Dunbar - The science of love

Contents

By the same author

Copyright 2012 by Robin Dunbar. All rights reserved

Cover image: science beakers Lumina Imaging/Getty Images; painting The Kiss (detail) by Gustav Klimt

Cover design: Wendy Mount

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Faber and Faber Limited

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data :

Dunbar, R. I. M. (Robin Ian MacDonald), date.

The science of love / by Robin Dunbar.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-39765-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-46684-1 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-39767-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-39766-4 (ebk)

1. Love. 2. Man-woman relationships. I. Title.

BF575.L8D86 2012

306.7dc23

2012025736

For Patsy

O my luves like a red, red rose

Thats newly sprung in June!

O my luves like the melodie

Thats sweetly playd in tune!

A Red, Red Rose

Its the weirdest thing that will ever happen to you. Falling in love, I mean. Think about it there you are, wending your way innocently through childhood, doing the things that children do, and then the hormones suddenly kick in. And then you fall in love. Hesitatingly in that first allconsuming crush, but then with more confidence and determination as practice and experience make perfect. And although it doesnt happen every day, from time to time throughout the rest of your life it will catch you by surprise. Its very weird. All at once, you cant think of anything else except this seemingly random person who has just stepped probably equally innocently into your life. Your attention is focused almost to exclusion on the object of your desire. You just cannot get enough of them. You experience heightened happiness, often associated with glazed eyes, a faraway look and a dreamy expression, and roused (though not turbulent) emotions. The word besotted often comes to mind.

Think Romeo and Juliet. Here in one single story, Shakespeare has managed to encapsulate every aspect of that extraordinary phenomenon in a beautifully crafted play. Were two star-crossed lovers ever so finely drawn? Their agony and angst distilled so deftly? Their story remains the quintessential tale of unrequited love, of the unattainable for which the protagonists ache with such all-consuming passion. In this richly complex play, Shakespeare combines all the elements of the human mate choice predicament the accidental meeting that precipitates instantaneous love on both sides, the friends that try to arrange trysts (as Benvolio does in his attempt to facilitate Romeos meeting with Rosaline at the Capulet ball, thus inadvertently engineering the fatal meeting between hero and heroine), parents inevitable attempts to manipulate their offsprings marital arrangements to their best advantage (as Capulet does in agreeing to Count Pariss request for his daughter Juliettes hand), and, last but not least, the raw uncertainty as to whether we can achieve our desired outcome (instantiated here by the enmity that separates the Capulet and Montague families and forms so insidious a barrier between the lovers).

The story raises, in one seminal moment, all the questions about love and betrayal that one can imagine. Why did Romeo fall so suddenly for Juliet, when he went to the ball to sneak a meeting with Rosaline? Can we really fall in love at first sight, or is that just an urban myth? Why is the desire for a kiss so strong? Can we really love one person forever? Are we ever so distraught that we could take our own lives when our passion is thwarted never mind if we return home to discover the love of our life awaiting burial? But even if we dont go to the lengths that Romeo did, can we actually die of a broken heart? And even if we cant, why is it that we feel the pain of separation or rejection as real pain?

This book brings modern science to bear on these questions. It will oblige us to draw on scientific disciplines that are very rarely bedfellows. The very richness of the experience makes that inevitable. But first, what is this phenomenon we refer to as falling in love? And is it really a human universal? Many have claimed that it is not, and that many traditional societies do not recognise it that it is a phenomenon born of nineteenth-century romantic novels. So lets begin by looking more closely at what we have to study.

The kind of besottedness that we associate with romantic love can be both intense and, compared to mate attraction in most other animals, relatively long-lasting. This early intense phase of a human relationship typically lasts twelve to eighteen months, but can often extend for several years beyond that in attenuated form. In the heady intellectualised aftermath of the 1960s, it became fashionable among intellectuals, and especially among anthropologists, to assert that this sense of falling in love is a peculiarity of modern, Western, capitalist culture, driven no doubt by the market in Mills & Boon-style romantic fiction. In traditional societies, people did not marry for love, but as a matter of economic convenience or for political reasons. It is still a common view. But this is to confuse the reasons for marriage contracts with the relationships involved. People have always been hardnosed and married for political or economic convenience. Arranged marriages have been a feature of every human culture the world over. Currently, they happen to be especially common throughout much of South Asia, from Iraq as far east as Japan, but they were the bread and meat of the noble houses of Europe ever since the Romans left us alone to get on with our lives as best we could. People still marry for convenience and economic advantage every day all over the Western world. But that doesnt mean to say that people dont fall in love. Whether they marry because they fall in love is a separate issue. In actual fact, the falling in love bit can happen just as often the other way around: people get married for strategic reasons and then, lo and behold, fall in love. As Molire put it in his play Sganarelle (1660): Love is often a fruit of marriage.