Nora age:24

  "Knowledge Is Power" Francis Bacon

WHAT IS LOVE?

Love: The Romance of Reproduction

Love may be the ultimate ruse in the reproductive game, the grandest trick of all for ensuring that humans produce babies.  We say that love makes the world go round, that we can't live without it, that it is the essential ingredient in male-female relationships, that life would be colorless and deficient without it.  But all of this is poetry.  In the context of evolutionary biology, the key question about love is whether it evolved as an adaptive psychological state.

Biologically, the end point of passionate love seems to be pregnancy, as many an unprepared couple have discovered.

Romantic love grows out of sexual attraction, which is the impetus for mating in all species.  The feeling we identify as human love may have evolved among our hominid ancestors in the context of friendships.

The feeling of love bridges cultural differences, but on its most fundamental level, love bridges sexual differences.  Medical psychologist Dr. John Money defines falling in love as "the experience of establishing a pair-bond".  He speculates that this bond "maintains itself at its level of highest passion typically for a maximum of two or three years.  It may be construed as nature's guarantee that a pregnancy will ensue."

If this indeed is the case, if love evolved as a psychological state contributing to an individuals reproductive success, it is surely one of the most complex mechanisms of mate choice.

"Our idea, which needs further development, is that romantic love is a biological process designed by evolution to facilitate attachment between adult sexual partners, who, at the time love evolved, were likely to become parents of an infant who would need their reliable care.  Romantic love and infant care-giver attchment thus contribute to reproduction and survival."

The biological goals of love are (1) to attract a mate, (2) to retain that mate, (3) to reproduce with that mate, and (4) to invest parentally in the resulting offspring.

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov even felt that the word love as inadequate to describe the intense emotional preoccupation that afflicts some individuals to such an extent that they are hardly able to focus on anything else.  She applied the word limerance to this state emphasizing that it can happen to any person of any age that it is "entirely involuntary once it takes hold", and that "for many individuals, recovery is never complete".  Tennov speculates that limerance is related to reproductive choice and points out that in most cultures in which marriages are arranged, there are powerful anti-limerance forces operating.  According to Tennov, those who experience the limerent state feel that it is necessary to live, although they also may feel that "it is odious in retrospect after full recovery..."  What conditions foster the biology of the state, these are as yet total unknowns.

In the literature of fiction, poetry, and psychology, love has been called a sickness, a form of insanity, a state of ecstasy, an exquisite passion and the ultimate psychological bond--all conditions that Tennov found among the subjects who admitted to having experienced limerence.  But love or limerence may also function as a form of deceit, making the love-smitten or limerent person highly susceptible to his or her own fantasies.  "What is true love itself if it is not a chimera, lie, or illusion?" wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  "We love the image we make for ourselves far more than we love the object to which we apply it.  If we saw what we love exactly as it is, there would be no more love on earth".

Each individual professes to know when he or she is in love, but that knowledge is not objective.  Love is an interior, subjective condition that, in its intense limerent state described by Tennov, can be akin to a disease; the victim is feverish, dizzy, and vascillates from ecstasy to despair.  People in love often describe feeling out of control, their lives caught up in fantasy, in seeing only what they wish to see.

But why do we fall in love?  What accounts for that love-at-first-sight attraction?  Love as an intense psychological state could have served an adaptive purpose in our ancestral past, ensuring that male and female mated, conceived, and stayed together in a harsh environment long enough to care for weak and dependent offspring.  The environmental context in which love may be evolved has long since disappeared but the feelings and longings have been programmed in our genes.  The contemporary emphasis on romantic love may represent a degeneration of what was once adaptive behavior into a futile craving for flowery words and empty phrases.  The feeling that we call love may be a kind of emotional appendix, a vestige of a former time.

excerpted from Sexual Strategies by Mary Batten

Carly age:19

Not long ago, the rules of life's game for men were eloquent in their simplicity - - play fair, don't hit, be nice to girls, work hard, don't cry, pray in private.  That game's over.  Not it's a new game.  What you find is terrible gender anxiety, guys trying to be Mr. Right, the man who can bake the cherry pie, go shoot skeet, come back, toss a salad, converse easily about intimate matters, cry if need be, laugh, hug, be vulnerable, perform passionately that night and the next day go off and lift them bales onto that barge and tote it.  Being perfect is a terrible way to spend your life, and guys are not equipped for it anyway.  And, a reasonable man might add, even if we were equipped for it, we've already seen what trying to "have it all" has done for women who aspire to perfection.

Trisha age:25

But wait -- isn't sex supposed to be the greatest of all stress-relievers?  Not any more, it isn't.  Aside form all the self-imposed performance stuff, sex now suffers from external pressures.  For one, there's the threat of terminal illness: For the first time since the discovery of Penicillin, a man can screw himself to death in one, brief unprotected moment.  For another, there's the intrinsic seriousness of sex itself in these peculiarly puritanical times.  For single men especially, what was once the ultimate relaxant is now just another stressor, the kind of thing that, in the hands of the right lawyer, can cost you your job, your fortune, your reputation and your freedom.