While the low road propels us into each other’s arms, the high road sizes up a prospective partner—hence the importance of having conversation over coffee after last night’s tryst. A prolonged courtship lets partners take the full measure of each other on what counts most to both: that a romantic partner be considerate and understanding, responsive and competent—that is, worthy of a more intense attachment.
The stages of courtship are paced to give prospective partners a chance to guess whether the other person might be a good companion, a positive indicator that perhaps one day they would also be a good parent.7 So during early conversations partners gauge each other’s warmth, responsiveness, and reciprocity, and they make a tentative choice. Similarly, infants at around three months become more selective in whom they seek to engage, focusing on the people with whom they feel most secure.
Once a partner passes that test, synchrony marks the transition from attraction to feeling romantic longings. The increased ease of getting in synch, both for babies and for flirting adults, shows up in fond gazes, cuddling, and nuzzling—all reflecting an increase in intimacy. At this stage lovers regress to outright babyishness, using baby talk or cute private names, soothing whispers, and gentle caressing. This utter physical ease with each other marks the point where each has become a secure base for the other—still another echo of infancy.
To be sure, courtship can be as stormy as a toddler in a tantrum. Infants, after all, are self-centered, as lovers can be. And this general template morphs to contain all the ways risk and anxiety can bring couples together, from wartime romances and illicit affairs, to women who fall for “dangerous” men.
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp theorizes that as a couple fall in love, they literally become addicted to each other.8 Panksepp finds a neural corollary between the dynamics of opiate addiction and our dependence on the people for whom we feel our strongest attachments. All positive interactions with people, he proposes, owe part of their pleasure to the opioid system, the very circuitry that links with heroin and other addictive substances.
That circuitry, it turns out, includes those two key structures of the social brain, the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. The OFC and the ACC activate in addicts while they are craving, intoxicated, and bingeing. When an addict goes through withdrawal from his addiction, these areas deactivate. This system accounts for the addict’s overvaluing his favored drug as well as the utter failure of any inhibition in seeking it out.9 All that may be true, too, with an object of ardor during the pangs of falling in love.
Panksepp theorizes that the gratification that addicts get from their drugs biologically mimics the natural pleasure we get from feeling connected to those we love; the neural circuitry for both are largely shared. Even animals, he finds, prefer to spend time with those in whose presence they have secreted oxytocin and natural opioids, which induce a relaxed serenity—suggesting that these brain chemicals cement our family ties and friendships as well as our love relationships.
THE THREE STYLES OF ATTACHMENT
It’s been almost a year since Brenda and Bob’s nine-month-old daughter tragically died in her sleep.
As Bob sits reading the newspaper, Brenda comes in, holding some photographs, her eyes red. She’s been crying.
Brenda tells him she’s found some photos from a day they took their baby to the beach.
Bob, not even looking up, mutters, “Yeah.”
“She’s wearing that hat your mother bought for her,” Brenda begins.
“Hmmm,” Bob mumbles, still not looking, clearly uninterested.
When Brenda asks if he wants to see the pictures, he just says no, brusquely turning the page of the newspaper, then scanning it aimlessly.
As Brenda watches him in silence, tears run down her face. She blurts out, “I don’t understand you. She was our baby. Don’t you miss her? Don’t you care?”
“Of course I miss her! I just don’t want to talk about it,” Bob growls, as he storms out of the room.
That poignant exchange illustrates how differences in attachment styles can put a couple out of synch—in dealing not only with a shared trauma but with virtually everything else.10 Brenda wants to talk about her feelings; Bob avoids them. She sees him as cold and uncaring; he sees her as intrusive and demanding. The more she tries to get him to talk about how he feels, the more he withdraws.
This “demand-withdraw” pattern has long been commented on by marital therapists, to whom such couples sometimes turn to help resolve their deadlock. But new findings suggest that this classic discrepancy has a brain basis. Neither way is “best.” Rather, both tendencies reflect underlying neural patterns.
Our childhood leaves its stamp on our adult ardor nowhere more clearly than in our “attachment system,” the neural networks that operate whenever we relate to the people who matter the most to us. As we have seen, children who are well nurtured and feel their caretakers empathize with them become secure in their attachments, neither overly clingy nor pushing away. But those whose parents neglect their feelings and who feel ignored become avoidant, as though they have given up hope of achieving a caring connection. And children whose parents are ambivalent, unpredictably flipping from rage to tenderness, become anxious and insecure.
Bob embodies the avoidant type; he finds intense emotions unpleasant and so tries to minimize them. Brenda is an anxious type, whose feelings bubble up irrepressibly and who needs to talk over her preoccupations.
Then there’s the secure type, comfortable with emotions but not preoccupied by them. Had Bob been secure, presumably he could have been emotionally available to Brenda as she needed. If Brenda had been the secure one, she would not have been so desperate for Bob’s attentive empathy.
Once it is formed in childhood, the way we attach ourselves stays remarkably constant. These distinct attachment styles emerge to some degree in every close relationship and nowhere so strongly as in our romantic ties. Each has marked consequences for a person’s relationship life, according to a series of studies by Phillip Shaver, the psychologist at the University of California who has led much of the research on attachment and relationships.11
Shaver carries the mantle passed down from John Bowlby to his American disciple Mary Ainsworth, whose pioneering studies of how nine-month-olds reacted to a brief separation from their mothers first identified some infants as secure in their attachment and others as insecure in various ways. Shaver, taking Ainsworth’s insight to the world of adult relationships, has identified those attachment styles as they show up in any close connection, whether it’s a friendship, a marriage, or a parent-child relationship.12
Shaver’s group finds that 55 percent of Americans (whether as infants, children, or adults) fall into the “secure” category, easily getting close to others and being comfortable depending on them. Secure people come to a romantic relationship expecting that a partner will be emotionally available and attuned—that their partner will be there for support in times of hardship or distress—just as they can be for their partner. They feel an ease in getting close to people. Securely attached people see themselves as worthy of concern, care, and affection, and others as accessible, reliable, and having good intentions toward them. As a result, their relationships tend to be intimate and trusting.
In contrast, about 20 percent of adults are “anxious” in their love relationships, prone to fret that their partner does not really love them or won’t stay with them. Sometimes their apprehensive clinging and need for reassurance can inadvertently drive a partner away. These adults tend to see themselves as being unworthy of love and care—though they incline toward idealizing their romantic partners.
Once they form a relationship, anxious types can readily be beset by fears that they will be left or found wanting in some way. They are prone to all the signs of “love addiction”: obsessive preoccupation, self-conscious anxiety, and emotional dependence. Often angst-ridden, they are beset by relationship worries of all kinds—such as about bei
ng abandoned by their partner—or they are hyper-vigilant and jealous about imagined dalliances. And they often bring the same set of overconcern to their friendships.
Around 25 percent of adults are “avoidant,” uncomfortable being emotionally close, finding it hard to trust a partner or share feelings, and getting nervous when their partner seeks to get more emotionally intimate. They tend to suppress their own emotions, and especially to stifle their distressing feelings. Because avoidant people expect a partner to be emotionally untrustworthy, they find intimate relationships unpleasant.
The underlying difficulty with the anxious and avoidant types comes down to rigidity. Both represent strategies that actually make sense in a specific situation but are adhered to even where they fail. If there is a real danger, for example, anxiety arouses preparedness; but anxiety out of place creates relationship static.
When people are distressed, those of each type typically follow a different strategy for calming themselves. Anxious people, like Brenda, turn to other people, depending on the power of soothing interactions. Avoidant people, like her husband Bob, remain stridently independent, preferring to manage their upsets on their own.
Secure romantic partners seem able to buffer the perturbations of an anxious partner, so that the relationship does not rock too much. If one partner in a couple has the secure pattern, they have relatively few conflicts and crises. But when both partners in a couple are anxious, they are understandably prone to flare-ups and tiffs and demand constant high maintenance.13 Apprehension, resentment, and distress, after all, are contagious.
THE NEURAL BASIS
Each of the three styles reflects a specific variation in the wiring of the brain’s attachment system, as research by Shaver with neuroscientists at the University of California at Davis reveals.14 These differences surface most boldly in disturbing moments, such as in an argument or when one is lost in fearful ruminations about such a tiff or, even worse, when one is obsessing about breaking up with a romantic partner.
During such distressing reveries, fMRI testing showed, a distinct brain pattern emerges with each of the three main attachment styles. (Though the study used only women, presumably the same conclusions apply to men—only future studies will tell.)15
The propensity of the anxious types to overworry, as when one fears losing a partner, lit up low-road zones including the anterior temporal pole (or ATP), which activates during sadness; the anterior cingulate, where emotions flare; and the hippocampus, a key site for memory.16 Tellingly, the anxious women could not shut down this circuit for relationship disquiet even when they were specifically trying to; their obsessive worries overpowered their brain’s ability to turn them off. This neural activity was specific to anxiety about relationships rather than fears in general. Their anxiety-calming circuits worked perfectly well for shutting off other kinds of worries.
In contrast, the secure women had no trouble shutting off fears about breaking up. Their sadness-generating ATP quieted down as soon as they turned their attention to other thoughts. The key difference: the secure women readily activated the OFC’s neural switch for calming distress from the ATP.
By the same token, the anxious women could bring to mind some particular worry-provoking moment from their romantic relationship far more easily than could the other women.17 Their readiness for preoccupation with relationship troubles, Shaver suggests, could well interfere with their ability to figure out what would be most constructive for them to do.
Avoidant women had a very different neural story; the crucial action hinged on an area in the cingulate that activates during suppression of upsetting thoughts.18 In these women this neural brake on emotion seems jammed: just as the anxious women were unable to stop their worry, the avoidant women were unable to stop their suppression of worry, even when they were asked to. By contrast, the other women had no trouble flipping on and off the cingulate when they were asked to think about something sad and then to stop thinking about it.
This neural pattern for nonstop suppression explains why those with the avoidant style tend to be emotionally distant and uninvolved with life—when a relationship breaks up or someone dies, they do little grieving, and they feel emotionally unengaged during social interactions.19 Some degree of anxiety seems to be a price we pay for true emotional intimacy, if only because it surfaces relationship problems that need to be resolved.20 Shaver’s avoidant types seem to have bartered away a fuller emotional connection with others for a protective disconnection from their own disturbing feelings. Tellingly, Shaver found it hardest to recruit avoidant women for this study, because one of the requirements was involvement in a serious, long-term romantic relationship—and so few were.
These styles, remember, are largely shaped in childhood, and so they do not seem genetic givens. If they were learned, then they should be modifiable to some extent by the right experience—whether in psychotherapy or in a reparative relationship. On the other hand, an understanding partner may simply be able to accommodate to these quirks, within limits.
We can think of the neural systems for attachment, sex, and caregiving as parts of one of those kinetic mobiles by Alexander Calder, where motion in any branch reverberates to the others. For example, attachment styles mold a person’s sexuality. Avoidant types have more sexual partners and “one-night stands” than do anxious or secure people. True to their preference for emotional distance, avoidants are content with sex without caring or intimacy. Should they somehow end up in an ongoing relationship, they tend to oscillate between distance and coercion, and so they are understandably more likely to divorce or to break up—and then, oddly, to try to return to that same partner.21
The challenges to a love match posed by attachment styles merely begin the saga. Then there’s sex.
14
Desire: His and Hers
One of my best friends during my freshman year in college was a brilliant, bearish rugby player we nicknamed “The Hulk.” To this day I recall the advice he told me his German-born father had given him as he was preparing to leave home.
The maxim had a Brechtian, wryly cynical flavor. Roughly translated from the German, it went: “When the penis gets hard, the brain goes soft.”
Put more technically, the neural wiring for sex inhabits low-road subcortical regions that are beyond the reach of the thinking brain. As these nether circuits drive us with ever more urgency, we care less and less about whatever advice the high-road rational regions might offer us.
In a more general sense, this wiring map accounts for the irrationality of so many romantic choices: our logical circuitry has nothing to do with the matter. The social brain both loves and cares, but lust travels some of the lowest branches of the low road.
Desire seems to come in two forms, his and hers. When couples in love gazed at photos of their partners, a brain imaging study revealed a telling difference: for men in love—but not for women—the centers for visual processing and sexual arousal lit up, showing how his lover’s looks trigger a man’s passion. Small wonder men worldwide seek out visual pornography, as anthropologist Helen Fisher notes, or that women tend to draw feelings of self-worth from their appearance and put so much energy into their looks, all the better to “advertise their assets visually,” as she puts it.1
But for women in love, looking at their beloved activates very different centers in the brain’s social circuitry: cognitive centers for memory and attention.2 This difference suggests that women more thoughtfully weigh their feelings and assess a man as a prospective mate and provider. Women who are entering a romance notoriously tend to be more pragmatic than do men, and so of necessity they fall in love more slowly. “Casual sex” for women, Fisher comments, “is often not as casual as it is for men.”3
After all, the brain’s radar for attachment typically needs a series of meetings to make its decision about whether to commit. Men plunge down the low road while they are falling in love. To be sure, women cruise down the low—but they also circle back along t
he high.
A more cynical view has it, “Men look for sex objects, and women for success objects.” But though women tend to find allure in signs of a man’s power and wealth, and men in a woman’s physical attractiveness, these are not the prime draws for either sex—just the ones they most differ on.4 For men and women alike, kindness tops the list.
To further confuse our love life, circuits within the high road, whether through elevated sentiments or puritanical mores, resolutely strive to contain the red-hot subterranean currents of lust. Throughout history cultures have applied high-road brakes to low-road urges—in Freud’s terms, civilization has always battled its discontents. For instance, for centuries marriages in European upper classes were simply a matter of landed families ensuring that their property would remain in a particular lineage; in essence, families married other families via arranged matches. Lust and love be damned—there was always adultery.
Social historians tell us that, at least in Europe, only during the Reformation did today’s romantic notion of a lusty, loving, and committed emotional bond between husband and wife emerge—a departure from the medieval ideal of chastity, which viewed marriage as a necessary evil. Not until around the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle class did the notion of romantic love become a popular enough Western ideal that simply falling in love was a respectable reason for a couple to marry. And of course, in cultures like India that hang at the cusp between tradition and modernity, those couples who marry for love alone are still a small minority, frequently encountering strong objections from their families who would prefer an arranged marriage.
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