Love: The Perfect Business Solution?
From an economist’s point of view, all cooperative relationships are business partnerships: whether the goal is to make children or to run the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain (a joint business venture launched in 1991 by actors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis) makes no difference. If these relationships are to last long enough for their goals to be accomplished, they will present the usual commitment problem. And as usual, the problem is solved by a combination of reputation effects, imposed sanctions, morality, and feelings. In the case of romantic relationships, before the commitment problem even arises, the two business partners must find each other. Robert Frank helps us understand how this process works, using another business analogy.
The search for the perfect romantic partner shares many features with the search for the perfect apartment in a rental housing market, Frank says, or if you are a landlord, the search for the perfect tenant. It takes time and effort to search for and inspect available rental apartments, just as it takes time and effort for the landlord to interview potential tenants and assess their reliability. Waiting until you have inspected all the apartments or interviewed all the potential tenants before you make a final decision would mean never making a decision. There are too many empty apartments and potential tenants to begin with, and every day new apartments show up on the market and new potential tenants call landlords. Instead, if you’re seeking an apartment you visit a few apartments, and if you’re a landlord you interview a few potential tenants to get a sense of who is out there. Then, according to Frank, when both parties meet a sensible quality threshold (that is, they find something that’s good enough), they terminate their search and decide to settle. At this point, the commitment problem arises, and the two parties try to solve it by signing a lease.
Signing the lease is necessary for two reasons. The first is that when an apartment-seeker finds a landlord, or a landlord finds a tenant, who meets their quality threshold, they never have the required information about this person’s past or the ability to predict his or her future behavior that would be necessary to make a good choice. The tenant might pay rent on time for a few months and then start skipping payments. Or the landlord could be helpful at the beginning and then refuse to make necessary repairs in the apartment.
Acquiring all the necessary information about the two individuals to predict their future behavior would take forever. If a lease is not signed, the partnership between the tenant and the landlord will deteriorate as soon as either party does something wrong or unpleasant. The analogies with the restaurant partnership are obvious. Even if the tenant and landlord each behave perfectly and provide no reason for breaking their partnership, neither party can ever be sure of having found the best possible deal; in theory, the tenant could find an even better apartment a month later, and the landlord could find someone willing to pay more the next day. If both continue the search for a better deal, it is guaranteed that sooner or later their partnership will end. To make it work, they must end their search.
Without a lease, the business partnership between landlord and tenant would be unsustainable. The uncertainty of being in a partnership with someone who might end it at any time is stressful. Moreover, if either partner could end the relationship whenever the benefits of leaving were high enough, the eventual breakup could be very costly to both partners. Both parties, then, are better off restricting their potential for rational choice and limiting their options. By signing a lease, each party guarantees loyalty to the other no matter what and gives up any opportunity to accept a better deal that might become available during the period covered by the lease. This way, both parties gain by the stability of their situation and avoidance of the unforeseen costs that could arise from its breakup.
Like apartment-seekers and landlords, people want stable and long-term relationships but have limited time and opportunities to find partners. They start sampling potential partners, and when they find someone who meets their quality threshold, they decide to settle down. Once a partner is chosen, however, circumstances often change. People discover new aspects of their partner’s personality or behavior that they didn’t notice before, or their partner’s behavior changes, or another, more attractive person comes along. One way or another, sooner or later, opportunities for cheating or breaking up arise. Given the large investment made in the relationship, this would be very costly and potentially disastrous for the joint goals of the relationships. To minimize the chances of this happening, people sign a marriage contract that imposes significant financial penalties on the partner who breaks up the partnership, such as hefty lawyer fees, alimony payments, and child support (for further information about this, please ask Tiger Woods). If the cause of the breakup is cheating with another person, there are also potentially high reputation costs—such as having one’s name printed on a giant billboard and being subjected to public moral condemnation (see Chapter 5). But all of these deterrents may not be enough to prevent a relationship breakup.
The circumstances could change dramatically so that the costs of staying together become very high, or the benefits drop, or Angelina Jolie walks in one day and all bets are off. In that case, financial penalties won’t matter, damage to reputation won’t matter, and morality and feelings of guilt and empathy for the other’s pain won’t matter. Something else is needed, an irrational force that doesn’t act as a deterrent against breaking up but rather makes people want to be together no matter what the circumstances are, no matter how bad the cost-benefit ratios, no matter what other people think, and no matter how emotionally devastated Jennifer Aniston is. The irrational force is love; love trumps reason, money, reputation, morality, and empathy. According to Frank, love is the ultimate solution to the commitment problem, the only one that can ensure that two people stay together. He argues that relationships motivated by irrational love are more successful than those motivated by material self-interest or exchange and cooperation. “Do people in love relationships really set aside material self-interest?” Frank asks. His answer: “There is evidence that many do.”
In Passions Within Reason, Frank launches a crusade against his fellow economists to prove that rational models of human behavior are inadequate and that people often behave against their selfish interests. “As the rationalists emphasize,” Frank writes,
we live in a material world and, in the long run, behaviors most conducive to material success should dominate. Again and again, however, we have seen that the most adaptive behaviors will not spring directly from the quest for material advantage. Because of important commitment and implementation problems, that quest will often prove self-defeating. In order to do well, we must sometimes stop caring about doing the best we can.3
The existence of love as a solution to the commitment problem in romantic relationships is the ultimate demonstration that “to do well” we have to behave irrationally, ignore the costs and benefits of our decisions, and embrace pure altruism and its costs.
Is Frank right? Does love really exist as a solution to the commitment problem? Let’s examine Frank’s ideas a little more critically. I can think of at least three specific problems, and a more general one, with his ideas.
The first problem is this: if romantic relationships present the same commitment problem as any other cooperative business partnership—as Frank implies—why is it that business partners don’t fall in love to solve their commitment problems? If signing an apartment lease is as ineffective as signing a marriage contract in maintaining a partnership, why is it that tenants don’t fall in love with their landlords all the time? Since love occurs in (some) romantic relationships but not in any other type of human cooperative partnership, there are two possible conclusions: either love is a solution to the commitment problem but both the problem and the solution are different in romantic and business partnerships (that is, romantic partnerships present unique problems that require unique solutions), or love is not the solution to the c
ommitment problem in romantic relationships.
Second, is it really true, as Frank maintains, that a relationship motivated by irrational feelings is inherently more stable than one motivated by rational thinking and prospects for material exchange? In fact, one could argue just the opposite—that the irrationality of love makes the romantic relationship subject to mercurial whims, while a partnership established on the basis of rational reasons is likely to persist as long as the reasons do. I don’t know if Bill and Hillary Clinton still feel passionate love for each other, but it’s clear that they have both benefited greatly, professionally and financially, from their partnership, and their relationship seems very stable.4 All those who expected them to divorce after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the end of the Clinton presidency were proven wrong. According to the tabloids, Brad and Angelina are very much in love, but they seem to fight all the time and are always on the verge of breaking up. Maybe what keeps them together is not really their love but all the interests they share, including children and joint properties.
If it’s true that love provides a solution to the commitment problem, how long does the solution last? This is the third problem with the commitment model: it does not explain when, how, and why love between two people ends. If love is an irrational feeling that occurs independent of the costs and benefits of being in a relationship, it follows that changes in these costs and benefits would not cause love to end. Although true love lasts forever, the kind of love available to common mortals seems to be strongest at the beginning of a relationship, when passion is at its peak, and to gradually fade until, in some cases, it simply disappears. The commitment model, however, would predict the opposite temporal pattern. According to this model, when two people start a relationship, their partnership is advantageous to both: they have common interests and want to pursue common goals because going alone is either impossible or less effective than a joint venture. In short, love is not really necessary at the beginning. According to the commitment model, love is needed later, when circumstances change and it’s no longer advantageous for one or both partners to be together. So love should get stronger and stronger with time, to make sure that these irrational feelings hold the relationship together when rational arguments would push for a breakup. Is this what really happens?
There is another, more general issue with the commitment theory of love: it does not account for the notion that romantic love is not only about the maintenance of closeness and commitment to a partner but also often about the pursuit of a relationship (sometimes unrequited) with an object of desire. To illustrate this point, I turn to one of the masterpieces of European literature: the 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.5 Here is a brief plot summary:
In Paris, in the year 1640, a brilliant poet and swordsman named Cyrano de Bergerac falls deeply in love with his beautiful, intellectual cousin Roxane. Cyrano, unfortunately, has a large ugly nose and does not want to tell Roxane how he feels for fear of being rejected.
Instead, Roxane tells Cyrano that she loves one of his cadets, the young and handsome (but intellectually challenged) Christian, and asks Cyrano to protect him. Cyrano goes even further and begins to write love letters to Roxane on Christian’s behalf. Roxane soon falls in love with the author of the letters, whom she assumes is Christian. One night Christian stands in front of Roxane’s balcony and speaks to her while Cyrano stands under the balcony whispering to Christian what to say. Frustrated by Christian’s romantic incompetence, Cyrano eventually shoves him aside and, under cover of darkness, pretends to be Christian and woos Roxane himself.
Roxane and Christian get married, but soon after both Christian and Cyrano are sent to the front lines of the war with Spain. During the long war, Cyrano writes to Roxane every single day, using Christian’s name, and risks his life each morning by sneaking through the Spanish lines to a place where he can post the letters. When Roxane comes to the front lines to see Christian, Christian forces Cyrano to tell her the truth, but just as Cyrano is about to do so Christian is shot and killed, so Cyrano cannot tell Roxane the truth.
Fifteen years later, Roxane lives in a convent and Cyrano visits her every week. One day Cyrano, who has made many enemies in his life, is ambushed and hit in the head. He appears at the convent, walking slowly and with a pained expression on his face, but sounding as cheerful as ever. As night falls, Cyrano asks to read Christian’s last letter to her. He reads it, and when it is completely dark he continues to read, as if he knows the letter by heart. Roxane realizes that Cyrano wrote the letters—she has found the soul she was in love with all along. Cyrano removes his hat, revealing his wound. Roxane exclaims that she loves him and that he cannot die. But Cyrano cannot survive his wound, and he collapses and dies, smiling as Roxane bends over and kisses him.
If neither Becker’s nor Frank’s economic models can explain Cyrano de Bergerac’s feelings and behavior, then what can? Are there other theories of love that can help us understand it?
Perhaps biology can provide the answers.
The Evolutionary Biology of Love
SEX, LOVE, AND HAMMERS
If you ask a random person on the street what love is, there is a good chance this person will say something about finding the perfect partner, being sexually attracted, developing passionate feelings, and spending the rest of one’s life with this person. An evolutionary biologist who happens to walk by and overhears this conversation, however, might object that love has little to do with sexual attraction or partner choice. From an evolutionary standpoint, sexual attraction exists to facilitate sexual intercourse, and sexual intercourse exists to make reproduction possible. Biologists and evolutionary psychologists know a great deal about how sexual attraction works and what different people find attractive and why.6 Although sexual attraction and romantic love sometimes go together, this is not necessarily the case. Similarly, although you might think that both sexual attraction and romantic love influence, or even determine, partner choice, in reality the choice of a long-term relationship partner can be entirely independent of sexual attraction and love. Why people pair up with particular individuals and not others is complex, and understanding it requires a combination of theories and knowledge produced by many different disciplines, including anthropology, biology, economics, psychology, and sociology. But understanding why people fall in love with each other does not require knowing anything about sexual attraction or partner choice.
The fact that love exists in all human cultures and that poems and songs at every stage of human history have described it in similar terms suggests that our ability to experience romantic feelings has a genetic basis and is hardwired into our brains. In fact, recent neuroimaging studies conducted by anthropologist Helen Fisher and her colleagues pinpoint precisely the location of the “love circuits” in the human brain.7
Although Walt Disney movies feature animals that fall in love with each other or pets who love their owners, this anthropomorphic view of animal inner lives is far from reality. I believe that romantic love is unique to our species and probably evolved a few million years ago, after our ancestors split from the ancestors of chimpanzees and other apes. Like many of our other psychological, physiological, and physical traits, the human ability to love probably evolved by natural selection. That being said, traits that evolve by natural selection to serve a particular function can occur later on in contexts that have nothing to do with the original function.
Take, for example, sexual desire. No one would question that sexual desire and sexual attraction evolved to facilitate reproduction. Yet, in human societies, people are sexually attracted not only to individuals of the opposite sex, with whom they could potentially reproduce, but also to individuals of the same sex or to sexually immature individuals, and the reasons for this are complex. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that there are different kinds of sexual attraction that evolved for different reasons. Similarly, romantic love is expressed in myriad different ways: children can fall in love wit
h other children (I experienced my first crush at age seven), adults can fall in love with other adults of the same or the opposite sex, and both children and adults can be in love with their pets or even with inanimate objects such as toys or cars. That doesn’t mean that there are many kinds of romantic love or that romantic love evolved for many different reasons. Regardless of its many expressions, romantic love is always the same phenomenon, and it is likely that it evolved to serve one particular function.
Consider this analogy. A hammer can be used to pound a nail, smash a window, or kill someone. That doesn’t mean that there are different kinds of hammers or that hammers were invented for different reasons. Whoever invented the first hammer probably had only one function in mind—hammering nails—and the rest followed. The evolutionary function of love, I propose, is not to solve the commitment problem in cooperative relationships but simply to encourage men and women to form a bond that lasts as long as it takes to raise children together.
Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships Page 18