There are 21 dictionary definitions for the word love. Every woman may come to
a point in her middle life when she suspects that she doesn't understand the
first thing about any of these. Poets, philosophers, playwrights and pop
singers from Socrates to Stevie Wonder have had a great deal to say about
love.
It is the sweetest thing; it is a red, red rose; it is a battlefield; it is a
drug, a delusion, a lunacy. It is the answer, and the question. It is a
balm, and a piercing arrow. H.L.Mencken compared it to perceptual
anaesthesia; Keats wrote that it was his religion; Shakespeare called it a
familiar, a devil, an ever-fixed mark, a smoke, a fire, a sea, a madness, a
fever, a choking gall; it is like sunshine after rain, and does not bend.
Of the various loves, romantic love is the most complicated and inexplicable.
It can come on when you least expect it (and with the most unsuitable
person), it can cast you from the heights of ecstasy to the abyss of
despair, it can roar in you one moment then dissipate as quickly as breath
on glass. It is what drives you to offer yourself to another human for the
rest of your natural life, but only a few years later you may look back and
have no memory at all of that initial ecstasy. Romantic love can be so
confusing that sometimes you simply want to give up on the whole thing and
concentrate on the nature of dark matter, or macroeconomics, or something
else less tiring.
A little biology can be helpful here. In the first throes of romantic love you
are under the influence of a powerful chemical cocktail: dopamine (which
makes opiates look like aspirin) is rushing through your veins. As if that
were not enough, a perfect mixture of vasopressin and oxytocin, the
attachment hormones, are raging around your body. Much of this was
discovered through extensive study of prairie voles, who mate for life,
spend a great deal of time tenderly grooming each other and nesting
together, and studiously avoid meeting other potential partners.
If only all men were just like prairie voles, we say, but if wishes were
horses we would all be Lady Godiva.
Aside from the chemical cosh, you also have the small-brain problem. MRI scans
have shown that falling in love involves only a very tiny part of the brain,
a much smaller part than is used when, say, operating heavy machinery.
Researchers at University College London have remarked wryly that it was
fascinating to reflect that Helen of Troy could have launched a thousand
ships through the agency of such a limited expanse of cortex.
It is vital, therefore, to bear in mind that when falling in love and choosing
your mate you may be making a decision about the rest of your life based on
only a fraction of your cognitive function. This limited section of the
brain is also the exact same part that responds to cocaine, which means that
you may select a partner for life, move to Anchorage and decide to make many
babies, all based on the same area of the cortex that enjoys an illegal
substance that makes you talk accelerated gibberish all night long.
Plato said that love is a mental disease. Modern researchers agree
enthusiastically, categorising love as a form of madness and echoing what
psychologists have been telling tearful patients for years. (There are
certain shrinks who refuse to treat people in the early throes of love
because they are too insane to do a thing with.) Currently, scientists are
having a genteel academic squabble over whether love most closely resembles
the manic phase of bipolar disorder or the characteristics seen in obsessive
compulsive disorder.
There is also a school of thought that insists love is a cultural phenomenon.
As the great French cynic La Rochefoucauld said: “People would not fall in
love if they had not heard love talked about.” The culture keeps up a
rapid-fire bombardment of the power and the glory of romantic love, and yet
it seems curious that so many of the Greatest Love Stories Ever Told - Cathy
and Heathcliff, Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelard, Lancelot and
Guinevere - end in disaster, if not death and carnage. If we were being
really sceptical, we might conclude that it is delusional that “in love”
should be regarded as the greatest and most time-consuming aspiration of the
modern female.
There is a highly dangerous literary subset to this, most vividly exemplified
by Elizabeth Smart's novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept,
which privileges true love over all other considerations. You can lay waste
to families, other people - entire countries - but it's all fine because you
are doing it in the name of Love. If you ever find yourself leaning towards
this view, we suggest that you have a strong cup of tea and read something
enlightening about pig husbandry until the delusion has passed.
It is only when the insane chemical phase of love dies down that you can tell
whether it is the real thing. If it is, it will shift into the deep steady
love that gets you through rainy days and financial crises and the small
quotidian tasks that make up a life. This is why couples who have been
together for 50 years always talk about marrying their best friend.
The mysterious thing about this proper love is that it contains no trace of
the early lunacy. It does not make you want to rip the beloved's clothes off
at inappropriate moments; it is nothing to do with the wild urge to create a
universe with only the two of you in it. Instead, it is the kind of profound
affection that makes you smile at idiosyncrasies that anyone else would find
pointless, or get the joke that nobody else will understand. This kind of
love is built of the bricks of a hundred small memories and moments in time.
It is the feeling you get when you read a story in the paper, or see a
comical character in the street, or overhear a conversation, and know that
there is only one person you have to call and tell. It has nothing to do
with extravagant hotel suites, or watching the sun rise, or impetuous trips
to distant cities. It is not what you see in the shuttered dark of a movie
palace; it is finding romance in the unheralded, the mundane: a sudden surge
of adoration because a certain person knows how to fix a dripping tap. It
may not be the world well lost for love, or “Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day?”, but it is less likely to leave your heart in shards on the
floor.
Romantic love, however deranged, is still one of the great delights of life.
It has given us sonnets and plays and entire sonatas; it has given us The
Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice and Doctor Zhivago. It lent us Yeats's
pilgrim soul and Herrick's sweet infanta, and Keats's bright star. The wild
twist in the stomach at the mere sight of the adored one, the random smiling
at strangers in the street, the sudden desire to swing from lampposts, all
add vastly to the gaiety of nations. (It should be noted that all these
symptoms are not just for the very young: the sensible, 40-year-old female
can just as easily become unhinged by the glimpse of a delightful pair of
green eyes.)
Love can be crazy, delicious, thrilling; it can make you feel as if every atom
in your body is dancing. It can bring back lost youth, make you remember
forgotten dreams, revive dashed hopes. It's just that it needs to come with
a caveat, a health warning, an unromantic but insistent voice of reason. So,
the next time you fall in love, you should bear in mind that in those early
days you are a little crazy, and it may be wise not to make any sudden moves.
The danger of romantic love
We don't mean danger in the obvious heartbreak way - the cheap betrayals, the
broken promises - we mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible, educated
women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for
the modern female. Every day, thousands of films, books, articles and TV
programmes hammer home this message - that without romance, life is somehow
barren.
However, there are women who entertain the subversive notion, like an intellectual
mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is
not necessarily the celestial highway to absolute happiness. Their empirical
side kicks in, and they observe that couples who marry in a haze of
adoration and sex are, ten years later, throwing china and fighting bitterly
over who gets the dog.
But the women who notice these contradictions are often afraid to speak them
in case they should be labelled cynics. Surely only the most jaded and
damaged would challenge the orthodoxy of romantic love. The received wisdom
that there is not something wrong with the modern idea of sexual love as
ultimate panacea, but that if you don't get it, there is something wrong
with you. You freak, go back and read the label. We say: the privileging of
romantic love over all others, the insistence that it is the one essential,
incontrovertible element of human happiness, traced all the way back to the
caves, is a trap and a snare. The idea that every human heart, since the
invention of the wheel, was yearning for its other half is a myth.
Love is a human constant; it is the interpretation of it that changes. The way
that love has been expressed, its significance in daily life, have never
been immutable or constant. The different kinds of love and what they
signify are not fixed, whatever the traditionalists may like to tell you.
So the modern idea that romantic love is a woman's highest calling, that she
is somehow only half a person without it, that if she questions it she is
going against all human history, does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not an
imperative carved in stone; it is a human idea, and human beings are frail
and suggestible, and sometimes get the wrong end of the stick.
