A Natural History of Love

by Diane Ackerman

  *An abbess was once asked what she held in her hand. Opening her fist to reveal a horse chestnut, she replied: “All that is made.”

  *The closing lines of the play are:

  For never was a story of more woe

  Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

  †In a secretly recorded telephone conversation in 1993, Prince Charles swore to his mistress that he longed even to be her “tampon.”

  *For example, both Miranda in The Tempest and Viola in Twelfth Night are only about fifteen, and Marina in Pericles is fourteen.

  *This belief that there is only one person in the world for me, without whom 1 am lost is a familiar part of loving stated formally by Plato.

  *One of the most curious, perhaps, was the codpiece, worn by European men between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Somewhat like a tribal penis sheath or a jockstrap, its purpose was to protect the penis, but men exaggerated its size and shape—sometimes even decorating it with a gargoyle-like head—to draw attention to the penis and make it appear to be constantly large and erect. In 1976, the product-development department of Birds Eye frozen foods planned on calling their new fish balls “cod pieces,” until someone pointed out that the term had an ancient and somewhat bawdy lineage.

  PLATO: THE PERFECT UNION

  Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past begins with a child waiting in bed for his mother to come and give him a good-night kiss. Sensitive and lonely, he grows anxious and unhinged, and the rest of the novel (more the mosaic of a life than a work of fiction) chronicles his attempts to bridge the gap between himself and the rest of humanity. He could not feel more separate, isolated, and alone. The passage shows the eternal quest of the child, who must learn to be separate from his mother even while he longs to reunite with her. One of the keystones of romantic love—and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics—is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.

  This vision of love has its wellsprings in ancient Greek thought. To Plato, lovers are incomplete halves of a single puzzle, searching for each other in order to become whole. They are a strength forged by two weaknesses. At some point, all lovers wish to lose themselves, to merge, to become one entity. By giving up their autonomy, they find their true selves. In a world ruled by myth, Plato tried to be rational, often using myths as allegories to make a point. His investigations of love in The Symposium are the oldest surviving attempts to systematically understand love. In The Symposium, he advises people to bridle their sexual urges, and also their need to give and receive love. They should concentrate all that energy on higher goals. He understood perfectly well that people would have to struggle hard to redirect such powerful instincts; it would produce much inner warfare. When, almost 3,000 years later, Freud talks of the same struggle, using words like “sublimation” and “resistance,” he is harking back to Plato, for whom love was a great predicament and a riddle. This was no doubt in part because Plato was confused about his own sexual identity; as a younger man, he wrote in praise of homosexual love, and as an older man he condemned it as an unnatural crime.

  At The Symposium’s banquet staged in honor of Eros, Socrates—who was a teacher and companion of Plato—and his friends exchange ideas about love. Actually, Socrates’ job is to poke holes in everyone else’s ideas. The banqueters are not present just to praise love, but to fathom it, to dive through its waves and plumb its depths. One of their first home truths is that love is a universal human need. Not just a mythic god, or a whim, or madness, but something integral to each person’s life. When it is Aristophanes’ turn, he relates a fable—one that has influenced people for thousands of years since. He explains that originally there were three sexes: men, women, and a hermaphroditic combination of man and woman. These primitive beings had two heads, two arms, two sets of genitals, and so on. Threatened by their potential power, Zeus divided each one of them in half, making individual lesbians, homosexual men, and heterosexuals. But each person longed for its missing half, which it sought out, tracked down, and embraced, so that it could become one again—and thereby Aristophanes arrives at an astonishing definition of love:

  Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half…. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, were to come to the pair who are lying side by side and say to them, “What do you people want of one another?” They would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said, “Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company, for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together …” There is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.

  It is an amazing fable, saying, in effect, that each person has an ideal love waiting somewhere to be found. Not “There’s a lid for every pot,” as my mother has sometimes said, but that each of us has a one-and-only, and finding that person makes us whole. This romantic ideal of the perfect partner was invented by Plato. It appealed so strongly to hearts and minds that people believed it in all the following centuries, and many still believe it today. As Freud discovered, Plato took his fable from India, where some gods were bisexual. Indeed, the original human in the Upanishads is as lonely as Adam in the Bible, and like Adam he asks for company and is pleased when a female is made from his own body. In each case, all the people of the earth are born from their union. Evolutionary biologists tell us that our ultimate ancestor almost certainly was hermaphroditic, and something about that news feels right, not just in our reason but in the part of us that yearns for the other. John Donne wrote magnificently about this passion for oneness, which takes on a special piquancy in his poem “The Flea.” One day, sweetly loitering with his mistress, he notices a flea sucking a little blood from her arm and then from his. Joyously, he observes that their blood is married inside the flea.

  Why should the idea of oneness be so compelling? Love changes all the physics in the known universe of one’s emotions, and redraws the boundaries between what is real and what is possible. Children often believe in magic and miracles, and when they grow up they naturally believe in the miraculous power of love. Sometimes this is depicted in myths or legends by having the lovers drink a love potion, as Tristan and Isolde do; be stung by Cupid’s arrows; be enchanted by music as Eurydice is; or receive a reviving kiss à la Sleeping Beauty.

  In many eastern and western religions, the supplicants strive for a sense of unity with God. Although this is not supposed to be an erotic coupling, saints often describe it as if it were, dwelling in orgasmic detail on the sensuality of Christ’s body. Religious ecstasy and the ecstasy of lovers have much in common—the sudden awareness, the taking of vows, the plighting of troths, the all-consuming fire in the heart and flesh, the rituals leading to bliss, and, for some Christians, a cannibalistic union with the godhead by symbolically drinking his blood and eating his flesh. Whether we fall in love with a human demigod or with a deity, we feel that they can return us to a primordial state of oneness, that then our inner electric can run its full circuit, that we can at last be whole.

 
How bizarre it is to wish to blend blood and bones with someone. People cannot actually literally become one, of course; it’s a physical impossibility. The idea is preposterous. We are separate organisms. Unless we are Siamese twins, we are not merged with another. Why should we feel incomplete, anyway? Why believe that uniting our body and thoughts and fate with another person’s will cure our sense of loneliness? Wouldn’t it make more sense to believe that when love brings two people together they are a community of two, not a compound of one? The idea of merging is so irrational, so contrary to common sense and observation, that its roots must strike deep into our psyche. Because a child is born of a mother, and lives as a separate entity, we think of the child as an individual. But in biological terms that is not precisely true. The child is an organic part of the mother that is expelled at birth, but it shares much of her biology, personality, even scent. The only and absolute perfect union of two is when a baby hangs suspended in its mother’s womb, like a tiny madman in a padded cell, attached to her, feeling her blood and hormones and moods play through its body, feeling her feelings. After that perfect, pendent, dependent union, birth is an amputation, and the child like a limb looking to attach itself to the rest of its body. I am not saying this consciously occurs to anyone, but that it may explain the osmotic yearning we all feel, at one time or another, to blend our heart and body and fluids with someone else’s. Only the thinnest rind of skin stands between us, only events slender as neurons. Only the fermenting mash of personality keeps us from crossing the boundary that organisms cherish to become one appetite, one struggle, one destiny. Then, when we finally reach that pinnacle, we feel more than whole: we feel limitless.

  STENDHAL MEETS THE DEEP SOUTH

  A special irony in the history of mind and heart is that wise people don’t always act wisely in their own lives. Novelists, blessed with insight about the psychology of their characters, may not be equally intuitive with friends, or with themselves. Lofty thinkers often become petty and obsessive when they’re at home. Even charismatic and inspiring world leaders sometimes secretly suffer from depression, or enjoy being degraded and dominated in the boudoir. We credit famous people with unwavering moods, good character, and a lifestyle defined by their genius. The usual truth—that they are as human, insecure, and neurotic as the rest of us—always comes as a shock, which public opinion rarely forgives. To my mind, it doesn’t matter that Freud was part of a ménage à trois, or that Havelock Ellis liked women to pee during sex, or that Churchill used to get down on all fours, pad over to his wife’s bedroom door, and meow like a tomcat. But I may be unusual in this. Most people expect their heroes to be flawless. I feel greatness is something that otherwise normal people rise to. Although their genius separates them from the rest of humanity, only their genius is different. Indeed, they may well have devised an intricate web of coping mechanisms to deal with that genius. We forget that highly attuned people are also highly sensitive to slight, self-doubt, and rejection.

  Marie Henri Beyle (Stendhal) was just such an artist. Insightful as he was about human nature in his novels, in real life he plunged deeper and deeper in love with a woman who just toyed with him. Her rejection was a constant knife wound. And yet he couldn’t break his obsession. Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski was, at twenty-eight, a beautiful Milanese mother of two, who had separated from her Polish husband, and was active in Italian revolutionary politics. In 1818, Stendhal fell vertiginously in love. She never returned his feelings, or understood him. During the winter of his discontent, she grew colder and colder; even rationing him to one short visit every two weeks. She didn’t refuse him entirely; she saw him just often enough to keep his hopes alive. Her power over him must have excited her beyond measure. In time, Stendhal fled to England to avoid arrest, and Mathilde died at the age of thirty-five. He wrote about her longingly for the rest of his life, and during her lifetime went to extraordinary lengths to deal with his ill-favored love for her.

  In his famous book On Love (De l’Amour), Stendhal used a code name for Mathilde, and attributed to other men what in fact had happened to him. Not even his friends knew that he was writing about himself, or that he was limbering up his heart and focusing his creative energies in an effort to win Mathilde’s esteem. Perhaps he also felt that by analyzing his passion, by trying to understand the nature of love, he might be able to break its stranglehold. Before you can exorcise demons you must name them.

  He begins the book by explaining that there are four kinds of love: “Mannered Love,” “Physical Love,” “Vanity-Love,” and, the highest of all, “Passionate Love”—a romantic, all-consuming, death-defying feeling that doesn’t need to be returned. This was a state Stendhal knew only too well. Mathilde kept him so off balance that, on the rare occasions they were together, he felt too much pressure to be charming. As a result, he would as often as not become clumsy and tongue-tied, or gabble ridiculously, or say something tactless. He must have seemed pathetic to her. His desire for her was hopeless, even mortifying at times, fed by the illusion that somehow she would ultimately return his love. One November day in 1819, he decided to reveal himself to her in a poised, artful way—as he never could do in person. He would write a novel called Métilde. A few weeks later, he hatched a different idea, something bolder, to write a “physiology of love” which would speak on several levels. To the general reader, it would be a profound work of intuitive perception; to Mathilde, it would be a personal appeal. In it, he calls her Léonore, and refers to himself as “a young man of my acquaintance,” but she would recognize both of them, since he quotes her word for word and refers to events in her life. So, although millions of readers have turned to the book for general truths about love, and found it illuminating, it was written about one tormented man’s unfulfilled love for one woman.

  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had been published the year before, and there was something of that sensitive, underestimated freak in Stendhal, who lived on the outskirts of Mathilde’s bungalow and would stare longingly through the window at her cheerful hearth, knowing that he was repugnant in her eyes.

  Stendhal is also reminiscent of a character in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. McCullers was only twenty-four when she wrote her novel filled with lonely hearts. The main character, Mr. Singer, though deaf and dumb, is loud with love he can’t make anyone hear. The adolescent heroine, Mick, is desperate for acceptance from her peers, but feels isolated. Everyone in the novel hunts for love in one form or another—stalking it, misfiring at it, sitting quietly in wait behind a carefully constructed blind. Some fire at shadows. Some have infallible aim. But most are like planets in orbit around others—bound together by the gravity of the human condition, trailing in one another’s wake, but doomed never to touch. Many of the characters are invalids or handicapped in some way, as McCullers herself would become five years later, when, at twenty-nine, muscular dystrophy imprisoned her in a wheelchair, where she would remain until she died at the age of fifty. She was relegated to the bleachers for most of her life, watching the able-bodied on the field of play. It made her especially sensitive to hidden infirmities. Her characters are consumed by their own private cancers, or severed from life. None can see the suffering of the other. Each is on a lonely trajectory through life, which they long to share, long to explain, but they can find no one with whom to connect. Mr. Singer appears the sanest, yet is the most alienated because he cannot even speak with other humans. He is like a trapeze artist swinging out over an abyss; ultimately he gives up hope of finding another pair of hands waiting to catch him, and he just lets go. Stendhal would have felt right at home in this circus of high-wire loneliness and lovesickness.

  His investigation of love is a small anatomy of obsession. He talks about the paralyzing shyness one feels in the presence of the beloved; how important it is to act naturally—but also how difficult; the way the beloved’s kind words can render one speechless; how the alternating current of hope and despair can fry one’s nerves; the way the mo
st trivial gesture or word can devastate a lover one moment and cause bliss the next; how music can convey the wordless depths of love; love’s power to whitewash the true nature of the beloved; and the pitilessness of self-doubt and self-consciousness that savage one’s heart. Ever the taxonomist, he describes seven stages of falling in love: First one admires. Then one hopes the feeling will be returned. When hope combines with admiration, love is born, and the senses awaken to the joy of touching, seeing, talking with the beloved. The next stage includes one of his key ideas, what he terms “crystallization,” the tendency for someone in love to idealize the beloved, imagining him or her to be finer and nobler than any other human being. It is “a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.” He labels it crystallization because it reminds him of the way crystals form on twigs in the salt mines. The miners throw a bare bough into an abandoned shaft and when they pull it out two or three months later they find it encrusted with glittering salt crystals. “The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.” After crystallization, doubt creeps in, and dreadful misgiving, as the lover demands proof after proof of affection. (Men and women doubt different things, he explains. The man doubts if he can attract the woman and cause her really to love him. The woman doubts the man’s sincerity and reliability; perhaps he is just interested in sex and will quickly desert her.) When doubt is overcome, “the second crystallization” occurs, with the mind imagining every act as a proof of love. At this stage, the opposite of being in love is death. If the idealized person should leave, the mournful lover assumes it was his fault, and that, through his own bungling, happiness is lost forever. There is no consolation. Depression deadens every light thought. The mind can no longer attach the idea of pleasure to any pleasurable activity. Stendhal writes: “This is the optical illusion which leads to the fatal pistol shot.”