The Blue Monkey Review

I know this blog is not all about me, that it does not exist as an excuse for me to share the sturm und drang of my life. But I have to admit, the main reason I couldn’t let this topic alone was due to one person—Helen Fisher. After my review last week of her article (and her writing and her views) in Time, I could let go of her. But she kept intruding into my life. I noticed her new book at Barnes and Noble early in the week, placed with on a table with a pink color motif for Valentine’s Day. It lay among books of love poems and books on seduction. This didn’t bother me too much. I didn’t even pick it up—just noted where I could find it if I needed it. But the next day, as I labored on the stationary bike at my gym, I looked into the TV screen and there she was! Helen Fisher sitting cara a cara with Diane Sawyer, recounting the results of her experiments just as she had done for Time readers, giving her insights into the love rituals of post-modern Americans, unwrapping the deeper meanings of Sex in the City. Actually, I don’t know for sure that she did all this. The TV volume was set uncharacteristically low, so all I could hear was the occasional word like “… love… men… brain… money… sex… power….” So I had to interpolate most of the dialogue:

Diane: Helen, if love is so much a part of our human nature, how do you explain the most awkward and unsavory part of it?
Helen: You mean, men?
Diane: Right. I mean, how can you include “brain” and “male” in the same sentence. Aren’t those terms contradictory?
Helen: Well, true, some computer programs won’t let you do that. But look, Diane, men can’t help the way they act. It results from millions of years of evolution. They can only think about one thing.
Diane: Money?
Helen: Sex.
Diane: Doesn’t that make you wonder how they could ever have gained a monopoly of power in society?
Helen: Diane, I can’t sleep most nights wondering about that.

Finally, yesterday, as I sat in Barnes and Noble piecing together a lecture on physical geography, one of the managers walked over to show me a book she thought might interest me. That book was written by Helen Fisher! I couldn’t get the woman out of my life—she had even invaded my ruminations on plate tectonics. I had to face the question: Am I falling in love with Helen Fisher?

Okay, maybe love states the problem a little bit too strongly. Maybe I had some other emotion, maybe even lots of other emotions, but because I’ve spent so much time lately thinking about romance, and because Professor Fisher is quite an attractive woman, I got confused and instead of thinking, “Helen Fisher and I both do a lot of thinking about love” turned it into “I think I’m in love with Helen Fisher.” But I had to know more. So, today, I spent some time this morning reading parts of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Holt, 2004).

In spite of my doubts about some of her ideas, I must admit that Fisher writes well. Most readers will find the book accessible and interesting. If you managed to avoid acquiring a fundamentalist prejudice against evolutionary theory, you might also find her explanation of the evolution of love satisfying and perhaps even seductive. For every major change in the social organization of our pre-human ancestors, some change had to take place in the relationship between male and female proto-us. Fisher notes that early hominids probably raised children in about four years, so needed couples to last as couples through infancy. Even today, divorce tends to spike about four years into marriage. Later in pre-history, when the species du jour had longer lifespan, childhood lasted longer. So, courtship became more elaborate along with the need for longer-lasting partnerships.

Yes, I admit, I found Fisher’s ideas more and more interesting as I read. She had an evolutionary explanation for everything about romance, even for the volatility of romantic affection. “I think love’s capriciousness is part of nature’s plan,” Fisher tells us on page 151. If men and women constantly fell in with other, newer partners, even while their young were still, uh, young, then that made possible new supplies of viable seed for women (with a possible doubling up on resources if the old lover could be kept in the dark) and new wombs and the possibility of many more progeny for men. She notes that a contemporary study using DNA testing showed that 10% of children were not the offspring of their legal fathers.

And Helen Fisher even goes into the dark emotions that come after love. She conducted brain scans on people who had been dumped to match the scans she had done on those still smitten (in one case, one of her subjects was scanned both for both parts of the experiment). Post-love emotions, like love itself, has their evolutionary backstory. She writes about abandonment rage (a means of motivating the abandoned partner to fight for resources for children) and depression (a means of attracting aid from other members of the pack/tribe/community).

Throughout her book Helen Fisher uses literary references, particularly poetry, to illustrate the feelings she discusses. Yet literature never exactly becomes a source. Even when she cites a series of poetic treatments of lost love, from Japan and the Inuit and other places, these references support her conclusions. She is not drawing conclusions from the literature. Instead, Fisher uses literature as a means of dressing up conclusions based on real science, on anthropology and on brain chemistry. And, in spite of my growing feelings of longing for Helen Fisher, and the lack of objectivity that these feelings encourage, I’m forced to conclude that Helen is an emotional realist. In other words, the emotions we talk about are entities that exist within our bodies. We share much the same feelings because we all have the same anatomy and physiology and biochemistry.

To this version of emotional realism I’d like to offer Occam’s Razor (Sounds kinky, no? Well, in fact, no, it isn’t.) Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Do not mulpliy entities (or explanations) beyond necessity. In Why We Love we have a huge apparatus of brain chemistry standing as surety for the emotions under discussion, and anthropological discovery and theory as a way of making sense of the chemistry. In terms of logical argument, the fact that it all makes sense (it all fits) does not weigh very heavily in favor of these arguments—not just a multiplication of entities, but entities raised to the second power.

In his 1893 textbook, Psychology: Briefer Course (published by Helen’s publisher, Henry Holt), William James proposed that emotion had two parts, the exciting cause (the object in the world that inspired our feelings) and physiological changes such as dizziness, panic, nausea, nervousness—in other words, in love). Emotion was one way of explaining those feelings. In other words (to put the idea into a slightly different, more recent formulation), emotion is the story, or narrative, that we create to explain our feelings. And for all emotions, and most spectacularly for love, we have a narrative tradition that would be hard to ignore.

So, how do I explain love? I don’t think I need to. No one who takes evolution seriously (a minority, alas) needs to pause even a moment looking for an explanation of sexual desire. More than all of the DNA conspiracy theories that has us seeking alpha partners and spreading seed or gathering male labor by hook or by crook, sexual desire is the not so hidden hand that has made physical self interest a dynamo for the common good. We copulate, we procreate, the species thrives. Love and every other emotion that we connect to it are the froth of nature’s wildness. But if it is froth, it is wonderful froth. But I think that stepping back and admitting that romantic love is not an entity with a life of its own allows us to recognize that love, even romantic love, takes its likeness and continuity from the stories we tell about it. And as stories change, so does that experience. We don’t have the same love as Don Quixote, or Werther, or Sappho. And while I’m inclined to agree with Alvaro Mutis, that we have the same story of love repeated infinitely (but also with infinite, important, variations), the story changes over time. You cannot take love out of history by pushing it into pre-history.