Anna Machin - Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships

Why We Love

The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships

Dr. Anna Machin

The Life of Dad: The Making of a Modern Father

WHY WE LOVE

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2022 by Dr. Anna Machin

First Pegasus Books cloth edition February 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-922-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-923-4

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Amanda Hudson

Cover imagery by Getty Images

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

For Hebe, Kitty and Lydia

In loving memory of my best boy, Bear.

PROLOGUE

Love its complicated.

Its fair to say that this is not the first book written about love. Indeed, the shelves of bookshops and libraries are crammed with authors proffering their views on love from many differing perspectives; psychological, philosophical, scientific, cultural. During my years of studying love, I have read many of these books, and they have provided helpful insights and sent me down new routes of research. But what many of them have tried to do is provide the answer to the question What is love? Love is regularly reduced to a set of chemicals in the brain, or an entirely cultural construct, or the route to great art and creativity. And this is unsurprising. We are a knowledge-hungry species who dislikes uncertainty. We are never happier than when we have a clear understanding of where we are going. But the thing about love is this: its complicated.

As an anthropologist, my job is to observe my fellow humans and then explain as fully as I am able the cause of the behaviour or anatomical quirk I see in front of me. And this means I am a bit like a magpie, borrowing ideas and techniques from other human-focused disciplines to make sure I have sought out all the evidence that enables me to present an answer at all levels of explanation. The goal is 360 understanding. The result of this is that straightforward answers are often elusive. And the study of love is no different. All the disciplines of academia seem to have their own answer to the conundrum of love. But in contrast to other areas of study, where all these explanations can be a bit of a headache, when it comes to love my reaction is one of awe. I am in awe of the sheer immensity of love. In awe of the way it infiltrates every part of our life and every fibre of our being. In awe of how it sits at the very centre of our existence, such is its power to shape our health, happiness and life course. In awe of how we get to experience love in so many ways and with so many people, animals and beings. I think we are incredibly lucky.

So this book intends not to give you a single answer to the question What is love? Instead of delivering a nice, neat explanation by reducing the cause to a single factor, it intends to do the exact opposite. This book gives you the expansionist answer. I want to present you with ten responses which separately give a strong and robustly evidenced answer to the questions which permeate our discussions about love. My aim is that by bringing these diverse answers together, and making it clear that no single one is the complete answer, I might just give you an inkling of the immensity and the true awesomeness of human love. All forms of love will be considered romantic, platonic, spiritual, futuristic and parasocial and all the scientific and social-scientific explanations interrogated. This does mean that at the end there will be no formula for love. No neat explanation that will guide your life and keep you on track and to timetable. But what I hope there will be is a reborn acknowledgement of the immensity of love, and a reconsideration of the many places where love exists in your life. Because I think we might have started taking love for granted, reducing it to a chore that we can efficiently tick off our list with the use of social media. And in the west our privileging of romantic love above all else has meant that maybe we have forgotten the other forms of love that we have in our lives those with family, friends, pets, gods which all go to making us who we are. Because that is part of the joy of being human. Unlike many of our fellow animals, we get to experience love in so many ways.

I will use evidence from across the disciplines to build my arguments, so the hard sciences of genetics, pharmacology and neuroscience will make regular appearances. We will also encounter psychology, philosophy, social anthropology and theology, because the explanation for any human behaviour or experience is inevitably multi-layered. So, yes, this is a science book, but more than that it is a book about a key aspect of the human condition. As a result, I hope there is something for everyone. And there is no need to be a scientist or an anthropologist to follow my arguments because we are all experts in love. To reinforce this, as well as giving you easy-to-follow summaries of what we academics know, you will also hear the voices of real people recounting their experiences of love and relationships with everyone from their child to their best friend, their dog to their god and even their favourite band. I hope you can add yours to them.

This book is about the why, how, what and who of love. Itll explain why love evolved in the first place and how all of our bodily mechanisms behavioural, physiological, neural are attuned to make sure we grab it and keep it. Itll unpack what causes love to be such a profoundly individual experience and explore the mechanisms both biological and cultural that make how I love and how you love so different. Itll explain how love is both intensely private but also made public by the rules our society imposes about how and who we love. Itll explore the loves we underestimate and ask you to reconsider love not as an emotion but as a need as fundamental to us as the food we eat and the air we breathe. And it will touch on the less considered aspects of love; its darker sides and where our quest for love might take us in the future. It is my fervent hope this book will act to both reassure and challenge you. As humans, the outlets for our love are so many that I truly believe that we can all find love in our lives, be it with a lover, friend, dog or god. But the question remains, are we able to sit comfortably with a phenomenon that can both heal and harm, and which, ultimately, is guaranteed to be unpredictable?

I am writing this prologue during the second Covid-19 wave in the UK. Covid has been devastating to us all on so many fronts, but I think one good thing that may have come out of it is a renewed understanding, through experience, of what is most important in our lives; to our health, our happiness, our life satisfaction. And it is who we love. Because Covid has taken away our opportunity to be with each other and has brought to the forefront our immense, visceral