Three Interesting Things About Romantic Love
I’m a persistent romantic, yet I’ve never been the most loyal follower of Valentine’s Day. To make matters worse, I’m not even in a relationship this year, which makes it all the easier to denounce the kitsch of the heart-shaped chocolates. But that doesn’t sound so productive. After all, this is an occasion to celebrate one of humankind’s most uplifting capacities. So here is my ode to romantic love, in three short chapters.
Want more than three? Scroll till the end! Something cool is happening tomorrow…
1. Romantic Love Around the World
I’m often dumbfounded by people arguing that romantic love is a Western invention. Even more nuanced suggestions in this space strike me as rather arbitrary. Take English historian Lawrence Stone, who wrote that:
“If romantic love ever existed outside of Europe, it only arouse among the nonwestern nation-states’ elite who had the time to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation for subjective experiences.”1
Stone’s enthusiasm to lecture about “nonwestern cultures” clearly did not urge him to read Six Records of a Floating Life, one of the classics of East Asian literature. Its author, Shen Fu, was a middle-class nobody in Qing Dynasty China. The book consists of autobiographical essays, many relating to his marriage. This was no European-style romance: he entered an organised marriage at 17 with his cousin. Yet here is how Shen Fu describes their wedding night:
“I playfully felt her breast and found her heart was beating as fast as mine. I pulled her to me and whispered in her ear, ‘Why is your heart beating so fast?’ She answered with a bewitching smile that made me feel a love so endless it shook my soul. I held her close as I parted the curtains and led her into bed. We never noticed what time the sun rose in the morning.”
And his wife’s thoughts?
“That night the moonlight was very lovely, and as it was reflected in the stream it turned the ripples of the water as white as silk. We sat together near the water wearing light robes and fanned ourselves gently as we looked up at the clouds flying across the sky and changing into ten thousand shapes. [My wife] Yün said, ‘The world is so vast, but still everyone looks up at the same moon. I wonder if there is another couple in the world as much in love as we are’.”
Clearly, the Chinese didn’t need Hollywood to teach them romance. (Curiously, they did learn kissing from Westerners, underlying the gap between emotion and expression.)2
But is romantic love confined to literate societies like Europe and China?
William Jankowiack and Edward Fischer studied ethnographic evidence from 166 societies, many of them “tribal” and illiterate. Of these, over 80% showed clear evidence of romantic love. (This is not to say that close to 20% did not feel anything for their partners, only that the ethnographers did not mention it.) And whilst culture changes a lot about the expectations from love, even this can be overstated. Here is a list of terms the Hadza hunter-gatherers expect from their partners:
“Sexy.”
“Hard worker.”
“Only wants you.”
“Understanding and gentle.”
“Doesn’t use bad words.”
“Cares for kids.”3
Naturally, culture matters. So does technology. The manifestations of love vary widely, from arranged cousin marriages to Durex-protected Tinder dates. But the underlying feelings seem to resonate across time and space. And why would they not? Romantic love is a natural emotion for lubricating human pair bonding — a well-respected Darwinian “strategy” amongst most birds and a minority of mammals. I write “strategy” in quotes, as some might mistake it for a cold-hearted calculation: a subconscious chess game to pass on one’s genes. This is nonsense. Love and lust have a Darwinian history but a romantic present. They are feelings which constantly turn against their original purpose, whether in the case of homosexual love — which pits love against reproduction — or in the form of disabling heartache, which devastates not only humans but prairie voles, too.
Love hurts. But that pain transcends cultures — even species.
2. Is Love a False Promise?
Love might feel beautiful at the start. But does that last? After all, around half of marriages end up in a divorce. This is true. But the other half doesn’t. And why should love last till death? It can. Brains scanning data has confirmed that some rare couples feel intense love even after 50 years of marriage — as intense as at the start. But to me, this seems like a high bar. Speaking from personal experience, I have two “failed” long-term relationships. Did I want them to last forever? Yes. Would I have given them up knowing that they don’t? Absolutely not. Indeed, Helen Fisher has argued that if humans evolved to be monogamous — which has many caveats — we evolved to be serially monogamous.4 Many might aspire for something else entirely: lifetime monogamy, polyamory, Platonic partnerships; you name it. I personally do. But whatever one aspires for, I think the term serial monogamy should be in more widespread use. Whether we like it or not, it accurately describes the experience of many of us. Why must it be a sign of serial failure?
3. Love has been a force for good
Love is often seen as a personal issue. When it enters politics, it means trouble more often than peace. Just think of Helen of Troy.
But love can be a force for good. Indeed, Alice Evans has convincingly argued that romantic love fuelled women’s liberation.
“But wait!” a sceptic might say. “Romantic love was supposed to be timeless and universal. So how could it explain a change in society?” Because the universal feeling can be celebrated or hushed up. As Evans writes, arranged marriages do “not prohibit love, but [do] make it more unusual”. She argues that when cultures start to value romantic love, they also begin to bring men’s hearts closer to women’s plight. It was not only out of suffragettes’ courage that women’s cause was advanced. It was also from the slow melting of the lover’s resistance.
With this in mind, I feel ever more compelled to smile when seeing couples celebrate tomorrow.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Bonus: Podcasts and webinar
Would you like to learn more about the psychology and biology of romantic love? I have recorded four episodes with world-leading scholars. To listen, find On Humans on your favourite player and search for the episode number from below!
A Musical Biology of Love (#3 with Ruth Feldman)
The Psychology of Love and Hate (#7 with Robert Sternberg)
A Cultural Biology of Sex, Love, and Monogamy (#11 with Helen Fisher)
Why Do We Love? (#35 with Arthur Aron)
Also, I highly recommend this online symposium tomorrow! It has an amazing lineup and is free of charge. Sign up here!
The quotation comes from Jankowiak & Fisher (1992)
Kissing is a mysterious expression of love, as it sits far in the middle between a human universal and a Western particular. Reports of it are found in 46% of societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: too few to count as a universal, but too many to be shrugged off as a Western import.
As for China, there are several reports of Chinese being confused about Americans “touching lips”, something I learned about in John Pomfret’s Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom.
This summarised list is from Chapter 5 of Nicholas Christakis’s excellent book, Blueprint. Complete lists and analyses can be found at Marlowe (2004).