The other two big ideas (the first being germs kill) were psychoanalysis and behaviorism. These two theories agreed on very little, but they both agreed that the infant’s attachment to its mother is based on milk. Freud thought that the infant’s libido (desire for pleasure) is first satisfied by the breast, and therefore the infant develops its first attachment (psychological need) to the breast. Only gradually does the child generalize that desire to the woman who owns the breast.

 

The behaviorists didn’t care about libido, but they, too, saw the breast as the first reinforcer, the first reward (milk) for the first behavior (sucking). The heart of behaviorism, if it had one, was conditioning—the idea that learning occurs when rewards are conditional upon behaviors. Unconditional love—holding, nuzzling, and cuddling children for no reason—was seen as the surest way to make children lazy, spoiled, and weak.

 

Freudians and behaviorists were united in their belief that highly affectionate mothering damages children, and that scientific principles could improve child rearing. Three years before my father entered the hospital, John Watson, the leading American behaviorist (in the years before B. F. Skinner), published the best-seller Psychological Care of Infant and Child.  Watson wrote of his dream that one day babies would be raised in baby farms, away from the corrupting influences of parents. But until that day arrived, parents were urged to use behaviorist techniques to rear strong children: Don’t pick them up when they cry, don’t cuddle or coddle them, just dole out benefits and punishments for each good and bad action.

How could science have gotten it so wrong? How could doctors and psychologists not have seen that children need love as well as milk? This chapter is about that need—the need for other people, for touch, and for close relationships. No man, woman, or child is an island.

 

 

Harlow argued that “contact comfort” is a basic need that young mammals have for physical contact with their mother. In the absence of a real mother, young mammals will seek out whatever feels most like a mother. Harlow chose the term carefully, because the mother, even a cloth mother, provides comfort when it is most needed, and that comfort comes mostly from direct contact.

 

Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life.  (This is why all mammal babies play; and the larger their frontal cortex, the more they need to play).

These two needs are often opposed, however, so they are regulated by a kind of thermostat that monitors the level of ambient safety. When the safety level is adequate, the child plays and explores. But as soon as it drops too low, it’s as though a switch were thrown and suddenly safety needs become paramount. The child stops playing and moves toward mom. If mom is unreachable, the child cries, and with increasing desperation; when mom returns, the child seeks touch, or some other reassurance, before the system can reset and play can resume. This is an instance of the “design” principle I discussed in chapter 2: opposing systems push against each other to reach a balance point.

 

When children are separated from their attachment figures for a long time, as in a hospital stay, they quickly descend into passivity and despair. When they are denied a stable and enduring attachment relationship (raised, for example, by a succession of foster parents or nurses), they are likely to be damaged for life, Bowlby said. They might become the aloof loners or hopeless clingers that Bowlby had seen in his volunteer work.

 

 

But does adult romantic love really grow out of the same psychological system that attaches children to their mothers?

 

Bowlby had been specific about the four defining features of attachment relationships: 

 

1. proximity maintenance (the child wants and strives to be near the parent)

2. separation distress (self-explanatory)

3. safe haven (the child, when frightened or distressed, comes to the parent for comfort)

4. secure base (the child uses the parent as a base from which to launch exploration and personal growth)

Evidence that romantic partners become true attachment figures, like parents, comes from a review of research on how people cope with the death of a spouse, or a long separation. The review found that adults experience the same sequence Bowlby had observed in children placed in hospitals: initial anxiety and panic, followed by lethargy and depression, followed by recovery through emotional detachment. Furthermore, the review found that contact with close friends was of little help in blunting the pain, but renewed contact with one’s parents was much more effective.

 

Once you think about it, the similarities between romantic relationships and parent-infant relationships are obvious. Lovers in the first rush of love spend endless hours in face-to-face mutual gaze, holding each other, nuzzling and cuddling, kissing, using baby voices, and enjoying the same release of the hormone oxytocin that binds mothers and babies to each other in a kind of addiction. Oxytocin prepares female mammals to give birth (triggering uterine contractions and milk release), but it also affects their brains, fostering nurturant behaviors and reducing feelings of stress when mothers are in contact with their children. This powerful attachment of mothers to infants—often called the “caregiving system”—is a different psychological system from the attachment system in infants, but the two systems obviously evolved in tandem. The infant’s distress signals are effective only because they trigger caregiving desires in the mother. Oxytocin is the glue that makes the two parts stick together.

 

When oxytocin floods the brain (male or female) while two people are in skin-to-skin contact, the effect is soothing and calming, and it strengthens the bond between them. For adults, the biggest rush of oxytocin—other than giving birth and nursing—comes from sex. Sexual activity, especially if it includes cuddling, extended touching, and orgasm, turns on many of the same circuits that are used to bond infants and parents. It’s no wonder that childhood attachment styles persist in adulthood: The whole attachment system persists.

 

 

Adult love relationships are therefore built out of two ancient and interlocking systems: an attachment system that bonds child to mother and a caregiving system that bonds mother to child.

These systems are as old as mammals—older perhaps, because birds have them, too. But we still have to add something else to explain why sex is related to love. No problem; nature was motivating animals to seek each other out for sex long before mammals or birds existed. The “mating system” is completely separate from the other two systems, and it involves distinctive brain areas and hormones.

 

Granted, this theory (see HH under this heading) is speculative (the fossilized bones of a committed father look no different from those of an indifferent one), but it does tie together neatly many of the distinctive features of human life, such as our painful childbirth, long infancy, large brains, and high intelligence. The theory connects these biological quirks about human beings to some of the most important emotional oddities of our species: the existence of strong and (often) enduring emotional bonds between men and women, and between men and children.

 

Because men and women in a relationship have many conflicting interests, evolutionary theory does not view love relationships as harmonious partnerships for childrearing; but a universal feature of human cultures is that men and women form relationships intended to last for years (marriage) that constrain their sexual behavior in some way and institutionalize their ties to children and to each other.

 

 

Take one ancient attachment system, mix with an equal measure of caregiving system, throw in a modified mating system and voila, that’s romantic love. I seem to have lost something here; romantic love is so much more than the sum of its parts. It is an extraordinary psychological state that launched the Trojan war, inspired much of the world’s best (and worst) music and literature, and gave many of us the most perfect days of our lives. But I think that romantic love is widely misunderstood, and looking at its psychological subcomponents can clear up some puzzles and guide the way around love’s pitfalls.

 

But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible. To see this, and to save the dignity of love, you have to understand the difference between two kinds of love: passionate and companionate.

Passionate love is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy). It’s no wonder: Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine.

 

Passionate love does not turn into companionate love. Passionate love and companionate love are two separate processes, and they have different time courses. Their diverging paths produce two danger points…

 

True love exists, I believe, but it is not—cannot be—passion that lasts forever. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other. Companionate love looks weak in the graph above because it can never attain the intensity of passionate love. But if we change the time scale from six months to sixty years, as in the next figure, it is passionate love that seems trivial—a flash in the pan—while companionate love can last a lifetime. When we admire a couple still in love on their fiftieth anniversary, it is this blend of loves—mostly companionate—that we are admiring.

 

 

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy. Oh, there is plenty of work extolling the virtues of love, but when you look closely, you find a deep ambivalence. Love of God, love of neighbor, love of truth, love of beauty—all of these are urged upon us. But the passionate, erotic love of a real person? Heavens no!

 

There are several reasons why real human love might make philosophers uncomfortable. First, passionate love is notorious for making people illogical and irrational, and Western philosophers have long thought that morality is grounded in rationality. (In chapter 8, I will argue against this view.) Love is a kind of insanity, and many people have, while crazed with passion, ruined their lives and those of others. Much of the philosophical opposition to love may therefore be well-intentioned advice by the sages to the young: Shut your ears to the sirens’ deceitful song.

 

I think, however, that at least two less benevolent motivations are at work. First, there may be a kind of hypocritical self-interest in which the older generation says, “Do as we say, not as we did.” Buddha and St. Augustine, for example, drank their fill of passionate love as young men and came out only much later as opponents of sexual attachments. Moral codes are designed to keep order within society; they urge us to rein in our desires and play our assigned roles. Romantic love is notorious for making young people give less than a damn about the rules and conventions of their society, about caste lines, or about feuds between Capulets and Montagues. So the sages’ constant attempts to redefine love as something spiritual and prosocial sound to me like the moralism of parents who, having enjoyed a variety of love affairs when they were young, now try to explain to their daughter why she should save herself for marriage.

 

 

In the late nineteenth century, one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, performed a scholarly miracle. He gathered data from across Europe to study the factors that affect the suicide rate. His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints. No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves. Durkheim looked at the “degree of integration of religious society” and found that Protestants, who lived the least demanding religious lives at the time, had higher suicide rates than did Catholics; Jews, with the densest network of social and religious obligations, had the lowest. He examined the “degree of integration of domestic society”—the family—and found the same thing: People living alone were most likely to kill themselves; married people, less; married people with children, still less.

 

Durkheim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives: “The more weakened the groups to which [a man] belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.”

A hundred years of further studies have confirmed Durkheim’s diagnosis. If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live (and if you are not allowed to ask about her genes or personality), you should find out about her social relationships.

 

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders. It’s not just that extroverts are naturally happier and healthier; when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood. Even people who think they don’t want a lot of social contact still benefit from it. And it’s not just that “we all need somebody to lean on”; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help. We need to interact and intertwine with others; we need the give and the take; we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

 

Seneca was right: “No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility.” John Donne was right: No man, woman, or child is an island. Aristophanes was right: We need others to complete us. We are an ultrasocial species, full of emotions finely tuned for loving, befriending, helping, sharing, and otherwise intertwining our lives with others. Attachments and relationships can bring us pain: As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit said, “Hell is other people.” But so is heaven.