we love. Why we choose the
people that we choose. How men and women vary in their romantic feelings.
Love at first sight. Love and lust. Love and marriage. Animal love. How love
evolved. Love and hate. The brain in love. These became major themes of this
book. I also hoped to gain some insight into how we might control this
unpredictable and often dangerous fire in the heart.
Romantic love, I believe, is one of three primordial brain networks that
evolved to direct mating and reproduction. Lust, the craving for sexual
gratification, emerged to motivate our ancestors to seek sexual union with almost
any partner. Romantic love, the elation and obsession of “being in love,” enabled
them to focus their courtship attentions on a single individual at a time, thereby
conserving precious mating time and energy. And male-female attachment, the
feeling of calm, peace, and security one often has for a long-term mate, evolved
to motivate our ancestors to love this partner long enough to rear their young
together.
In short, romantic love is deeply embedded in the architecture and chemistry
of the human brain.
But what actually produces this thing called love?
To investigate this, I decided to make use of the newest technology for brain
scanning, known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to try to
record the brain activity of men and women who had just fallen madly in love.
For this important part of my investigation, I was fortunate to be joined by
two exceptionally gifted colleagues, Dr. Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Dr. Arthur Aron, a research
psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Debra
Mashek, then a doctoral candidate in psychology at SUNY Stony Brook, Greg
Strong, another SUNY psychology graduate student, and Dr. Haifang Li, a
radiologist at SUNY Stony Brook, all talented individuals, also played crucial
roles. Over a period of six years, we scanned the brains of more than forty men
and women who were wildly in love, collecting some one hundred forty-four
pictures of brain activity from each. Half of our participants were men and
women whose love was reciprocated; the rest had recently been rejected by
someone they adored. We wanted to record the range of feelings associated with
“being in love.”
The results were startling. We found gender differences that may help
explain why men respond so passionately to visual stimuli and why women can
remember details of the relationship. We discovered ways in which the brain in
love changes over time. We established some of the brain regions that become
active when you feel romantic ecstasy, information that suggests new ways to
sustain romance in long-term partnerships. I came to believe that animals feel a
form of romantic attraction for one another. Our findings shed new light on
stalking behavior and other crimes of passion. And I now understand more about
why we feel so depressed and angry when we are rejected, and even some ways
to stimulate the brain to soothe the anguish.
Most important, our results changed my thinking about the very essence of
romantic love. I came to see this passion as a fundamental human drive. Like the
craving for food and water and the maternal instinct, it is a physiological need, a
profound urge, an instinct to court and win a particular mating partner.
This drive to fall in love has produced some of humankind’s most
compelling operas, plays, and novels, our most touching poems and haunting
melodies, the world’s finest sculptures and paintings, and our most colorful
festivals, myths, and legends. Romantic love has adorned the world and brought
many of us tremendous joy. But when love is scorned, it can cause excruciating
sorrow. Stalking, homicide, suicide, profound depression from romantic
rejection, and high divorce and adultery rates are prevalent in societies around
the world. It’s time to seriously consider Shakespeare’s question: “What is
love?”
I hope this book will be as useful to you as writing it has been to me, in our
mutual and eternal dance with this monumental force: the instinct to fall in love.