"Love is chemical bribery, to make sure we stick around... and then it has a dark side". Anna Machin looks clear-sightedly at the "complex beast"
Sharp, wise essay on Aeon from an evolutionary investigator into love, Anna Machin, whose new book Why We Love: The New Science Behind our Closest Relationships is out now.
Some extracts below:
We can all agree that, on balance, and taking everything into account, love is a wonderful thing. For many, it is the point of life. I have spent more than a decade researching the science behind human love and, rather than becoming immune to its charms, I am increasingly in awe of its complexity and its importance to us.
It infiltrates every fibre of our being and every aspect of our daily lives. It is the most important factor in our mental and physical health, our longevity and our life satisfaction. And regardless of who the object of our love is – lover or friend, dog or god – these effects are largely underpinned, in the first instance, by the set of addictive neurochemicals supporting the bonds we create: oxytocin, dopamine, beta-endorphin and serotonin.
This suite of chemicals makes us feel euphoric and calm, they draw us towards those we love, and reward us for investing in our relationships, even when the going gets tough. Love feels wonderful but ultimately it is a form of biological bribery, a cunning evolutionary trick to make sure we cooperate and those all-important genes continue down the generations.
The joy it brings is wonderful but is merely a side-effect. Its goal is to ensure our survival, and for this reason happiness is not always its end point. Alongside its joys, there exists a dark side.
Love is ultimately about control. It’s about using chemical bribery to make sure we stick around, cooperate and invest in each other, and particularly in the survival-critical relationships we have with our lovers, children and close friends. This is an evolutionary control of which we are hardly aware, and it brings many positive benefits.
But the addictive nature of these chemicals, and our visceral need for them, means that love also has a dark side. It can be used as a tool of exploitation, manipulation and abuse. Indeed, in part what may separate human love from the love experienced by other animals is that we can use love to manipulate and control others.
Our desire to believe in the fairy tale means we rarely acknowledge the undercurrents but, as a scholar of love, I would be negligent if I did not consider it. Arguably our greatest and most intense life experience can be used against us, sometimes leading us to continue relationships with negative consequences in direct opposition to our survival.
We are all experts in love. The science I write about is always grounded in the lived experience of my subjects whose thoughts I collect as keenly as their empirical data.
It might be the voice of the new father as he describes holding his firstborn, or the Catholic nun explaining how she works to maintain her relationship with God, or the aromantic detailing what it’s like living in a world apparently obsessed with the romantic love that they do not feel.
I begin every interview in the same way, by asking what they think love is. Their answers are often surprising, always illuminating and invariably positive, and remind me that not all the answers to what love is can be found on the scanner screen or in the lab.
But I will also ask them to consider whether love can ever be negative. The vast majority say no for, if love has a darker side, it is not love, and this is an interesting point to contemplate. But if they do acknowledge the possibility of love having a less sunny side, their go-to example is jealousy….
…Evolution saw fit to give us love to ensure we would continue to form and maintain the cooperative relationships that are our route to personal and, most crucially, genetic survival. It can be the source of euphoric happiness, calm contentment and much-needed security, but this is not its point. Love is merely the sweet treat handed to you by your babysitter to make sure the goal is achieved.
Combine the ultimate evolutionary aim of love with our visceral need for it and the quick intelligence of our brains, and you have the recipe for a darker side to emerge. Some of this darker side is adaptive but, for those who experience it, it rarely ends well. At the very least there is pain – physical, psychological, financial – and, at the most, there is death, and the grief of those we leave behind.
Maybe it is time to rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about love because the danger on the horizon is not the dragon that needs to be slain by the knight to save the beautiful princess but the presence of some who mean to use its powers for their gain and our considerable loss.
Like all of us, love is a complex beast: only by embracing it in its entirety do we truly understand it, and ourselves. And this means understanding its evolutionary story, the good and the bad.