Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love

  • Helen Fisher
Henry Holt: 2004. $25, 288 pp.

Tristan is on the road with Iseult, who is planning to marry his uncle, Mark. They shoot up a potion of dopamine and noradrenaline enhancer, take one look at each other and fall in love. A serotonin suppressor ensures that the passion becomes obsessive. Delirious with joy, Tristan answers an advertisement from his university at Rutgers, New Jersey, recruiting lovestruck undergraduates to have their brains scanned. In the analysis, his caudate nucleus shines out, a part of the ancient reptilian brain tuned to anticipate and discriminate between rewards. So too does his ventral tegmental area, producing ever more dopamine to drench his emotions. As Helen Fisher writes: “When I first looked at those brain scans, with the active brain regions lit up in bright yellow and deep orange, I felt the way I feel on a summer night when I gaze at the sparkling universe: overwhelming awe.”

Fisher's populist book attempts to explain the mechanism of romance. It is snappily written and filled with quotations. Here's Richard Burton's first sight of a 19-year-old Elizabeth Taylor: “She was so extraordinarily beautiful I nearly laughed out loud. She... was famine, fire, destruction and plague... Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires before they withered... those huge violet eyes... had an odd glint... Aeons passed, civilizations came and went while these cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon.”

Fisher's thesis is that headlong infatuation is a universal human trait. The brain scans she has made of volunteers in and out of love, and their chemical background, are the scientific kernel of the story. The book's aim is to interest people who are fascinated by love found or love lost, with a light hand on the science side.

What interests me is what Fisher does not say. She makes a deliberate choice to ignore the mind–brain and evolution–culture controversies of recent decades. She does not bother justifying her approach. She quotes sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists as sources, with no mention that they still raise many people's hackles. She simply describes a mating system that sets our emotions on fire at the sight and touch of a beloved individual, but where lust, companionship and romance do not map perfectly onto each other. Then she speculates how this system enables the successful propagation of a species that needs commitment between partners, at least during the first four years of a dependent child's life. So far, I am with her. It is high time we outgrew the phlogiston theory of biology-free humans.

However, she also chooses to ignore the ethics of her studies. This worries me more. She accepts a chemical-based society. When love is lost, depression sets in. In mild form, it is adaptive, enabling the jilted lover to let go. In extreme forms, it is horror. Fisher reports that currently “some 7.1 million Americans take serotonin boosters to counter depression, stress, bereavement, or the despair of tragic love”. She doesn't strongly advise that you join them, but points out that anything is better than suicide. When you are ready to fall in love again, she suggests reviewing your medication. Serotonin boosters could block romantic obsession, trivializing your next relationship.

I conclude that King Mark does not stalk Iseult or menace Tristan, her knightly lover. His first love potion having gone astray, he simply doses Iseult with an antidote before readministering the potion, making sure this time that she looks at him, not Tristan. Tristan is still obsessed by old-fashioned romantic love, ignoring its chemical bases. He sneaks into the castle disguised as a jester. His faithful hound recognizes his smell, but not only does Iseult not recognize him, she does not even care. Now you can decide the story's end. Does Tristan die of a broken heart? Or does King Mark don a doctor's white coat and advance on his rival, syringe in hand — not to murder Tristan, but to erase his love?