I don't even know how I got to this thread, but it made me want to post for the first time in a very long time. I have always found the subject of love fascinating, not just from the point of view of experience, but other areas as well.
I want to start this off by agreeing that there is nothing about wanting to be loved that should make us feel like our expectations are too high. The desire for recognition and approval is innate to all human beings regardless of outside factors or even our mental state. However we might define love or to whichever extent we want to pursue it, wanting to be loved is setting the bar about as low as it goes.
That said, I would like to say a few things about the basis of love that some here have mentioned. I have debated this with many people and a lot of them found my view on this helpful, so I hope there are takeaways for some of you here as well. I also want to say that I appreciate everyone's opinion on this, but let me try to offer a slightly different perspective.
First, I would like to challenge you to a quick thought experiment: Imagine a language that - for whatever historical or etymological reason - never developed an equivalent for the word "love" (there in fact have been languages like that) – just like Spanish doesn't have a word for 'commute' or French doesn't have a word for 'cheap'.
There is no reason to think that there are no commuters in Spanish-speaking countries or that everything in French-speaking ones is expensive. Likewise, it is unlikely that a society of homo sapiens with fully developed brains where everyone communicated in a language that coincidentally didn't have a word for 'love' would be any less capable of experiencing it or expressing it in much the same way as speakers of other languages do.
Language is an inherent property to humans which often tricks us into forgetting that it is a just way of communicating complex structures – information, thoughts, states of mind. A child raised in a controlled environment where language was not a form of communicating would not grow up to be any less capable of experiencing any of the processes we associate with the notion of 'love' – it wouldn't even find it inconvenient that it can't express its feelings through language, as it was never taught to communicate through language in the first place.
Love is a way we refer to a set of social and physical impulses that result from various chemical reactions in our brain – a state of mind which in the absence of the word would be almost impossible to convey. It predates the emergence of language by many thousands of years and is not exclusive to humans – other species demonstrate similar types of social behavior, and certain monogamous species - such as a group of rodents called prairie voles - display behavior patterns eerily similar to ours.
The neurobiology of love has been under study for many decades, but it is only recently that some very interesting discoveries have been made. I will spare you the tedious details and jump straight to the interesting part.
Currently, there are about half a dozen chemicals linked to the experience of love, with oxytocin and vasopressin gradually emerging as the two responsible for the need for long-term attachment. Others include the nerve growth factor, dopamine, norepinephrine, testosterone, estrogen and serotonin, most of which you've probably heard of before, albeit in other contexts.
What scientists have observed is that monogamous females in both the animal world and human females experience a spike in oxytocin levels whenever an emotional bond is formed – whether with a young/child or partner. In males, a similar pattern has been noticed with vasopressin levels – a shot of vasopressin will cause a male prairie vole to be more involved in the nurture of the young, as well as exhibit stronger monogamous behavior.
Oxytocin and vasopressin seem to be the main - if not the only - chemical drivers behind our need and ability to experience and demonstrate love, without which creating emotional bonds would prove to be far more difficult, if not impossible. This, in fact, seems to be the case with males - particularly among humans - who find creating and maintaining such bonds difficult or even undesirable. A recent study has shown that males who exhibit this type of behavior have a significantly lower number of vasopressin receptors than those with strong monogamous tendencies. The effect of this type of deficiency in fact appears to be so strong that a similar non-monogamous group of voles began displaying monogamous behavior almost immediately upon being injected with a gene that codes for vasopressin.
In other words, males who find it difficult to stay in monogamous relationships or generally find a monogamous lifestyle difficult to maintain, might in fact not be suffering from any form of mental or social disorder - or, for that matter, making a conscious choice - but simply haven't been 'coded' for monogamy.
There are many other interesting parts in the process of developing emotional bonds. A lot has been made about the nerve growth factor, a protein molecule which seems to be the source of the state of 'being in love'. About ten years ago a study was done that tested neurothropin levels in three groups of subjects with varying levels of romantic attachment – single people, people in long-term relationships, and people who had recently developed feelings for someone. It found that the nerve growth factor levels were considerably higher among people who had recently fallen in love than in the other two groups. This was consistent with the previous finding that NGF levels rise when a person first experiences an interest in another person and come back down after about a year. This is why you will often hear that "crushes usually only last about a year or two".
Another discovery that has stirred a lot of debate is that the triggers for these chemicals seem to have less to do with the apparent features of the person (their physical appearance, voice, manners) and more to do with other factors – common interests, shared activities, matching opinions, a sense of mutual appreciation, etc.. This would explain why people tend to become progressively more skeptical of 'love at first sight' as they grow older.
There are various other processes that cause us to experience various other stages of love and there are many other things that could be said on this topic, but the bigger point to be made is that however intricate and counterintuitive it may be, the neurochemistry of love is real no less – just as there is nothing about looking in the mirror that would make us think that we are 50% banana and 98% chimpanzee, there is nothing about feeling love for another human being that would enable us to realize that what we are experiencing is in fact a complex - or not so complex - interaction of various chemicals and processes in our brain.
And while many will interpret this as depressing, consider for a moment the alternative: Imagine if love was not in any way scientifically traceable – if MRI showed no increased brain activity when an emotional bond was formed, if oxytocin levels showed no spikes and no molecules were linkable to the experience of being in love. How exactly would this not further the cause of those who claim that love doesn't exist?
Luckily, we don't live in that kind of world, and even at this very early stage of our ability to understand it, love is fully scientifically provable and explainable.
There is a darker side to this pancake however. If love really is a matter of varying levels of chemicals in the brain, then it's reasonable to expect that at some point in the future we will also be able to manipulate these levels. In theory, men who find it difficult to stay monogamous could be given a shot of vasopressin and suddenly find it a lot less difficult to create monogamous bonds. Unrequited love would be a matter of suppressing high levels of neurothropin. Staying in love would require renewing neurothropin levels at regular intervals.
While this has the potential to alleviate a lot of unnecessary suffering, it also opens a vast landscape of various ethical concerns and controversies. Could young mothers opt out of their motherly instincts to free up time for socializing with their friends? Could married men get away with marital infidelity by simply blaming it on low vasopressin levels?
And here's another thought experiment for you – if we indeed had access to this kind of technology, would any of us actually choose to use it?
Would falling in love arbitrarily with the first person who professed feelings for us seem more appealing than the possibility that someday we might develop genuine feelings for someone? How would we weigh the fear of spending the rest of our life single against being injected with a lifetime of happiness? Would we ever feel tempted to inform our significant other that our feelings are a sham? How would we feel knowing that the longevity of our relationships was contingent on not being late for our shot of oxytocin/vasopressin?
At the very least, the mere possibility that a technology like this might someday exist casts a whole new light on emotional suffering caused by social rejection. All of these issues will need to be addressed as discoveries in this field continue to mount.
There is, of course, no doubt that devout critics of science will spare little effort trying to accuse scientists of "deflating love to mere chemicals", and while this sentiment is understandable, it not only undermines its own point, but misses it entirely – which is that - from the point of view of ethics at least - the social psychology of love says nothing about its chemical origins, and whatever debate there is to be had about love, it needs to take place within the context of the circumstantial nature of the human brain.
In short, love is x^2 + (y - (x^2)^(1/3))^2 == 1
Or:
How's that for love?
(If anyone wants to know more about this, just shoot me a PM and I'll send you some links.)
