With respect to the first question, the literature on oxytocin in humans is beginning to reveal an equally compelling picture of the physiological underpinnings of love, devotion, and trust. In studies of lactating women, it has been found that oxytocin reduces activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the physiological basis of stress. Prepartum mothers who show higher baseline levels of oxytocin later show increased attachment-related behavior with their new babies. Oxytocin is released in response to pleasurable massage and sex. Even chocolate triggers oxytocin release. It’s not a coincidence that we give chocolate to loved ones on Valentine’s Day, and not pickles, Pringles, or salsa—we’re seeking to stimulate that feeling of trust and devotion.
So what about romantic love? To more directly document the relationship between oxytocin and romantic love, Gian Gonzaga and I undertook a Darwinian study of sexual desire and romantic love. Gian first did what a good descendant of Darwin does: He turned to Darwin’s own observations. Darwin identified three kinds of love—“maternal love,” “love,” and “romantic love” (see table below)—which closely parallel our designations of caretaker love, romantic love, and desire, although Darwin uses the term “romantic love” to refer to what we now call sexual desire.
DARWIN’S DESCRIPTIONS OF THE VARIETIES OF LOVE
MATERNAL LOVE
TOUCH, GENTLE SMILE, TENDER EYES
LOVE
BEAMING EYES, SMILING CHEEKS (WHEN SEEING OLD FRIEND), TOUCH, GENTLE SMILE, PROTRUDING LIPS (IN CHIMPS), KISSING, NOSE RUBS
ROMANTIC LOVE
BREATHING HURRIED, FACES FLUSHED
Then Gian, envy of his graduate-student peers, sequestered himself in the depths of the library stacks and surveyed dozens of not-so-lurid studies of the nonverbal displays that accompany sexual intercourse versus friendly, affectionate contact in humans and nonhuman primates. What he identified were possible display behaviors that signal sexual desire and romantic love. Prior to sex, human and nonhuman primates tend to engage in a variety of lip-and mouth-related behaviors—they pucker lips, kiss, lick their lips, and stick their tongue out, stock in trade for rock and rollers like Mick Jagger.
In contrast, romantic love tends to be signaled with a warm, eye-glistening smile, a head tilt, and open-handed gestures. It is surprising that Darwin missed the open-handed gesture as a signal of love, for it is so readily explained by his principle of antithesis: We signal anger with clenched fists, tightened shoulders, flexed arms—the upper-body posture of the readiness to attack. Love, by implication, should be conveyed by the opposite—relaxed shoulders, head tilt, and open-handed gestures. It is no wonder that around the world greeting rituals between strangers employ open-handed gestures—signs of trust and cooperation. Our primate relatives, the chimps, resort to open-handed gestures to short-circuit aggressive tendencies, and to stimulate close proximity, grooming, and affiliation.
In our first study, we had young romantic partners come to the lab and talk about experiences of love and desire. These young partners, in love for an eternity—eighteen months—talked for a few minutes about when they fell in love. There were stories of meeting in a chemistry lab at 3:00 AM, of bumping into each other when skateboarding, of being charmed by the other’s Facebook entries. And there in plain sight via intensive, frame-by-frame analysis, were four-to five-second bursts of the displays—flurries of lip licks, puckers and lip wipes, a smooth unfolding of smiles, head tilts and open palms. Our question was whether these brief behaviors, just a few seconds long, would map onto distinct experiences of sexual desire and romantic love.
That indeed is what we found, and so much more. The brief displays of love increased as the partners, males and females alike, reported feeling more love at the end of the two-minute conversation. These microdisplays of love were unrelated to reports of desire. The brief displays of sexual desire, in contrast, correlated with the young lovers’ reports of sexual desire, but not with love. Partners attributed more love, and not desire, to their partner when their beloved displayed more smiles, head tilts, and open-handed gestures; and they attributed greater desire when they saw their partner show those lip licks and lip puckers. In two-minute conversations, by carefully measuring half-second-long lip puckers and head-tilting smiles, we could pull apart these two great passions—romantic love and desire.
With further exploration, we uncovered other findings that may just change how you look at that partner across the dinner table from you. The couples who showed more intense nonverbal displays of love reported higher levels of trust and devotion and were more likely to have done something unusual for twenty-year-olds—to have talked about getting married. The couples who were swept away in desire were less likely to have talked about a future together (it gets in the way of desire) and reported less long-term commitment to one another. With this knowledge, I am ready for the stormy adolescences of my daughters. When their first dates come over or declare their romantic intentions, I am armed with the precise knowledge that I need. If I see a few too many lip licks and lip puckers as plans for the evening are discussed, it’s a firm hand on the neck and a polite escorting out of our house.
We next turned to a query of our chemical quarry, oxytocin. Gian, Rebecca Turner, and I had women, who on average have seven times the rate of oxytocin in the bloodstream as men (oh, well), talk about an experience involving intense feelings of warmth for another person. As they recounted these experiences, blood was drawn and oxytocin was assayed some fifteen minutes later. From videotapes of these remembrances, we coded head-tilting smiles and open-handed gestures, as well as lip licks, puckers, and tongue protrusions. Only the warm smiles, head tilts, and open-handed gestures increased with oxytocin release. The cues of sexual desire had nothing to do with the release of this neuropeptide of devotion and long-term commitment. The fulcrum on which marriage tips may be nothing more than these molecules of monogamy.
TRUST
In her cultural history Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich details humans’ irrepressible tendency to dance, to move in rhythm toward collective joy and a love of one another. Paintings of dance are found on the earliest human pottery. Dance is part of many great myths, most notably the Maenads’ celebration of Dionysus. It was a regular, ritualized occurrence of hunter-gatherer life. Dance may be the one uniformity, outside of eating, to collective gatherings—sporting events, political rallies, family reunions, religious meetings.
The early Christian church took an immediate dislike to communal dance—it generated subversive passions and could quickly sow the seeds of dissent and protest. Not surprisingly, the powers that be in the church (I suspect they had little rhythm) set in place extreme restrictions upon this human universal. But that proved to be, and will always be, a losing endeavor. The instinct to dance reemerged outside church walls in the form of carnivals, which persist to this day. Dance will emerge in any context, in church, at the game, at scholarly conferences, in strangers waiting in line for a bus, in two-year-olds bouncing to the beat of big bands at formal weddings. People need to sway their hips, shimmy their shoulders, and clap their hands together.
Our conceptual mistake, Ehrenreich observes, and it is a common one, is to assume that dance is sexual. Certainly our early, memorable experiences of dance—the intense slow-dance clutches to Stairway to Heaven of my eighth-grade youth—felt sexual. (Of course, anything in eighth grade is sexual—algebra, spelling bees, fire drills, corn dogs served at lunch.) But to generalize from these experiences to a broad statement about dance is misguided.
Instead, dance creates a love for fellow group members; it coordinates evolved patterns of touch, chant, smiling, laughing, and head shakes to spread collective joy in the sweat and delirium of collective movement. Dance is the most reliable and quickest route to a mysterious feeling that has gone by many names over the generations: sympathy, agape, ecstasy, jen; here I’ll call it trust. To dance is to trust.
If neuroeconomist Paul Zak could study the neural correlates of t
hat particular kind of love—of fellow group members—that rises after a great bout of dancing, he would likely find oxytocin levels shooting through the roof. Zak proposes that oxytocin is the biological underpinning of trust—a thesis he has supported in his groundbreaking work with the trust game. In the trust game, one participant, known as the “investor,” makes contributions to another individual, known as the “trustee.” The value of the money given to the trustee then triples, and the trustee then gives some amount back to the investor—as much or as little as he or she desires. As in so many realms of life, cooperation amplifies the potential gains to be had by all, but it requires a leap of faith, a core conviction, a sense of trust, that the trustee will give back some of the funds generously given.
In studies Zak has conducted in Germany and Switzerland (where it is not illegal to study oxytocin experimentally) Zak has given a blast of oxytocin, or a neutral solution, to the investor via a nasal spray. Our “investor,” grooving on oxytocin, was more than twice as likely to give away maximum amounts of money to the stranger than the “investor” given a neutral solution in the control condition.
My former student Belinda Campos calls this cocktail of love toward non-kin, enhanced by oxytocin and founded in the sense of trust, the love of humanity. Her research shows that this feeling, and not other kinds of love, amplifies the conviction in the goodness of other humans. It is accompanied by the urge to give, to trust, and to sacrifice. In one study we examined college students’ transitions to their new community—their residence hall—during their first year of college. Students who reported feeling a great deal of the love of humanity prior to coming to college more quickly trusted their new hallmates, and folded more quickly into dense webs of friendships. It is the feeling that led Gandhi to say that “all men are brothers” and Jesus to say “Whoever love all brothers has obeyed the whole law” (Romans 13:8–10). It is the love of humanity that weaves together Walt Whitman’s declarations in Song of Myself.
And empirical studies are finding that the health of communities depends on trust and the love of humanity. Robert Sampson, at Harvard University, has found that in resource-deprived, dangerous neighborhoods, children fare better when they feel a sense of love of humanity from their neighbors. In these neighborhoods, adults who make warm eye contact with neighborhood children, who provide that comforting pat on the back, who speak with encouraging words and in uplifting tones, create a sense of trust and strength in the young non-kin in their midst. In other research on divorce and the fractured family, children prove to be much more resilient in the wake of their parents’ divorce when they feel a sense of connection to and devotion for other nearby adults—neighbors, teachers, coaches, pastors.
Oxytocin increases generosity in the trust game.
In the small groups in which we evolved, there were few walls that separated kin from non-kin. All were likely engaged in the sharing of caretaking behavior, cooperation in gathering resources, defense against predation. Our success at these tasks hinged critically upon a sense of trust in others, on the emergence of a love of humanity. Evolution responded with a deeply rooted set of behaviors related to love and trust—feelings of devotion, the urge to sacrifice, a sense of the beauty and goodness of others, affectionate touch, oxytocin, activation in the reward circuitry of the brain, the shutting down of the threat circuitry of the brain (the amygdala), mutual smiles and head tilts, open-handed gestures and posture, a soft, affectionate tone in the voice. These in their earliest forms were most evident in the early attachment dynamics of parent and child and in the quiet, isolated moments of intimacy between reproductive partners. These patterns of behavior were readily spread to non-kin, in rituals like dance and feast, serving as the basis for friendships. They spread informally, through the contagious power of these emotions. Passing a young, bundled-up baby from mother to friend, in a common exchange of caretaking, might bring about shared coos, smiles, and cradling of the child, and so much more—a sense of community.
BACK TO THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
If I could have taken another shot at helping my daughters understand the realm of love in the wake of the elephant seal disaster, I might have tried to walk them through the figure below. This figure portrays what social science has found about the varieties of love across a human’s life. Perhaps I would have started with the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, and the corresponding science showing that in humans, loving relationships (of any kind) lead to less depression and anxiety, greater happiness, more ruddy health, a more robust nervous system, and greater resistance to disease (not to mention it just feels good). I would have told Natalie and Serafina that as they age, and as the end nears, psychologist Laura Carstensen has found time and time again, loving relations get more important, and love all the sweeter. So why not start now?
I would have told them that the love between parent and child (the dark solid line) fluctuates; it dips necessarily during adolescence when they themselves (or their children, some twenty years from now) will be throwing themselves into romantic relations of their own. They shouldn’t be alarmed when this happens to them (although I’m certain I will be more than alarmed); the love of caretakers and those we take care of returns and branches into the delightful love of grandparents for grandchildren. The circle expands.
I would have told them of the delights of that most intense of loves, passionate love (the dark dotted line), and of its head-spinning, heart-pounding delirium, but that we mustn’t be tricked for too long by its celestial charms. When passionate desire dips postchild-birth, in particular between year one and four into life with young children, researchers find, romantic relations become vulnerable. As it declines through the life course, as much as we (or the multi-billion-dollar beauty industry) might think otherwise, other forms of love become so much sweeter.
I might have cautioned that after the golden period of romantic love (the gray solid line), which they are too soon to head into, romantic love dips during the early years of raising children, overshadowed by demands such as spit-up, phone tag over playdates, and temper tantrums. I would remind them of the love that reemerges in the empty nest. I would ask them to read Stephanie Coontz’s History of Marriage, where she suggests the one mistake we make today in marriage is to put too much of a burden on romantic love; that we need more diverse kinds of love. I would refer to the new science of relationships, which suggests that romantic love does not live on passion alone. It requires many other positive emotions—laughter, play, a sense of wonder, kindness, forgiveness—to arrive at that magic ratio of five positive feelings for every toxic negative one that enables marriages, in John Gottman’s wisdom, to endure.
And I would have tried to describe the love of humanity, agape, really a love of all sentient beings (the gray dotted line). This feeling is the central discovery—the heart, so to speak, of ethical systems ranging from Tibetan Buddhism to major strands of Christianity. It is a love that generates trust, generosity, and stable communities. It is the ether in the air of peaceful playgrounds, Sunday strolls in the park, quiet reverence in museums and churches. It may be the clue toward beating things like global warming. It is a kelson of creation in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers…and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.
I would have tried to convey that their lives, and their children’s lives, and those of their friends, and the character of the communities they will inhabit, are shaped by their search for these four passions. I would have wished them well in hoping that life’s arrangements would allow for the fullest expression of these four loves.
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Compassion
In Humanity, historian Jonathan Glover documents many such “sympathy breakthroughs” in the wars of the twentieth century—in Stalin’s purges, the My Lai massacre, the killing fields in Cambodia, the genocide in Rwanda. These are moments when soldiers break free from the dutiful honoring of the military code, from strict orders to shoot on sight, and are overwhelmed by the humanity of the humans they are killing. Most often it is when encountering children and women—for example, the toddlers and pregnant women beheaded and disemboweled in the My Lai massacre. Most often the sympathy breakthroughs are triggered by eye-to-eye contact, the sight of the enemy’s pupils, the pores on his skin, oblique movements in his eyebrows.
No sympathy breakthrough was more dramatic than that of Miklós Nyiszli, a medical doctor at a Nazi concentration camp. One day as a gas chamber was being cleared of bodies, a young girl of sixteen was found alive at the bottom of the rigor mortis pile of thin-limbed, stiffening corpses. The attending staff reflexively offered the young girl an old coat, warm broth, tea, and reassuring touch to her shoulders and back. Nyiszli tried to persuade the concentration camp’s commandant to save her. One proposal was to hide her amid German women working at the camp. The commandant toyed with this possibility momentarily but in the end had her killed by his method of choice—the young girl was shot in the back of the neck.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 23