Well, you can tell Valentine’s Day is coming up; after blogging a couple of stories that came out last week about mating and sex, I now find that the American Psychological Association has published three articles on the ever-popular topic of love in the latest Monitor on Psychology. The first article covers the debate over whether love could properly be described as an emotion or is really a drive, like hunger or thirst. The experience of love appears to rely on the brain’s dopamine-fueled reward and motivation circuits, and includes a range of emotions, which might argue that it’s a drive, but not everyone agrees.
The second article looks at how romantic love and sexual desire are related to each other. You would think that the second is an indispensable element of the first; the article covers a proposed biobehavioral model that suggests that in fact romantic love can develop in the absence of sexual desire, and that the two can feed into each other (that you might start lusting after who you love, or loving who you lust after). If love is, as some psychologists have proposed, a set of behaviors that incorporates three different behavioral systems (attachment, caregiving, sex), then you would ostensibly need all three for romantic love to develop, but it sounds like the idea is that love can grow through attachment and caregiving even in the (initial) absence of sexual desire.
The third article discusses whether love can last. (It refers to this as “the eternal question” but I think the eternal question is the less generic “Will our love last?”) The article is divided into pro and con sections. The latter cites evidence that the passionate love of new relationships and the companionate love of long-established marriages both decline over time (bummer), although the passion may still flare up from time to time, often enough in many cases to keep a couple together. The remainder of the article talks about how love can last in some circumstances, namely if both people have the same “story” about the relationship–a story being basically a model for what the relationship is about.
Helen Fisher, who is cited in the first article, has written about the possibility that humans evolved for serial monogamy. (As I recall it, the argument is that the biochemistry of mating works in such a way that it supports romantic attachments that last only long enough to produce a child and care for it through its most vulnerable years. You’d have to read her books to get the full story, or check out her web site.)
Did you see the pics of the embracing neolithic skeletons found in Mantova, Italy? Beautiful.
Lovely indeed, and very moving.