Chemistry of Love

Here is a story which may or may not be true, but it captures the essence of what is called the magic or mystery of love. The story goes that a college student falls madly in love with his classmate who is hardly aware of being loved. The boy thinks that he can attract her attention for a romantic relationship if they are together for some time and undergo some novel experience. He read in a book that novel experiences will raise levels of dopamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that is central to the feeling of romantic love. He offers her to have rikshaw ride in the city. After the ride which both immensely enjoyed, she tells him 'Wasn’t the rikshaw driver handsome?’ 

The story is a slightly modified version of the one narrated by Helen Fisher, a noted anthropologist at Rutgers University, New Jersey, who studies the evolution of human love, sex, marriage and gender differences. Living in a culture steeped in mythical stories of erotic relationships, Indians are not wholly unfamiliar with the mystery of romantic love and sex, though we may not be well-versed in their chemistry and biology. The story of Radha and Krishna, for example, is the story of a passionate relationship elevated into an eternal metaphor of intense love and passion, longing for reunion and agony and pain caused by the absence of the loved one. In this story, there is no submission as both Radha and Krishna are not constrained by the hierarchy involved in a man-woman relationship in marriage.

Despite this rich legacy of erotic and love stories in mythology that defy social restrictions, we are largely loath to any open-minded discussion of love, passion and sex. No wonder, arranged marriages are still the most favoured mode of nuptial knot in the country, though the number of women joining the workforce and thus being empowered has increased manifold over the past few decades. It is a puzzle, to say the least, because the Indian culture is traditionally not negative to sex, unlike the Western Christian culture where sex is basically sin. Kamasutra, written in the 2^nd century BCE is one of the best sex manuals ever written. It dwells on sexual positions and techniques for maximising sexual pleasure.

Philosophical and scientific discourse of human sexuality in Europe and the U.S. began in the 19^th century known for its largely repressive norms of sexuality. The best philosophical discourse on love and sex I have come across during my recent quest for literary and scientific discussions of human sexual behaviour is French writer Stendhal’s De l’amour (On Love), published in 1822. His avant-garde ideas of love in its different forms are not without prejudices such as this observation: “In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.” He delineates different phases of romantic love from mere admiration to what he calls `crystallisation’: “that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.” A person madly in love with another person starts seeing new ‘meaning’ in everything associated with the latter. Fisher quotes a truck driver as having said: “The world has a new centre and that centre is Maryanne (the woman he loves).”

A Darwinian explanation of how evolution has shaped human mind and affected love and sex sheds light on what has remained a mystery. Men and women have gender differences that have evolved over evolutionary time. They are not just arbitrary social construct, a line of argument favoured by some scientists fearing backlash from politically correct intellectual circles that believe that evolutionary explanation will only strengthen gender stereotypes. British philosopher of science Helen Cronin, who is co-director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics, debunks the social construct argument:

The fashion for denying biological sex differences stems, I believe, from good intentions. There is a fear that if sex differences are “in the genes,” then a just and fair society, women and men having equal status, is unattainable; instead, both sexes will be inexorably condemned to what is “natural”—women minding babies and kitchen sinks, men striding forth into the world to run it; and thus “socially constructed gender” is the only safe sex. Well, the intentions are good; but the science is bad.

Cronin traces the gender differences to the divergence of sex organisms between sperm-bearers competing for mates and egg-bearers caring for offspring. She observes:  “In human beings the divergence is more modest. But it nevertheless cleaves our species into two. For, although the differences originate in reproductive strategies, they permeate our psychology—our priorities, emotions, hopes, and desires.”

Empirical researches by Fisher have also confirmed that there are gender differences. She put people who were madly in love into a brain scanner to see if she could identify which parts of the brain are active when someone experiences romantic love. Her finding is this: “Men tended to show more activity in brain regions associated with the integration of visual stimuli, and with penile erection. Women tended, instead, to show more activity in regions associated with emotion, attention and recalling memories.” These gender differences make perfect Darwinian sense, according to Fisher, as our male ancestors “needed to see if a woman showed visual signs of youth and health, signs that she would bear him healthy babies” while the “ancestral woman needed to remember all the things a mating partner had done for her, what he had given her and what he had promised.”

George Bernard Shaw’s characteristically witty observation that love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another unwittingly reflects the male proclivity for ‘sizing up’ women. There is also another interesting story that also apparently reinforces the idea of the male ‘advantage’ in matters sexual: the U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were on a tour of government farms one day. When the First Lady passed the chicken coops where a rooster was vigorously copulating with a hen, she asked an aide how often the rooster performed this duty. The guide answered: `Dozens of times a day’. Then she told the aide: ‘Make sure you mention this to the President’. When the President was told about the rooster’s performance, he asked the aide: ‘Always with the same hen?’ When the aide replied ‘Oh, no, always a different hen’, the President asked the aide: ‘Make sure you mention that to Mrs. Coolidge.’

But it is easy to question the stereotype idea that men are more adulterous than women. Who are these aduterous men sleeping with? As Robert Smith, who edited Sperm Competition and the Evolution of Mating Systems (1984) observes: “...males could not have been selected for promiscuity if historically females had always denied them opportunity for expression of the trait.”

Fisher is addicted to the theme of love, if the four books she has authored are anything to go by. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2004) and The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They are Changing (2000) are her widely discussed books. She is trying to make an evolutionary sense of the mystery of love to find answers to questions 'What is love?’ and 'Why do we love?’ Why We Love, Richard Dawkins says, “will entice you, charm away your resistance to its thesis, seduce you into accepting it. It is poetic, sexy, beguiling and, all at the same time, scientific.” She describes sex drive, romantic love and feeling of attachment as three brain systems or circuits human beings have evolved for mating and reproduction.

 

Her central theme of the book is that romantic love is more powerful than sex drive. People live for love, kill for love, die for love, have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings and myths. The sex drive has evolved to allow the human being to look for a whole range of partners, the romantic love to allow him or her to focus on one individual and the attachment to enable the partners to tolerate each other at least long enough to raise children together as a team.

The three brain systems are interconnected in Fisher’s view. Dopamine, the chemical associated with romance, can enhance levels of testosterone, the hormone of sexual drive and elevated levels of testosterone can increase levels of dopamine. The chemistry involved in attachment can generally suppress passion of romantic love, a fact that explains why couples find it hard to keep their passion alive when their relationship settles into a long-term and stable one.

 

Evolutionary analysis of love and sex does not do away with the mystery involved in them even as it seeks to unravel the enigma that we have traditionally attached to them. Science has not worked for the college student the way he has thought it will. Maybe the girl’s dopamine has been driven up by the rikshaw driver’s 'feats’ of driving. Why you love a person rather than another person may be a mystery still. But Darwinian explanation can throw light on the chemistry and biology of love.