Authors: Helen Fisher
“If you are not currently ‘in love’ with someone, but felt very passionately about someone in the past, please answer the questions
with that person in mind.
” Participants were then asked several demographic questions, covering age, financial background, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and marital status. I also asked questions about their love affairs. Among them: “How long have you been in love?” “About what percent of an average day does this person come into your thoughts?” And “Do you sometimes feel as if your feelings are out of your control?”
Then came the body of the questionnaire (see the Appendix). It contained fifty-four statements, such as: “I have more energy when I am with _____.” “My heart races when I hear _____’s voice on the phone.” And “When I’m in class/at work my mind wanders to _____.” I designed all these questions to reflect the characteristics most commonly associated with romantic love. Subjects were required to indicate to what extent they agreed with each query on a seven-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” A total of 437 Americans and 402 Japanese filled out the questionnaire. Then statisticians MacGregor Suzuki and Tony Oliva assembled all these data and did a statistical analysis.
The results were astonishing. Age, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, ethnic group: none of these human variables made much difference in the responses.
For example, people of different age groups answered with no significant statistical differences on 82 percent of the statements. People over age forty-five reported being just as passionate about their loved one as those under age twenty-five. Heterosexuals and homosexuals gave similar responses on 86 percent of the questions. On 87 percent of the queries, American men and women responded virtually alike: there were few gender differences. American “whites” and “others” responded similarly on 86 percent of the questions: race played almost no role in romantic zeal. Catholics and Protestants showed no significant variance on 89 percent of the statements: church affiliation was not a factor. And where these groups did show “statistically significant” differences in their responses, one group was usually just a little more passionate than the other.
The greatest differences were between the Americans and the Japanese. On most of the forty-three questions where they showed statistically significant variations, one nationality simply expressed somewhat greater romantic passion. And the twelve questions showing dramatic differences all appeared to have rather obvious cultural explanations. For example, only 24 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “When I am talking to _____, I am often afraid that I will say the wrong thing,” whereas a whopping 65 percent of Japanese agreed with this declaration. I suspect this particular variation occurred because young Japanese often have fewer and more formal relations with the opposite sex than Americans do. So, all things considered, within these two very different societies, men and women were much alike in their feelings of romantic passion.
Romantic love. Obsessive love. Passionate love. Infatuation. Call it what you will, men and women of every era and every culture have been “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered” by this irresistible power. Being in love
is
universal to humanity; it is part of human nature.
9
Moreover, this magic visits each of us in much the same way.
“Special Meaning”
One of the first things that happens when you fall in love is that you experience a dramatic shift in consciousness: your “love object” takes on what psychologists call “special meaning.” Your beloved becomes novel, unique, and all-important. As one smitten man phrased it, “My whole world had been transformed. It had a new center, and that center was Marilyn.”
10
Shakespeare’s Romeo expressed this feeling more succinctly, saying of his adored one, “Juliet is the sun.”
Before the relationship grows into romantic love, you may feel attracted to several different individuals, addressing your attention to one, then another. But eventually you begin to concentrate your passion on just one. Emily Dickinson called this private world “the realm of you.”
This phenomenon is related to the human inability to feel romantic passion for more than one person at a time. In my survey, 79 percent of men and 87 percent of women said they would not go out on a romantic date with someone else when their beloved was unavailable (Appendix, #19).
Focussed Attention
The love-possessed person focusses almost all of his or her attention on the beloved, often to the detriment of everything and everyone around them, including work, family, and friends. Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, called this “an abnormal state of attention which occurs in a normal man.” This focussed attention is a central aspect of romantic love.
Infatuated men and women also concentrate on all of the events, songs, letters, and other little things they have come to associate with the beloved. The time he stopped in the park to show her a spring bud; the evening she tossed lemons to him as he made the drinks: to the love-possessed, these casual instants breathe. Seventy-three percent of the men and 85 percent of the women in my survey remembered trivial things that their beloved said and did (Appendix, #46). And 83 percent of men and 90 percent of women replayed these precious episodes in their mind’s eye as they mused about their dearest (Appendix, #52).
Billions of other lovers have probably felt a surge of tenderness when thinking of moments spent with a sweetheart. A touching Asian example of this comes from a ninth-century Chinese poem, “The Bamboo Mat,” by Yuan Chen. Chen agonized, “I cannot bear to put away / the bamboo sleeping mat: / that night I brought you home, / I watched you roll it out.”
11
For Chen, an everyday object had acquired iconic power.
The twelfth-century tale
Lancelot,
by Chrétien de Troyes, illustrates this same aspect of romantic passion. In this epic, Lancelot finds Queen Guinevere’s comb lying in the road after she and her entourage have passed. Several of her golden hairs are tangled in its teeth. As de Troyes wrote, “He began to adore the hairs; a hundred thousand times he touched them to his eyes, his mouth, his forehead, and his cheeks.”
12
Aggrandizing the Beloved
The infatuated person also begins to magnify, even aggrandize tiny aspects of the adored one. If pressed, almost all lovers can list the things they do not like about their amor. But they cast these perceptions aside or persuade themselves that these defects are unique and charming. “So lovers manage in their passion’s cause / To love their ladies even for their flaws,” mused Molière. Quite so. Some even adore their beloved for their faults.
And lovers dote on the positive qualities of their sweethearts, flagrantly disregarding reality.
13
It’s life through rose-colored glasses, what psychologists call the “pink-lens effect.” Virginia Woolf described this myopic view vividly, saying, “But love … it’s only an illusion. A story one makes up in one’s mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion.”
Our sample of Americans and Japanese certainly illustrates this pink-lens effect. Some 65 percent of men and 55 percent of women in the survey agreed with the statement: “_____ has some faults but they don’t really bother me” (Appendix, #3). And 64 percent of men and 64 percent of women agreed with the statement, “I love everything about _____” (Appendix, #10).
How we delude ourselves when we love. Chaucer was right: “Love is blynd.”
“Intrusive Thinking”
One of the primary symptoms of romantic love is obsessive meditation about the beloved. It is known to psychologists as “intrusive thinking.” You simply can’t get your beloved out of your head.
Examples of intrusive thinking abound in world literature. The fourth-century Chinese poet, Tzu Yeh, wrote, “How can I not think of you—.”
14
An anonymous eighth-century Japanese poet moaned, “My longing has no time when it ceases.” Giraut de Borneil, a troubadour of twelfth-century France, sang out, “Through too much loving … So terribly do my thoughts torment me.”
15
And a Maori native of New Zealand expressed his suffering with these words: “I lie awake the livelong night, / For love to prey on me in secret.”
Perhaps the most striking example of intrusive thinking, however, comes from Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval masterpiece,
Parzifal.
In this story, Parzifal was cantering along on his steed when he saw three drops of blood in the winter snow, shed by a wild duck that had been wounded by a falcon. It reminded him of the crimson and alabaster complexion of his wife, Condwiramurs. Transfixed, Parzifal sat in contemplation, frozen in his stirrups. “And thus he mused, lost in thought, until his senses / deserted him. Mighty love held him in thrall.”
16
Unfortunately, Parzifal was holding his lance erect—a chivalric signal of challenge. Soon two knights who were camped in a nearby meadow with King Arthur took notice and galloped out to joust with him. Not until one of Parzifal’s followers draped a yellow scarf over the drops of blood did he shake off his love trance, lower his weapon, and stave off a deadly battle.
Mighty is love. Not surprisingly, 79 percent of the men and 78 percent of the women in my survey reported that when they were in class or at work their mind returned continually to their beloved (Appendix, #24). And 47 percent of men and 50 percent of women agreed that “no matter where it starts, my mind always seems to end up thinking about_____” (Appendix, #36). Other surveys report similar findings. Informants report they think about their “love object” over 85 percent of their waking hours.
17
How apt of Milton in
Paradise Lost
to have Eve say to Adam, “With thee conversing, I forget all time.”
Emotional Fire
Of the 839 American and Japanese people in my survey of romantic love, 80 percent of men and 79 percent of women agreed with the statement, “When I feel certain that _____ is passionate about me, I feel lighter than air” (Appendix, #32).
No single aspect of “being in love” is so familiar to the stricken lover as the torrent of intense emotions that pour through the mind. Some become painfully shy or awkward when in the presence of the beloved. Some turn pale. Some flush. Some tremble. Some stammer. Some sweat. Some get weak knees, feel dizzy, or have “butterflies in the stomach.” Others report quickened breathing. And many report feelings of fire in the heart.
Catullus, the Roman poet, was certainly swept away. Writing to his beloved, he said, “You make me crazy. / Seeing you, My Lesbia, takes my breath away. / My tongue freezes, my body / is filled with flames.”
18
Ono No Komachi, a ninth-century female Japanese poet, wrote, “I lie awake, hot / the growing fires of passion / bursting, blazing in my heart.”
19
The woman in the Song of Songs, the Hebrew love lyrics composed between 900 and 300
B.C.
, bemoaned, “I am faint with love.”
20
And American poet Walt Whitman described this emotional whirlwind perfectly, saying, “That furious storm through me careering—I passionately trembling.”
21
Lovers ride a kite of exhilaration so swift that many find it difficult to eat or sleep.
Intense Energy
Loss of appetite and sleeplessness are directly related to another of love’s overwhelming sensations: tremendous energy. As a young man on the South Pacific island of Mangaia told an anthropologist, when he thought of his beloved, he “felt like jumping in the sky!”
22
Sixty-four percent of the men and 68 percent of the women in our survey also reported that their hearts raced when they heard their beloved’s voice on the phone (Appendix, #9). And 77 percent of men and 76 percent of women reported that they had a surge of energy when they were with their beloved (Appendix, #17).
Bards, minstrels, poets, playwrights, novelists: men and women have sung for centuries of this energizing chemistry, as well as the awkward stammering and nervousness, the pounding heart and breathlessness that can accompany romantic love. But of all who have discussed this psychic and physical pandemonium, none has been as graphic as Andreas Capellanus, or Andreas the Chaplain, a learned Frenchman of the 1180s who traveled in high courtly circles and wrote
On the Art of Honorable Loving,
a literary classic of the times.
It was during his century that the tradition of courtly love emerged in France. This conventionalized code prescribed the conduct of the lover toward the beloved. The lover was frequently a troubadour—a highly educated poet, musician, and singer, often of knightly rank. His beloved was, in many cases, a woman wed to the lord of a distinguished European household. These troubadours composed, then sang highly romantic verse to worship and flatter the lady of the house.
Yet these “romances” were expected to be chaste—and rigidly observant of complex codes of chivalrous conduct. So in his book, Capellanus codified the rules of courtly love. Unknowingly, he also listed many of the primary traits of romantic love, among them the lover’s inner turbulence. As he aptly expressed it, “On suddenly catching sight of his beloved, the heart of the lover begins to palpitate.” “Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.”
23
And “A man tormented by the thought of love eats and sleeps very little.”
24
This sophisticated churchman also spoke of the “intrusive thinking” that lovers experience, declaring, “Everything a lover does ends in the thought of his beloved.” And “A true lover is continually and without interruption obsessed by the image of his beloved.” He also clearly recognized that the lover focusses all of his or her attention on a single person when they love, saying, “No one can love two people at the same time.”
25