Summary
For this month we read, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love by Helen Fisher. Helen Fisher, who is an anthropologist - she's not a neuroscientist, which I personally think comes through in the book - argues that romantic love is a universal human drive, and comprises one of three fundamental "brain systems" involved in mating behavior. Throughout the book she supports the hypothesis in some conventional ways that we are used to in this book club, such as animal mating studies and fMRI studies, but she also uses quite a bit from poetry, literature, and her cross-cultural surveys.
The first chapter sets the stage for what Fisher is describing as romantic love. I personally found this quite helpful because as we discussed in the previous book, people tend to think about romance and love in different ways. Helen Fisher's focus throughout the book, and what she called romantic love, seems to be equivalent to limerence - which is a feeling of intense infatuation and involuntary obsession with another person that involves intrusive thoughts, emotional arousal, heightened energy, and increased sex drive.
Chapter 2 is called Animal Magnetism and builds the case that we can look to the mating behavior and brain systems of other animals to make inferences about the early evolutionary roots of "romantic love." Fisher argues that many non-human species, such as voles, beavers, and birds, exhibit bonding behaviors that mirror patterns in humans.
Chapter 3 was about the "Chemistry of Love" and was one of the main chapters along with the following chapter dealing with the neuroscience of romantic love. Fisher presents evidence from fMRI that people feeling in love, according to her definition, had greater activation in brain regions involved in reward and craving, particularly associated with the dopamine system.
Chapter 4 combines evidence from multiple sources to argue for three main and interacting brain systems involved in mating behaviors - lust, romantic love, and attachment. She goes into the associated hormones and neurotransmitters that seem to be involved in those different systems and guide human mating behavior through different stages of relationship formation - mainly testosterone in lust, dopamine in romantic love, and oxytocin or vasopressin in attachment. The basic framework is that the romantic love system motivates lots of energy and approach behavior toward a potential mate, and also is associated with lust - together they facilitate a new sexual relationship - and facilitate growing attachment. Over time once the relationship is established the romantic love system sort of peters out, but gives way to another pleasant kind of relationship which is more about safety and attachment.
I would say that Chapter 5 starts the second part of the book, which really came across to me like Helen Fisher's pet evolutionary theories for lots of different aspects of mating relationships. This chapter talks about the evolutionary pressures that shape our romantic preferences, which are mainly that men favor youth and beauty and women seek status and stability.
In Chapter 6, "Why We Love," which shares the title of the book and is presumably the most important chapter in Fisher's mind, she describes her theory that romantic love evolved to keep ancestral couples together long enough to raise children. Once hominid females came down from trees and began walking upright, they couldn't carry infants on their backs, so they needed a mate to help. Fisher makes, what I thought was a pretty bold claim, that we are evolutionarily programmed to seek new romantic relationships after about four years.
In Chapter 7, she focuses in on the despair and rage that can follow romantic rejection and makes the parallel to drug withdrawal, in line with her hypothesis that romantic love is a kind of addiction.
And in Chapter 8, Fisher tries to give some tips and tricks for dealing with the evolutionarily ingrained trait of losing romantic love. She suggests using things that enhance dopamine circuits, like novelty or exercise or getting off your SSRIs or absorbing neurotransmitters from semen to control brain chemistry.
And in the final chapter, Fisher concludes by giving us lots of examples of romantic love emerging universally across many different kinds of cultures and contexts, such as in arranged marriages, among older adults, and in many different cultures across time.
My personal opinion of the book was that it tended to overextend neuroscientific findings or fairly scant anthropological research into sweeping, universal claims about human behavior. Worse yet, a lot of the claims seemed to use data to justify beliefs that Fisher already held. For example, if 20% of people surveyed say they have fallen in love at first sight, it is interpreted as a universal possibility in human romance. However, if 85% of people surveyed say that they could not love more than one person at a time, it is interpreted as impossible. Even the kind of romantic love that the book covers is so extreme that many people don’t ever experience it - the kind of obsession that can derail your life. I would even venture that most people’s experience with romantic love is less extreme than the kinds of participants that Helen Fisher looks for in her studies according to her definition.
I felt like the book went even further off the rails when it evolves into a speculative “just-so” story, often presented as settled science. I’m a neuroscientist, so I agree with Fisher that even complex emotional phenomena, like love, can theoretically be reduced to a biological framework. But we’re so far away from that, and I felt like her attachment to biological explanations totally de-emphasized and left out the major cultural, psychological, and interpersonal nuance that is clearly present and better, right now, at explaining human relationships. So for example, her attachment to the overlap between dopaminergic circuits and romance, leads her to suggest things like exercising and getting off your antidepressants in order to rekindle a romantic connection rather than things like spending time talking through your issues in your relationship and changing communication or behavioral patterns.
Thought Questions
- Fisher tended to argue that romantic love is basically a human universal rooted in biology. Do you agree that romantic love is primarily a product of innate biology, or would you assign more of a role to culture in determining how we experience or even define love.
- Did you find Fisher's evolutionary explanations to be very convincing? What sort of evidence would make you more convinced?
- Did you buy into Fisher's claims about different innate mating preferences between men and women. I felt like her claims were pretty in line with gender stereotypes. Did they ring true to you? How did you react to them?
- Did you find anything interesting about the neuroscience of love? In both this book and the last book fMRI was used to study love, and I'm wondering what you think the best way is to study something like love?
- Fisher claims that romantic love has existed in virtually all human societies forever. Can you think of any cultural or historical examples that challenge this idea? Do you think that this basic assertion is true?
- Do you think that Fisher's ideas about using medication or novelty to enhance romantic love in relationships is a good solution? Are you going to take anything you learned from this book and its theories and apply them to your life?
- Fisher seems to argue that humans and many other animals basically feel similar thing when it comes to feelings of romantic love. On the one hand, I think we have the tendency to downplay what other animals are capable of if we feel that something is special about us. On the other hand, I think most people's intuition is that human feelings of romantic love is a lot richer than other animals. How do you feel about this? Do you think that Fisher anthropomorphizes or do you think we should give animals more credit?