The Blue Monkey Review

This week’s (January 19) Time magazine claims to be a special issue on “How Your Love Life Keeps you Healthy.” The cover, of a happy couple cuddling and presumably enjoying the health benefits of intimacy, should have moved me to throw it away without opening it. If a good love life equals health, I should have revised my will long before now. But, no, the cover misled. The magazine contains a series of articles on the theme of romantic love and sex, and also one on marriage though I’m not sure what the connection was. In the lead essay by Jeffrey Kluger, “The Power of Love,” offers up the leading question of whether love is more than “hot wiring us for sex” with all its obvious benefits for the human species [Obviously not a slave to the Freshman composition principle of stating topics as theses, that is points to be supported or proven, Kluger has a scattershot paragraph of questions and then goes on to pepper us with more questions—all of these are presumably answered in the articles that follow.] As the cover claimed, so too some of the articles claim that love has all kinds of health benefits. Like most Time journalism, this series has a homogenized taste. No spice of conflicting viewpoints disturbs the reader. Love originates in the brain, we learn, and has clear, chemical explanations (dopamine, oxytocin—no, not the Rush Limbaugh drug). Passion depends on a hormone cocktail, and if you don’t have all the ingredients modern pharmacology can probably supply your deficit. If Time can be described as a liberal magazine, it must depend on the ability of its writers to leave the reader feeling slightly optimistic and little else.

For all their interesting points, though, these articles miss out on the messiness of love. If love somehow leads to better mental and physical health then I think we have a problem explaining the existence of popular music (Country music? Fuhgetaboutit!) Yet when psychologists or others in the helping professions talk about the dark side of love they quickly fall back on a concept like addiction or something that makes lovesickness into a psychopathology (the kind that get into the DSM—everyone knows that love makes you crazy, but that is true whether it goes well or badly). Most people living in the western world (and maybe the rest of the world, for all I know) considered romantic love an outlaw passion until the 19th century. Then, a narrow group known as the middle class began the process of regularizing romance until it became both the most admired (or at least the most discussed) of all emotional states and the only legitimate basis for a commitment for life. So, amazingly, the very social class that imposed its economic system on pretty much all of the planet, created the belief that in order to initiate a lifetime of committed cooperation and childrearing one had to experience the most volatile passion ever to spring fully armed from the human psyche. But, if romance has undergone regularization (embourgeoisment), it has also acquired its bureaucracy of therapists and twelve-step programs to help the lovesick. The scientific investigations of love explored in Time can stand as representatives of our scientific efforts to understand love. In general, these ignore the cultural (or, really, historical) context of romantic love and so lose the chance to have any valuable insights into passion.

One of the Time articles is drawn from the book Why We Love by Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher. She and her associates scanned the brains of people passionately in love as they gazed at pictures of their beloved, and so identified areas of the brain most active during those moments of visual stimulation. Since this is an article in a news magazine and not a journal, it contained none of the explanations about the background literature and how the experiments would meet the standards for the publication of data. That is certainly something to be thankful for, but it does leave dangling the question of whether the group who were tested can represent all of humanity. A study in 1975 claimed that only 5 to 10% of those studied had experienced the full range of what both the investigators and the subjects themselves considered to be romantic love. Different wiring for different monkey-boys and –girls? If so, then what we call love might actually be distinct physical entities from one individual to the next. I’m inclined to doubt this, falling back as I often (and lamely) do on individual variation. Probably we all have a little of everything that everyone else has, whether that is dopamine or machismo or appreciation for hip hop. But it’s also clear that individuals vary so greatly that one person’s crush is another person’s ticket to a twelve-step program

Love addiction? Yes, that seems to have a lot of currency lately. Helen Fisher has something to say about it, though it is unfortunate for her that this particular pronouncement made it into the popular media. Her brain scans identified chemical activity in the brain’s reward system as her subjects mooned over photos of their love objects, “including areas of the septum and a brain region that becomes active when people eat chocolate. Chocolate can be addictive. I maintain that romantic love is addictive too.” I want to Professor Fisher's Freshman comp instructor and lower his salary. Those statements seem to claim that love originates in an area of the brain that is vulnerable to physical addiction. In fact, though, every statement there simply stands on its own and is joined by nothing more than what David Hume would call propinquity—well, hell, anyone would call it that. Brain chemistry. Chocolate. Love. Addiction. You can put all that together into one dish, but you have to do the mixing yourself. Nothing in Fisher’s evidence connects them.

Wagging a finger at Helen Fisher won’t make the love and addiction connection go away. Barnes and Noble either stocks or can obtain three books with the title Addicted to Love. Zev Wanderer and Tracy Cabot, [ Letting Go (NY: Dell, 1987)] state near the beginning of their guide for overcoming lost love that “Being ‘in love’ is being addicted to the loved one.” (34) You have the same person around all the time, you get used to him or her, you start building your life around this person. Well, that doesn’t exactly sound like addiction to me. And, note that they put quotation marks around “in love,” making that into something that isn’t quite real, and not around “addicted.” You would think they would want to say that the being in love, something that many of us know first hand, is like being in an addiction, a place that presumably only a tiny minority inhabits. For Zev and Tracy, the addiction is real—they have long lists beginning on page 27 that allow you to see if your post-love trauma has left you obsessive, compulsive, depressed, phobic or what.

Okay, I’m playing ingénue here. I get their point! That person who shares a part of your self disappears, you are gonna suffer, baby! Elizabeth Kuster, in Exorcising Your Ex (NY: Fireside, 1996), opens one chapter by saying that if you have just split up you are probably thinking about your ex a couple of times every second. Part one of this useful guide to and advice manual for post-break-up life has the subtitle, “Welcome to Hell.”

Yet equating love with addiction doesn’t make much sense. Stanton Peele, a New Jersey psychotherapist who had co-authored a 1976 book entitled Love and Addiction offered a nicely balanced consideration of using the addiction model to discuss love in a 1988 essay contained in a collection entitled The Psychology of Love [Robert J. Sternberg and Michael L. Barnes, eds, (New Haven: Yale, 1988)] . He offers a set of opposing ideal states, such as love as idealization versus love as a “helping relationship.” No one should be expected to fall entirely on one end of any of these ranges. We would all be in-between on most of these, and have a mix in where our extremes lay. A nice likert scale test might even be able to test this. Yet Peele at least allows us to recognize that lots of love might not look like addiction at all.

From thinking of love as addiction, it makes one a bit giddy to suddenly turn to the view of Art Aron as revealed in the Time piece written by Fisher. Aron, a colleague of Fisher’s, put forward a hypothesis that “romantic love was not an emotion but a motivation system designed to enable suitors to build and maintain an intimate relationship with a preferred mating partner.” At first glance this seemed perfectly correct. Romantic love hooks you up with someone you like. That’s clear. But, once more, we would have to bid a tearful farewell to Country music. Any serious study of some of the standard authorities in the field, such as Days of Our Lives, Dallas, or even Friends would have to lead the researcher to conclude that romantic love is a motivation system designed to leave us depressed, bitter, vengeful, and generally messed up.

Or, perhaps, we could consult the works of Shakespeare. Peele cites Shakespeare, recognizing that the Bard knew more about love than reading only Romeo and Juliet would reveal. The same crazy scheme suggested by Friar Lawrence (“Juliet, you pretend you are dead…”) that leads to a bloodbath actually works in Much Ado About Nothing when Friar Francis suggests it (“Hero, you pretend you are dead…”). Shakespeare had the full measure of the passion, and worked it through a variety of circumstances and freely used it for tragic and comic effects. It is worth noting that in the comedies people live long enough to make it to the wedding. Or, put another way, comedy happens when love leads to marriage.

For the mixed crowds standing in front of the Globe stage, love must have generally meant madness. Look at Romeo’s contemporary, Don Quixote. At least through book one we know the Knight of the Woeful Countenance is crazy. When he sets out to fall passionately in love with the farm girl Aldonza, that just seals the deal. Or look at Romeo, or Othello who “loved not wisely but too well.” Passion that leapt outside the bounds of social norms meant disaster. Most of Shakespeare’s audience probably assumed love needed to stay out of marriage and family, so those necessary relations could continue to combine property and rear children. The Puritans, who stayed away from the Globe, had already begun to shape an ideal of love growing within marriage. But they did not advocate the romantic excesses of Shakespeare’s passion-sick lovers.

I close with a recommendation of an article in this week’s New Yorker (January 19) by Katha Pollitt. In “Webstalker” (pp. 38-42--unfortunately not online) Pollitt spares neither her ex nor herself in recounting how, after the unnamed lover walked out on her, she used Internet search engines to track his movements and also to track down the many women he had affairs with during their time together. Pollitt is a poet, and clearly knows how to express herself powerfully, but what startles about this article is how dispassionately she seems to write about the break-up and what she calls going “a little crazy.” But the very evenness of her tone reveals for us the depth of Pollitt’s feelings. Love, and lovesickness, are passions. We feel them everywhere in our bodies, and they can take control of our entire lives for months or years or indefinitely. Certainly lovers need help when love ends badly—and to poll popular culture, it ends that way most of the time. Therapy, support groups, friends, alcohol, drugs (prescription and self-prescribed) all may help, and most often more than one is needed. But distorting love from madness to psychopathology only makes sense if you accept the bureaucratized love of psychotherapy.