Of Love

What if you meet up with an old flame of yours? That will definitely spark old memories of smooching and hugging in shady corners of your campus, under the shade of verdant woods in the nearby grove or on a palm-fringed beach with shallow waters. To be frank, I can only imagine such an encounter because I have no experience of having fallen in love with a girl during my college days. I was kissed off by love early in life and I have never dared to venture into any adventure of love. I may be accused of having made virtue out of my weakness. But I have reconciled myself with the fact that there are haves and havenots in the world controlled by Cupid.
Let me tell you an interesting anecdot to explain this. That happened when I was doing my MA in English Literature way back in the late 80s. A close friend of mine in the college (please don't press me to reveal his name because he is still my close friend and probably one of the very few who pretend to read my blog) gave me real surprise when I saw him bluntly, mercilessly returning a flower given to him by a girl in another class on the same campus. Though she pretended that it was a funny gesture, she - I felt so - was showing her personal intimacy towards him which may evolve into a romantic affair. Had she given me that flower, I would have readily accepted it and reciprocated appropriately (Aside: This girl was in the province of my imagination in those days). What on earth prompted my friend to refuse to accept that flower continued to be a mystery till, months after competitng the course, I came to know that he was deeply but discreetly in love with a classmate of ours. That was a different story.
What is love, essentially? Where does this feeling of interpersonal attachment and intimacy driven by strong desire come from? Is there a scientific explanation of love? These are questions that came to my mind after reading three love notes excavated by my friend from her archival collections of photographs and letters.
There is no doubt that love is rooted in evolutionary biology because at the level of genes, the principal job of a living creature is to conceive offspring to ensure that our genes survive. Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, says that humans, like all other animals, are machines created by our genes. In his 1993 article called `Viruses of the mind', Prof. Dawkins makes comparison between falling in love and religion when he says that the symptoms of a person infected by religion may be `reminiscent' of symptoms usually associated with sexual love. When he says that religion could be a by-product of `irrationality mechanisms' that were built into the brain by Darwinian natural selection, what he means is that falling in love is one of those mechanisms that evolved for the survival of the gene machine. Evolutionary explanation is that sexual attraction and pleasure are what draw people to mate and reproduce for the genes to survive. Isn't it somewhat irking to say that lovers exchange flowers, write poetry and meet because they are driven by their selfish genes and have a single objective of ensuring that a sperm meets an egg? What about the transcendent feeling that the lovers experience? What makes people go crazy over love?
Each of us has emotional experiences such as love, intimacy, sense of loss, sadness and they are subjects of scientific enquiry for scientists. I recently watched a programme on love presenting the findings of Dr. Thomas Lewis of California University who has authored A General Theory of Love. He also gives an evolutionary explanation to the feeling of love:

"When mammals showed up on the planet, their method of reproduction was different. Unlike reptiles, they gave birth to live helpless young that had to be nurtured or wouldn’t survive. The parent had to monitor the physiology of the baby. This lead to the development of a part of the brain called the Great Limbic Lobe, which we share with all mammals."

According to Dr. Lewis, all of us are bigger infants badly in need of some regulatory influence. The limbic brain of the mammal specialises in detecting and analysing just one part of the physical world: the internal state of other mammals and he calls this capacity limbic resonance, a mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals are tuned to each other's inner states:

"Limbic resonance is what makes looking into face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience."

Going further, he says that relationships have a kind of grammar to them and what happens to two people in a relationship has a regularity in it that is discoverable. The brain of a child, for example, studies the relationships that are going around him/her and pull out the regularities and learns those regularities and rules, Dr. Lewis argues.
These are interesting ideas about love and affection and affinity and attachment. These ideas certainly are relevant when I try to make scientific sense of these emotions. I am an outsider in the world of love. So I can afford to be scientific. Cupid, for me, is as blind as a religious fanatic. The lover is no better than a believer in god. Both believe that there is something that cannot be defined and explained.
(The painting pasted above is The Kiss, a wellknown work of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt)