The first great love of life begins upon leaving the womb. It lasts, in the words of John Bowlby, “from cradle to grave.” It is laid down in a rich vocabulary of touch, voice, gaze, and facial display, it is evident in the merging of minds, heartbeats, and nervous systems of caretaker and young child. These processes establish deep patterns of neural response in the pro-social nervous system—growth in tactile receptors in the skin, strengthening of the oxytocin system (which is damaged in orphans), the setting of the HPA axis to less stressful levels, lighting up of reward centers in the brain. These early attachment experiences are laid down so early we can’t consciously remember them, for the regions of the brain involved in memory—the hippocampus in particular—aren’t fully functioning until age two or so. But they are felt every moment of life, in the trust of a stranger, in the willingness to speak out and fail, in the devotion to a romantic partner in times of difficulty, in the sense of hope, and in the devotion one feels for one’s own children. If it goes well, that early love is felt as the encouraging, not-so-invisible warm hand on your back as you move through life.
THE ELEMENTS OF DESIRE
A lek (Swedish for “play”) is the singles bar for many bird species. It is a small patch of ground where the males of a species congregate and set up shop to take their shot at seducing their female counterparts. The male bowerbird, for example, will build elaborate bowers of sticks, leaves, bottle caps, and hot commodity items like the bird of paradise’s feathers to show off his resource-acquiring abilities. Like young women arriving at the dance after a trip to the bathroom, female bowerbirds arrive at a set time at the leks, inspect each male, engage in a few courtship head bobs and coos, and then converge on a couple of males who seem most worthy (that is, resource-rich) to mate with.
It does not take a great leap of the imagination to recognize human leks—junior proms and Sadie Hawkins dances, bars, nightclubs, Bible study groups, coffee and copy machines at the office, singles hikers in the Sierras, activist meetings—where desire is negotiated according to our own ancient patterns of courtship. This ancient language of desire catapults us, heads spinning, into reproductive relations. Before cataloguing this language of desire, it is worth considering two underappreciated qualities of human desire that might be taken for granted. The first is that human desire channels us into monogamous bonds. This is not the trajectory of desire in our closest primate relatives. In gorillas, resource-rich alpha males lord over harems, while other males do their best to sneak in surreptitious copulations—like those elephant seal beta males. In chimpanzees, all is quiet on the sexual front until the female goes into estrus. At this time she most typically mates indiscriminately with dozens of males each day, often requiring up to 3,000 copulations prior to pregnancy. And bonobos wage an all-out, polyamorous Haight-Ashbury lovefest, using sex for just about every purpose: to reproduce, to form friendships, to help share food, to play, to pass the time.
Putting aside your bonobo envy, it is important to appreciate that human desire, at least in the moment, is singular. It is oriented toward one person; it pair-bonds. The most obvious reason for this is that our big-brained, ultravulnerable offspring required multiple caretakers, including fathers. Another factor, suggests Matt Ridley in The Red Queen, is our love of meat. Some 1.6 million years ago, our foraging, group-dwelling hominid predecessors started eating meat. The provision of meat is a probabilistic affair, and bound males into dependent trade relations. This focus of early hominid dietary activity prevented any single male from hoarding all the resources—a precondition for harems—and kept early hominids in pair-bonding relations.
If you need further proof of our pair-bonding predilections, just look at a few males’ testicles. In species with polygamous females, males have outsized testicles that produce copious amounts of sperm to win in the game of sperm competition with other males. Thus, in chimps, with their promiscuous females, the male’s testicles on average are two times larger than those of the gorilla, whose females mate in serial and monogamous fashion with one alpha male. In the right whale, whose females are polygamous, the testicles of the male weigh half a ton, or 1 percent of its body weight (two pounds on a 200-pound human). The right whale’s testicles greatly outweigh those of the male in the pair-bonding gray whale. Human testicle size reveals us to be more on the pair-bonding end of the continuum. Sexual desire is the rocket booster that moves us toward that arrangement.
Human desire is just as remarkable in that it leads to sex and intimacy unrelated to procreation. Long before the birth control pill revolutionized intimate life by freeing sexual behavior from reproductive outcome, the same was happening in human evolution. Females of our closest primate relatives advertise their reproductive readiness with swollen, colorful sexual regions—displays that shock and astonish in the primate section of your local zoo. Human females, in contrast, have evolved concealed ovulation. As a result, women and men do not necessarily know whether their desire will lead to reproductive outcome (although a woman is more likely to initiate sex, masturbate, have affairs, and be accompanied by her husband during ovulation; and pole dancers earn bigger tips, Geoffrey Miller has recently found, at the peak of their ovulation). Concealed ovulation evolved, we now know, to prevent stepfather infanticide, which is unnervingly common in mammals, and seen in many rodent species, lions, and many primates. Concealed ovulation keeps males guessing about whether offspring are theirs, thus reducing the likelihood of infanticide. Concealed ovulation also allows women and men to have sex throughout the female’s cycle—an ongoing incentive for the male to remain in a relationship and contribute to the raising of such resource-dependent, vulnerable offspring.
The specific language of desire, which propels potential partners toward one another, has been documented by Givens and Perper. These researchers spent hundreds of hours hiding behind ferns and jukeboxes, laboriously documenting four-or five-second bursts of nonverbal behavior amid the lambent light and Lionel Richie tunes of 1980s singles bars. They homed in on those microscopic behaviors that predict whether women and men will pursue a romantic encounter—a shared drink, an exchange of phone numbers, leaving the bar with buoyant step, arm in arm.
In the initial attention-getting phase, women walk with arched back and swaying hips, amplifying the extent to which their bodies take on that platonic form of beauty—the hourglass figure. Women resort to the well-known universal—the hair flip—which dominates the field of vision of the male of interest, who is nonchalantly sipping his third Bud. Women (and men) smile coyly, lips puckered, head turned away, but eyes dropping in to make eye contact for a millisecond or two.
Men counter with behaviors that amplify their physical size and assumed resource-holding potential. They rock back and forth on their heels and roll their shoulders. They raise their arms with exaggerated gestures, in ordering a round of drinks or stretching out, to show off their well-developed arms, the broad expanse of their shoulders, or expensive watches or prep-school pinkie rings. These brief signals honor time-honored principles in the game of sexual selection. The woman is drawing attention to her curves, fine skin, and full lips—signs of her sexual readiness and reproductive potential. The man is signaling that he has stature, resources, and good genes, appealing to the woman whose desire is conditioned by an awareness of the enormous costs of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, which would be offset by a man of means and justified by a man with good genes.
Like courtship, momentary flirtation progresses toward more intimate phases. In the recognition phase, women and men gaze intently at each other; they express interest with raised eyebrows, singsong voice, melodious, voiced laughter, and subtle lip puckers. They turn to the exquisite language of touch, and all those receptors under the surface of the skin, to explore their interest in each other with provocative brushes of the arm, pats on the shoulder, or not-so-accidental bumps against one another that safely occur in the aftermath of a joke or in a pleasant, joshing-around tease. A slight touch to the should
er that is ever so slightly firmer and more enduring than a polite pat reveals a desire beyond the typical exchange between friends or new acquaintances.
If all of this proceeds well, the potential partners move to the keeping-time phase. They begin to mirror each other’s glances, laughter, gaze, gesture, and posture, as they share jokes, order drinks, disclose embarrassing snippets of the past, and search for commonalities. This kind of behavioral synchrony creates a sense of similarity, trust, and merging of self and other. In Plato’s view, the two souls, having separated at birth but now reunited, are forming the perfect union with one another.
In many species, courtship behaviors stimulate the biology of reproduction. For the tree-dwelling African dove, flirtatious coos and head bows trigger the release of estrogen and luteinizing hormone in the female, and eventually ovulation. A stag’s roar stimulates females to go into heat faster. The lowly snail shoots darts into potential sexual partners, which activates the snail’s sexual organs (I dare not describe them). In humans this language of passion stimulates the experience of desire. In the throes of this kind of love, people experience an entirely different sense of time and a disarming loss of personal control and agency. A metaphorical switch in the mind is turned on (and the voice of cost-benefit, conventional rationality is turned off). People feel blown away, swept off their feet, knocked out, ill, feverish, and mad. They may eat and bathe less, stop seeing friends, neglect their homework and bills. The old definitions of the self are turned off, to make way for the establishment of an entirely new identity, one that emerges in the early delirium and upheaval of pair-bonding relationship and which will rearrange their lives.
This language of desire carries the couple toward a different kind of consummation than that observed in other species. The couple will likely make love face-to-face, unusual in the primate world. They will have sex in private. And alongside desire, our research finds, they will feel a deep sense of anxiety. The woman will wonder whether her new partner resembles the male caricatured all too readily in scientific research, the male eager to pursue short-term sexual strategies (one-night stands) to dispense with his daily production of 200 million sperm (in one study, 75 percent of college males were willing to go home with a female experimenter they had just met while walking on campus, and who had asked whether they were interested in a quickie). The man will feel his own anxiety, perhaps sensing that he is unlike any other primate in the degree to which he will be expected to sacrifice, to forgo other reproductive opportunities, and devote resources to his offspring, whom he will, again unlike any other primate, recognize as his own. They await the warm surround of romantic love to shut down these anxieties.
OPEN ARMS AND MOLECULES OF MONOGAMY
Each year 2.3 million couples wed in the United States. The average cost of a wedding is $20,000, which exceeds the average life savings of any American you might pick off the street. Guests lists are negotiated, dresses fitted, invitations embossed and mailed, appetizers and music selected. What follows is a surreal day of rapturous emotion, fathers crying, mothers spilling their glasses of wine, ex-lovers smoldering, recalled verse, besotted smooches, best friends in arms, and dancing children.
The wedding ceremony could rightfully be thought of as the most elaborate, expensive ritual in human history to fail. Approximately 47 percent of those individuals who stand at the altar, suffused with lofty emotions, uttering vows in hallowed words of devotion, will divorce, and they’ll often go down in flames of hatred and litigation. Very often they’ll divorce within a year or two of the ceremony, giving each other the finger, as did the divorcing parents of a friend of my parents’, in the county courthouse’s courtyard, or uttering “Tu es mort” as they sign the papers.
Or, you could think of the wedding ceremony as an astonishing success. Half of marriages make it. In spite of frequent surges of youthful desires and the mundane complexities of marriage, estimates of adultery suggest that only 11 to 20 percent of married partners have extramarital affairs. Compare that success rate in taming nonmonogamous sexual impulses with recent studies of abstinence programs provided to middle-and high-school students. These expensive, sophisticated products engineered by well-meaning social scientists fail abominably, and often lead teenagers to be more inclined to have sex or unsafe sex after such indoctrination.
In terms of its outcome, the wedding ceremony can be seen as a glass half empty or a glass half full, an interpretation that no doubt is shaped by our own experiences with the person we enjoyed that day with. In terms of its function, there is no doubt about the interpretation of why we go to such lengths in the wedding ceremony: It is a ritualized solution to the commitment problem. The wedding ceremony is our attempt as a culture to get two young partners to remain faithful to one another (and devoted to their offspring) in the face of so many compelling alternatives; to sacrifice their pursuit of sexual desire to the interests of their bond and their offspring. Culture’s answer is to empty the bank account, bring every person you cherish into a sublimely beautiful locale, make public avowals, give expensive rings to one another, photograph every instant of the day in the event that memory fades, and head off into the sunset. Evolution’s answer to the commitment problem is that emotion most favored by poets and rock stars alike: romantic love.
Romantic love enables the human mind to countervail self-interest. In the depths of romantic love, we idealize our partners; they take on unique, mythic qualities; we turn to deistic metaphors to describe our beloved. When Sandra Murray and her colleagues asked romantic partners to rate themselves and their partners in terms of different virtues (understanding, patient), positive traits (humorous, playful) and faults (plaintive, distant), they found that happier couples idealized their partners; they overestimated their partners’ virtues (compared to the partners’ self-descriptions) and underestimated their faults. In other studies, Murray and colleagues asked people to write about their partners’ greatest fault—the source of endless vitriol in therapy sessions and divorce proceedings. Happier romantic partners were more likely to see virtues in faults and more likely to offer “yes, but” refutations of faults. A happier married wife would look at her lethargic husband on the couch, snoozing with the remote pressed into his cheek, and think, “yeah, but at least he is around more in the home and not cavorting at the sports bar or at the golf course all day Saturday.”
Studies point to a neurological basis for romantic love’s rose-colored glasses. Not too surprisingly, long-term committed romantic love is associated with activation in reward centers in the brain—the ventral anterior cingulate, the medial insula, the caudate and the putamen. More dramatically, romantic love deactivates threat detection regions of the brain—the right prefrontal cortical regions and the amygdala. The person in the throes of romantic love may be physiologically incapable of seeing all that is worrisome, problematic, or worthy of a skeptical second look.
And studies have begun to document the very chemical that promotes long-term devotion. We can pin our hopes on oxytocin, a mammalian hormone, or neuropeptide, consisting of nine amino acids, and involved in humans, as any midwife will tell you, in uterine contractions, milk letdown, and breastfeeding. Oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus, an old region of the brain that coordinates basic behaviors related to food intake, reproduction, defense, and attack. It is then released into both brain and bloodstream, which is why it is called a neuropeptide. Receptors in the olfactory system, neural pathways associated with touch, and regions of the spinal cord that regulate the autonomic nervous system, especially the parasympathetic branch, including the vagus nerve (see chapter 11), await the chemical’s arrival.
By activating touch and a calmer physiological state, oxytocin enables monogamous pair-bonding. This remarkable discovery emerged in Sue Carter and Tom Insel’s comparisons of two nearly genetically identical rodents, the monogamous prairie vole and the promiscuous montane vole. The most notable neurological difference between the two species is the density and distributi
on of oxytocin receptors in their brains, the monogamous prairie vole enjoying greater densities of oxytocin receptors. Moreover, injections of oxytocin into appropriate brain areas lead the montane vole to preferences for a single partner over other partners, while injections of oxytocin blockers render the prairie vole less capable of monogamy. Other studies of voles find that oxytocin increases after sexual behavior, and that injections of oxytocin increase social contact and pro-social behavior, whereas blocking the activity of oxytocin prevents maternal behavior.
Studies of other species yield similar results. In primates, injections of oxytocin increase touching behavior and gaze focused on infants, and decrease threatening facial displays such as teeth-baring yawns. Little domestic chicks, when separated from their mother, emit fewer separation distress calls after they have been given a dose of oxytocin. Oxytocin injections cause ewes to become attached to unfamiliar lambs.
Right now I suspect you’re asking three questions. What about humans, that most complex of the pair-bonding species? Isn’t oxytocin what Rush Limbaugh was addicted to? (No, that was OxyContin, an opioid painkiller; one wonders what his show would’ve been like had he grown addicted to oxytocin.) And where can I get this oxytocin and sprinkle it on my partner’s morning Corn Flakes?
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 22