Greek, Hebrew, and Hindu versions of the same story about the origin of sexual love

ChatGPT created the mandala above. I had the following conversation with Claude. There’s something very profound about this little story, but I’m not quite sure what.

* * * * *

In the Symposium Plato has Aristophanes explain love in the following way (I’m quoting from Wikipedia):

“His speech gives an explanation of why people in love say they feel ‘whole’ when they have found their love-partner. He begins by explaining that people must understand human nature before they can interpret the origins of love and how it affects their own times. This is, he says because in primal times people had doubled bodies, with faces and limbs turned away from one another. As spherical creatures who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels, these original people were very powerful. There were three sexes: male, female, and hermaphrodite; they were said to have descended from the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, respectively. These creatures tried to scale the heights of Olympus and planned to set upon the gods. Zeus thought about blasting them with thunderbolts, but, not wanting to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half, in effect separating each entity’s two bodies.

“Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature. [...] Aristophanes then claims that when two people who were separated from each other find each other, they never again want to be separated. This feeling is like a riddle, and cannot be explained.”

A couple of years ago I was a Jewish wedding and heard the rabbi tell a similar story from a Hebrew background. And I’ve just heard Seema Anand tell a similar story out of a Hindu background. Do you have any idea about where the Jewish and Hindu versions came from?

This is a fascinating example of how similar archetypal stories appear across different cultures! You’re right to notice these parallels - the theme of originally unified beings who are separated and then seek reunion appears in several traditions.

For the Jewish version, the most likely source is from Talmudic and later Kabbalistic literature. The Talmud (Tractate Berakhot 61a) contains a teaching that Adam was originally created as a double-bodied being, male and female joined back-to-back, whom God then separated. The Zohar and other mystical texts expand on this, developing the idea that souls are created in pairs and separated before birth, leading to the search for one’s bashert (soulmate). This interpretation often draws on the Genesis creation narrative where Eve is formed from Adam’s rib, but recasts it as a splitting of an originally unified being.

For the Hindu version, there are several possible sources. The concept appears in various Puranas and in the mythology surrounding Ardhanarishvara (the half-male, half-female form of Shiva and Parvati). Some versions tell of cosmic beings or divine couples who were split apart and must find reunification. The Shiva Purana and other texts contain variations of this theme.

The really intriguing question is whether these represent independent cultural developments or whether there was some cross-pollination of ideas. Given the ancient trade routes and cultural exchanges between these civilizations, it’s possible there was mutual influence, though each tradition developed the story in ways that fit their particular theological and philosophical frameworks.

The fact that this archetypal pattern appears so widely suggests it taps into something fundamental about human psychology and the experience of love and longing.

Yes, the issues you raise in the last two paragraphs are fascinating. But if the story does tap into something fundamental about human psychology, then it’s easy to see how they could have arisen through independent creation, on the one hand, and why the story would move from one culture to another through ancient trade and such.

Exactly! You’ve identified a really important dynamic with archetypal stories - the very qualities that make them likely to emerge independently also make them highly “transmissible” between cultures.

If a story pattern emerges from deep psychological truths about human experience - like the longing for wholeness, the sense that love makes us complete, or the feeling that we’re searching for something we’ve lost - then it becomes almost inevitable that different cultures would develop similar narratives. These aren’t just arbitrary tales; they’re attempts to make sense of universal emotional experiences.

But precisely because such stories resonate so deeply, they’re also the ones most likely to “travel well” when cultures interact. A merchant or scholar encountering this story in another tradition would recognize its power and meaning, making it more likely to be remembered, retold, and eventually absorbed into their own cultural framework.

This creates a kind of feedback loop where psychologically resonant stories both arise organically and spread readily. We see this with other archetypal patterns too - flood myths, hero’s journeys, creation stories involving cosmic eggs or primordial chaos. The stories that survive and spread across cultures tend to be those that speak to something essential in human experience.

So rather than having to choose between independent creation or cultural transmission, we might be looking at both processes working together - the archetypal pattern emerging naturally from human psychology, then being reinforced and refined through cross-cultural contact.

Welcome to this brave new effing world. “The old way of mating is dead.”

Jean Garnett, The Trouble With Wanting Men, NYTimes, July 21, 2025.

It's not clear to me just what this article is about. Obviously, sex and relationships, and something's wrong with men. I think. Beyond that... So I'll just quote a few passages that seem indicative to me.

Male anxiety & heterofatalism (in 1st 3rd of the article):

My husband and I had an open relationship at the time that J. and I met, so the terms of our involvement were, at first, limited, and although J. exerted a pleasant pressure against these limitations, ultimately they suited him. I was the one who violated the terms by finding it intolerable, after a while, to care that much, in that way, for one person while being married to another. I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration, things I wanted with (from?) J., even as, throughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.

It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who “can’t.” Have these men not heard of “don’t want to?”

Maybe my friend was right about male anxiety at this moment. Maybe the men are taking a beat, “laying low,” unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion.

There are many routes to the species of disappointment I am circling here, but however we get there, the complaint is so common, such a cultural and narrative staple, that the academy is weighing in. We now have a fancy word, “heteropessimism,” to describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the mating behavior of men. Coined by the sexuality scholar Asa Seresin, who later amended it to “heterofatalism,” the term seems, at first glance, to distill a mood that is no less timely for being timeless.

Communication pessimism (midway):

I was doubled over laughing, briefly tasting the knee of my jeans, while the man next to me on the sectional couch strummed a guitar and did a spot-on imitation of Bruce Springsteen. He had that lifting-something-heavy moan down cold, and he was improvising a song about work, American work in the American heartland, hyperbolically tough and tragic male work. Because I was losing it, he kept going, and I kept losing it, and at a certain point I wasn’t sure if I was overpowered by amusement or just overpowered by him.

On the way to his place, I had been texting with my aunt. “Word from an expert,” she wrote. “Wait til he wants it so bad he’s nutsy cuckoo. Sounds facile but, man, truer words were never spoken. ‘Make ’em Suffer’ is my mantra!”

I kept catching myself staring at his mouth, his bottom lip. He told me to slow down; he needed time to get a better sense of how I worked. I lay back to murmur, let him try stuff, and he warmed to his own control, putting his mouth right up to mine, then pulling away when I tried to engage his tongue. “I see what you are,” he said finally, pinning my forearms. “You’re a bratty sub.” He held himself there, just out of reach, breathing on me. “I like to make you wait,” he said.

He did make me wait. I stood at the slot machine watching those cherries and fat yellow coins blur by, and they didn’t stop. He was sweet with me in person, impulsive about biting my nose, but for stretches I wouldn’t hear from him, or I would but only perfunctorily, and then, suddenly, he would pop up. Requesting clarification on what a man feels or wants or sees happening here has gotten me burned before, as it has many women I know. I have learned to regard such demands as “demanding” in a feminized way — simultaneously bossy and supplicating, a reinscribing of the “bratty sub” position. Taking my cues from him, I stayed mostly quiet. Call it “communication pessimism.”

Emotional labor, hermeneutic labor (later midway):

Anderson gives us a new term, related to but distinct from “emotional labor” and more useful in parsing what we might call the micropolitics of dating: She calls the work women do to interpret mystifying male cues “hermeneutic labor,” and she posits it as a form of “gendered exploitation in intimate relationships.” The guy dating my friend may have been too busy lawyering to confirm his plans with her, but meanwhile, Anderson might say, my friend was working two jobs: one to earn her living, the other as sole manager of an emotional entanglement that was also his. Heterofatalism is partly just burnout.

The beginning of the end, wordplay:  

“A good man is hard to want,” a good man wrote in the group chat.

“A hard man is good to find,” said another who knows I haven’t had satisfying sex in a minute.

“A man is hard to find good?” said the previous man’s girlfriend.

“A good find is hard to man,” I said, as if a guy were a tricky piece of equipment. “Slow down, I need to get a better sense of how you work.”

Everywhere all at once (still moving):

I toppled the whole structure of my life for a man who, when I asked him, “Do you want to be with me or not?” replied, after a few seconds’ silence, “I want to be with you, and I want everything everywhere all at once.” J. was referring, of course, to the 2022 surreal sci-fi comedy set across a multitude of parallel universes in which many versions of the protagonists play out many versions of their lives, each millisecond branching fractal-like into countless alternate dimensions, creating infinite selves, infinite fates, infinite answers to the dilemma of how to be and with whom. This film had moved him deeply, seeming to capture qualities of his neurotype that he seldom saw portrayed.

It occurs to me that the multiverse mind-set may also reflect the cognitive effects of dating apps that, defeatist by design, project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines. One guy I went out with spoke with a hint of longing about the relationship between his grandparents, who barely spoke to each other before getting married as teenagers in Sicily, thrown together by slim-pickings village life, adolescent hormones and the oppressive myth of female honor. What a system, what a gamble, and then both people were trapped for life. But at least you were spared the anxiety of choice. At least there was that.

Final paragraphs:

To break the impasse of “complementary twoness” that can grip any pair of people, Jessica Benjamin imagines how we might collaborate, over time (and the time is crucial), to create an “intersubjective third,” a space in which your needs and mine, your desires and mine, recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance. To create such a space, Benjamin says, requires a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission. I find this distinction difficult to grasp, which is perhaps to say that I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose. I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here. A good man is hard to want, after all, and my sexuality owes me neither protection nor affirmation; it is out for itself, out for a skirmish, a strain, a smell.

“The old way of mating is dead,” said my friend at our colloquy of female complaint over dinner, “and the new one has yet to be born.” What is the new one? Pessimism may help us feel knowing, but really, we don’t know. For now, life has us pinned here: “I like to make you wait.”

That last paragraph I understand. That makes sense to me.

Join the crowd.

It's not just the old way of mating that's dead. The old way of everything is dead. Welcome to this brave new fucking world. 

* * * * *  

YouTube:

Emily Jashinsky unloads on the ridiculous New York Times Magazine essay “The Trouble With Wanting Men” that reads like something from a 2011 Jezebel article. She dives into the incoherent worldview of the author, the media’s role of perpetuating toxic masculinity and why women and men are really having problems connecting.

Fantasy, Romantic Love, Polyamory, and Relationships

You may have gathered by now that I like to use chatbots as thought partners. Here I’m using Anthropic’s Claude to explore an idea I’ve had about the role fantasy in romance and how, in the right circumstances, romantic fantasies can lead to substantial relationships. I start out by asking about polyamory, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my main theme, but I wanted it to be in the context for subsequent discussion, something’s that important in working with chatbots.

What I’m exploring is the capacity for personal autonomy within a romantic relationship. What is the trade-off between (needy) dependency and autonomy?

As usual, my prompts are set in boldface type.

* * * * *

Polyamory

First tell me about polyamory. When did it first become noticed as such, that is, when did the word itself become prominent. I’ve got the impression that, for the most part, we’ve got couples who view one another as their primary relationship, but then allow other relationships “on the side” as it were.

Polyamory as a term was coined relatively recently - in 1990 by Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, who combined the Greek "poly" (many) with the Latin "amor" (love). The word gained wider recognition through the 1990s and 2000s, particularly after the publication of books like "The Ethical Slut" (1997) and "Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits" (1997).

While the practice of consensual non-monogamy has existed throughout history in various forms, the specific term "polyamory" and the modern movement around it really emerged in the late 20th century, often connected to countercultural movements and communities exploring alternative relationship structures.

Your understanding captures one common model - hierarchical polyamory, where people have primary partners with secondary or tertiary relationships alongside. However, polyamory actually encompasses several different approaches:

Hierarchical polyamory is indeed what you described - primary relationships with other relationships that are considered secondary or given less priority in terms of time, commitment, or life decisions.

Non-hierarchical polyamory treats all relationships as equally important, without ranking them or giving one partner precedence over others.

Relationship anarchy goes further, rejecting traditional relationship categories entirely and allowing each connection to develop its own unique structure.

The core principle across all these approaches is ethical non-monogamy - having multiple romantic or sexual relationships with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. This distinguishes it from cheating or affairs, which involve deception.

The term became more mainstream through academic writing, online communities, and media coverage throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

Romantic fantasy

OK. Very interesting. Let’s set that aside at look at some other dynamics for relationships.

I have a speculation about “true romantic love.” You’ll recall that Dante saw Beatrice once, was smitten, and went on to write La Vita Nuova. But he never met her, never had a real relationship with her. My idea about romance is that two people engage in reciprocal relationships like that. They fall in love with one another, as Dante was smitten with Beatrice, but then they go on to have an actual relationship with one another. It’s like that line from a Dylan song, “I’ll let you in my dream if you let me in yours.” Ideally, then, as they interact with one another, the romantic fantasies are replaced with real relationships based on shared experience. Does this make sense?

Your speculation makes a lot of sense and captures something profound about how romantic love might ideally function. The Dante-Beatrice model you're describing - where two people are initially enchanted by idealized versions of each other, then gradually allow reality to replace fantasy - feels like a compelling framework for understanding healthy romantic development.

The Dylan line you quote is perfect for this: "I'll let you in my dream if you let me in yours." It suggests that early romance involves a kind of mutual fantasy-sharing, where each person projects their romantic ideals onto the other. But the key insight in your model is that this initial enchantment serves a crucial purpose - it creates the motivation and emotional energy for two people to invest in getting to know each other deeply.

What's particularly interesting about your framework is how it positions romantic idealization not as something to be avoided, but as a necessary starting point that should naturally evolve. The fantasy creates the conditions for intimacy, but then real intimacy gradually displaces the fantasy through shared experience, vulnerability, and seeing each other in mundane as well as magical moments.

This seems to address a common relationship problem: some couples get stuck in the fantasy phase and can't handle the reality of their partner's full humanity, while others become so focused on practical compatibility that they lose the sense of enchantment that initially drew them together.

Your model suggests that successful long-term love requires both the initial spark of romantic projection and the gradual, mutual work of replacing those projections with genuine knowledge and acceptance of who each person actually is. The relationship deepens not by abandoning the dream, but by slowly trading it for something more real and sustainable.

Star-equilibrium

Moving on.... In “Women in Love” DH Lawrence talked of the ideal relationship between a man and a woman as a “star-equilibrium.” He’s talking about a double-star, where two stars are in one another’s gravitational field, but neither forms a center. Rather, they both rotate around a common center. In such a relationship, each person has their own life, but enter into a shared relationship with one another. Am I right about this?

You're absolutely right about Lawrence's "star-equilibrium" concept, and your astronomical analogy captures it perfectly. In "Women in Love," Lawrence was indeed rejecting traditional relationship models where one partner becomes subordinate to or absorbed by the other, instead proposing this binary star system where both individuals maintain their distinct identities while being held together by mutual attraction.

The concept emerges most clearly in the relationship between Birkin and Ursula, where Birkin explicitly argues against the romantic notion of two people becoming "one flesh" or merging completely. Instead, he envisions what he calls "an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings" - each person remaining whole and separate, yet connected through what he describes as a kind of gravitational pull.

How I became an adult in Baltimore, 1965 to 1973

Standing on the balcony, blowing at post horn.

I entered Johns Hopkins University as a freshman in the fall of 1965 and graduated in 1969 with a degree in Philosophy. I spent three more years then getting a master’s degree in humanities while also working in the Chaplain’s Office as a conscientious objector to military service. When I published my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001) I dedicated it to my five fathers. I worked with two of them at Johns Hopkins, Richard Macksey and Chester Wickwire. (My first father, of course, is my biological father, William Benzon. David Dysert is my second, he was my music teacher for five years. David Hays is my fifth; he was my Ph.D. teacher and mentor. We later became colleagues.)

While the pieces I list in this post hear cover much of what happened to me during those formative years, they don’t cover everything. For one thing, my relationship with my sister changed substantially during that time, though that didn’t happen in Baltimore. I should probably say a bit about other faculty members, Maurice Mandelbaum (philosophy), Neville Dyson-Hudson (anthropology), Arthur Stinchcombe (sociology) and Mary Ainsworth (psychology). Nor do I say anything about my friends Henry Shapiro, Fred Portnoy, Peter Barnett (whom I have kept up with), Ivia Waterman and Al Crowley, Frank Munley (I’ve also kept up with him), Vicki Pollard, and Donna Keck. I might also say a word or two about the strange (sexual) affair I carried out through the phone over the course of, I don’t know, two or three months. And perhaps I should say something about the letter I published in Playboy in 1966 since it was my first national publication (of sorts). Perhaps I do some more writing about that period of my life. But for now, this is what I’ve got.

* * * * *

My Annus Mirabilis

“Annus Mirabilis” – a somewhat pretentious term meaning “wonderful year,” and used in mostly obsolete contexts.

These two papers are about the period from 1968-1972, when I settled on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” as the focus of my intellectual life, a focus that remains with me to this day. I originally published “Touchstones” in December 1975 in, Paunch, a journal edited by my teacher, Art Efron. The current version contains annotations that bring it more or less current. It loops back to several childhood experiences which I identify as precursors to events that happened during those years, including both my structural analysis of “Kubla Khan” and the LSD trip I took in January 1972 got me “unstuck,” freeing me up both to finish my work on “Kubla Khan” and to enroll for trumpet lessons at the Peabody Conservatory.

Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life, November 2015, Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/9814276/Touchstones_Strange_Encounters_Strange_Poems_the_beginning_of_an_intellectual_life

An esoteric interpretation of my annus mirabilis, 1968-1971 https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/05/an-esoteric-interpretation-of-my-annus.html

This is rather different from all the other papers here as it is mostly written by ChatGPT as it interprets a series of events. First what happened to me in the course of writing four term papers in the course on Romantic literature where I settled on “Kubla Khan.” The first two papers involved distinctly different altered states of consciousness, while the last two did not. Then I tell ChatGPT about a mystical experience I had while performing with a rock band some time in 1971. I asked ChatGPT to interpret these events using concepts from Hinduism and Buddhism. The Chatster concludes: “This is not just an academic coming-of-age story. This is a spiritual initiation disguised as a liberal education.”

Johns Hopkins, Academics

Dick Macksey was my mentor at Johns Hopkins, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student. Without him, I don’t know what I would have done. Earl Wasserman introduced me to the close reading of poetry and, in particular, to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

“It got adults off your back” – Richard Macksey remembered, 3 Quarks Daily, Aug. 19, 2019, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/08/it-got-adults-off-your-back-richard-macksey-remembered.html At Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/40040691/_It_got_adults_off_your_back_Richard_Macksey_remembered

Earl Wasserman, a lifelong student, a scholar’s scholar, New Savanna, September 27, 2018, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2018/09/earl-wasserman-lifelong-student.html

This one is about the Tudor and Stuart Club, a literary society. I was the club secretary for two or three years. This one gives you a glimpse of academic life outside the classroom.

Old School: Torpor and Stupor at Johns Hopkins, 3 Quarks Daily, Nov. 13, 2017, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2017/11/old-school-torpor-and-stupor-at-johns-hopkins.html

This is the first thing I published in the student newspaper. It’s a review of John Barth’s story collection, Lost in the Funhouse, which is written as a parody of the book. I’m told that Barth liked it.

John Barth and Me, Having Fun [Trapped], New Savanna, April 3, 2024, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/04/john-barth-and-me-having-fun-trapped.html

In this longish blog post I talk about the three universities is knew, Johns Hopkins for undergraduate school, State University of New York at Buffalo for my Ph.D., and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for my first and only faculty job.

The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite Schools, New Savanna, July 23, 2019 (originally posted in October 2013) https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-hunt-for-genius-part-5-three-elite.html

Chester Wickwire [Johns Hopkins]

All of these blog posts involve Chester Wickwire, the Chaplain at Johns Hopkins. I participated in various programs run by him during my undergraduate years and then worked in the Chaplain’s Office to fulfill my Selective Service obligation as a conscientious objector to military service.

Living with Living Creatures: Will We Become the Apocalypse, New Savanna, May 22, 2011, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/05/living-with-living-creatures-will-we.html

Break! How I Busted Three Trumpeters Out of a Maryland Prison, New Savanna, August 3, 2012, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/04/break-how-i-busted-three-trumpeters-out-of-a-maryland-prison.html

How I Freaked the Secret Service and Live to Tell About It, New Savanna, Nov. 5, 2014 https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-i-freaked-secret-service-and-lived.html

Music

Music has always been important in my life. The first two pieces are about music I heard in Baltimore while the third is about the rock band I played in during 1969-1971. Some of the gigs I played with that band are among the happiest moments in my life but the last gig was something else entirely, a mystical experience that shook me to the core.

Ecstasy at Baltimore’s Left Bank Jazz Society, 3 Quarks Daily, May 2, 2016, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/05/ecstasy-at-baltimores-left-bank-jazz-society.html

Rahsaan works the crowd, New Savanna, December 6, 2022, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/12/rahsaan-works-crowd.html

White Light and Basement Joy: Into The Saint Matthew Passion and Beyond. 3 Quarks Daily, May 19, 2025. https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/05/white-light-and-basement-joy-into-the-saint-matthew-passion-and-beyond.html

Politics

My college years came as the Civil Rights movement peaked and as the anti-war movement peaked. I protested the war in Vietnam, became a conscientious objector to it, and spent a good deal of time with political activists in Baltimore. These blog posts present two aspects of that engagement.

Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s, New Savanna, March 30, 2025 https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/03/breaking-down-monogamy-in-baltimore-in.html

I became a conscientious objector during the War in Vietnam, New Savanna, April 14, 2025, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/04/i-became-conscientious-objector-during.html

In Love

The second paragraph: “At the time, I thought I was in love. But, considered as a love relationship, it would’ve made a strange movie. For the love was mostly in my mind, not in the relationship.” And then there’s Christel, who had been my first year German teacher, and Dante and his beloved Beatrice, whom I knew not at all except at the remostest distance.

My First Muse, and My Second, New Savanna, September 3, 2011, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/09/my-first-muse-and-my-second.html

Sorting Things Out: Emotions and Behavioral Systems

Note: This is mostly a quick post to remind me of something I (think) I know, but am not necessarily very careful about in my thinking and writing.

What’s the relationship between love and attachment? Attachment, I believe, is best thought of as a behavioral system; that’s certainly how John Bowlby thought of it, and our contemporary concept of attachment is due largely to him. Love, on the other hand, is an emotion. It’s an emotion that’s often experienced in the context of attachment, but so are other emotions. And love, presumably, can be felt in the context of other behavioral systems.

Thus Helen Fisher has identified three behavioral systems involved in romantic love: sex, attraction, and attachment (see abstract below). Manfred Clynes has identified seven basic “emotion shapes,” which he calls essentic forms: anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence. I’m not sure about sexual desire. Sexuality is certainly a behavioral system. The desire? Seems more like a feeling than an emotion, but that strikes me as a semantic quibble. But of the other six, anger, hate, and joy can be experienced in various behavioral contexts. Grief? It’s certainly experienced with the loss of an attachment object. The loss of other objects as well? Love and reverence? I can see love in relation to both attachment and sexuality. Reverence? Hays thought it was how the infant regards its attachment object (Mommy).

This requires some sorting out. But not now.

* * * * *

Helen E. Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy L. Brown, Romantic love: a mammalian brain system for mate choice, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2006) 361, 2173–2186, doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1938

Abstract: Mammals and birds regularly express mate preferences and make mate choices. Data on mate choice among mammals suggest that this behavioural ‘attraction system’ is associated with dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain. It has been proposed that intense romantic love, a human cross- cultural universal, is a developed form of this attraction system. To begin to determine the neural mechanisms associated with romantic attraction in humans, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 17 people who were intensely ‘in love’. Activation specific to the beloved occurred in the brainstem right ventral tegmental area and right postero-dorsal body of the caudate nucleus. These and other results suggest that dopaminergic reward and motivation pathways contribute to aspects of romantic love. We also used fMRI to study 15 men and women who had just been rejected in love. Preliminary analysis showed activity specific to the beloved in related regions of the reward system associated with monetary gambling for uncertain large gains and losses, and in regions of the lateral orbitofrontal cortex associated with theory of mind, obsessive/compulsive behaviours and controlling anger. These data contribute to our view that romantic love is one of the three primary brain systems that evolved in avian and mammalian species to direct reproduction. The sex drive evolved to motivate individuals to seek a range of mating partners; attraction evolved to motivate individuals to prefer and pursue specific partners; and attachment evolved to motivate individuals to remain together long enough to complete species-specific parenting duties. These three behavioural repertoires appear to be based on brain systems that are largely distinct yet interrelated, and they interact in specific ways to orchestrate reproduction, using both hormones and monoamines. Romantic attraction in humans and its antecedent in other mammalian species play a primary role: this neural mechanism motivates individuals to focus their courtship energy on specific others, thereby conserving valuable time and metabolic energy, and facilitating mate choice.

Love is a mystery & the importance of Rom-Coms [Adventure, any one?]

Kyle Buchanan, How Much Are You Worth Romantically? This Director Has Thoughts. NYTimes, June 13, 2025.

In her 20s, long before she wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives,” Celine Song spent six months working as a matchmaker in New York. By day, she’d meet with single women rattling off requirements for a potential mate, from appearance and height to income. By night, over beers with her artist friends, she couldn’t help but notice a disconnect: Many of her favorite people would be instantly rejected based on those criteria.

“I’d be like, ‘You guys would be not good mates for any of my clients,’” she said. “I spent all day listening to these women describe them as worthless people they do not want to meet, even though I ascribe so much worth to them because they are creative and brilliant and amazing.”

That tension lies at the heart of Song’s new rom-com, “Materialists,” which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men.

Love is a mystery:

“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”

“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”

From the interview itself:

Value is a big theme in “Materialists.” You really boil it down: People want a mate who makes them feel like a more valuable commodity.

Oh, yeah. And part of the frustration is, “With everything else, I can get the higher version because I can pay for it. So why not my partner?” You can upgrade a car, you can renovate a home, but people are people and they’re going to show up as they are. It’s a complete mystery why you’re going to connect with somebody.

And I feel like people reject mystery these days.

That’s what I was so interested in with this. Of course, the movie has a relationship to movies in the ’80s and ’90s, those romantic films from Nora Ephron and [James L.] Brooks. But I do think that the movie is so interested in what’s going on right now with us spiritually and romantically. Like, you might be 5-4. Why does your boyfriend need to be 6 feet tall? [...]

Though that’s always been true, it does feel like right now, we’re in a more presentational era than ever before.

Of course. This is why the language around going to the gym, self-improvement, there’s so much language about enhancing your value. We’re all just trying to develop our product, and you’re the product, right? And hopefully, you can develop your product to such a high value that you’re going to then maybe land a mate of another value.

The importance of the rom-com:

I respect it so much because it’s a genre where every single person can walk into it and feel connected. You must relate because love is a drama that you are in. You cannot go through life without any relationship to love whatsoever.

Many of our biggest actresses now, like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone, don’t typically make romantic comedies.

Think about the superstar actresses of that time where romantic comedies ruled, like Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock. They themselves had power alone — it didn’t matter who the male leads were, the audience would show up for it. [The decline of romantic comedies] is also diminishing the role of an actress.

So why do you think that genre has fallen on hard times?

You have to be stupid to be in love. That’s very difficult, and it exasperates even the smartest people. Of course it exasperates some very smart filmmakers. [...]

Love as adventure:

Where do you think that interest comes from, if you had to drill down?

I think I got addicted to the feeling of going deep with someone. Once you’ve been there, why would you ever have any experience that is not that deep? You want to live on the edge and feel connected as much as you can, and there is a very funny fearlessness about it: You’re like, “Oh, it hurts, I cried all night,” but there’s kind of a fun to it, right? [...]

Some people do treat love as a math problem to be solved. But can you really control something so mysterious?

It’s a very good question. Every day you’re jumping off a cliff when you’re with someone. You’re deciding, “I’m going to tell you that I’m going to love you today and tomorrow I’m going to tell you I’m going to love you again.” At the end of it, you’re going to be on your deathbed and the fantasy is that you’re going to look at that person and you’ll be like, “Wow, I can’t believe it, but we still love each other.”

I’m reminded of one of my favorite rom-coms, Romancing the Stone. It’s about a romance writer, played by Kathleen Turner, who ends up in a Latin American jungle with bird smuggler, played by Michael Douglas, and together they go chasing after a large and mysterious emerald.

The science of sex, love, and attachment [Helen Fisher]

YouTube:

Why do we fall in love with one person over another? The late biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher unpacks the evolutionary roots of romantic love, sex, and attachment.

Using research derived from the ethnographies of hunter-gatherer societies and fMRI brain scans Fisher explains how love functions as a powerful survival mechanism.

00:00:00 A life shaped by love and curiosity
00:00:17 What was growing up like for you?
00:00:47 When did you first learn about sex?
00:03:30 What is the importance of sex in our lives?
00:06:13 How did your family life lead you to study the brain?
00:08:19 Is love supernatural?
00:09:23 Love is a drive, not a feeling
00:09:33 Why did humans evolve in a way other mammals did not?
00:17:18 How did you conduct your FMRI studies?
00:19:14 What did you find in your FMRI studies?
00:21:30 Did you think about the reviewer who called love “supernatural”?
00:21:54 Could you describe your next study?
00:24:15 How can this information be used?
00:26:12 How to make love last
00:28:25 How can we maintain a long-term relationship?
00:29:19 What is science doing to expand our understanding of love?
00:30:13 What work do you do with Match.com?
00:34:37 How is online dating affecting love?
00:37:22 What is “slow love"?
00:41:07 How are millennials approaching love?
00:43:31 Are men and women different?
00:53:59 Why are millennials different?
00:55:16 Does this change from city to city?
00:57:27 Does sex, love, and attachment always happen in that order?
01:05:04 What are the findings of your work?

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/helen-fisher-science-of-love/

Helen E. Fisher, Ph.D. biological anthropologist, was a Senior Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, and a Member of the Center For Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She wrote six books on the evolution, biology, and psychology of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the neural chemistry of romantic love and attachment, human biologically-based personality styles, why we fall in love with one person rather than another, hooking up, friends with benefits, living together and other current trends, and the future of relationships — what she called: slow love.
 

* * * * *

Fisher had a short marriage early in life and then three long-term relationships later on. Then late in life, against all expectations, she got married again, and against all expectation. At 49:52 she notes:

How is this different? and I saw a little note that I had written to myself right after we got married and stuffed into that drawer. And I found it about a week ago. On the note it said “I married for adventure. He married for union.” And I looked at that note and I realized I found union and he found adventure. And I’ve asked him many times “How is it different?” And he says to me “It’s richer It’s deeper.” And I think that’s as good as I can get on it. It is richer. It is deeper.

Sex/Life, gender inversions of old themes [Media Notes 162A]

Over the last two weeks or so I worked my way through a Netflix series, Sex/Life:

is an American erotic drama television series created by Stacy Rukeyser for Netflix. The series is inspired by the novel 44 Chapters About 4 Men by BB Easton and it premiered on June 25, 2021. In September 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which was released on March 2, 2023. In April 2023, the series was canceled after two seasons

Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about its reception:

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 21% approval rating with an average rating of 5.5/10, based on 24 critic reviews. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Suffocating its more provocative ideas with steamy interludes and melodramatic writing, this erotic drama is too obsessed with sex to ever fully come to life.” Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 45 out of 100 based on 11 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.

When I read that after having seen the first or second episode, I was not exactly inspired to binge watch the rest.

And indeed I did not. But I somehow worked my way through to the end, one, two, or even three episodes at a time. And I’m glad I did, not because they finally pulled it off. They didn’t. But for what they attempted, that’s interesting. The principles in the series are confused. That’s OK. That’s standard. But the folks who made Sex/Life are confused as well. That’s not OK. But it’s interesting.

What’s going on here

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the first episode, “The Wives are in Connecticut”:

Billie Connelly is a housewife living in Connecticut, married to her husband Cooper and with two young children. While loving her husband and family, Billie cannot stop herself from consistently reminiscing about her past as a wild party girl. The longing for her previous life grows ever stronger as her relationship with Cooper continues to disappoint her sexually. Despite the counsel of her best friend Sasha, Billie also keeps thinking back to her former relationship with Brad, a record producer. Billie documents her desires on her laptop, and this is discovered one morning by Cooper, leading the two to have passionate sex for the first time in years. However, after Cooper leaves for work, Billie impulsively goes to New York City to confide her feelings to Sasha. Upon arrival, Billie is left devastated when she sees Sasha slept with Brad the previous night.

That is to say, Billie is caught between good husband, father, and provider, Cooper, and hot bad/boy ex-lover, Brad. Now, that’s interesting. Why? Because it inverts a situation that Freud described early in the 20th century, where a men are often split between a woman they ravish sexually and a woman they marry and have children with – the Madonna/whore syndrome. A woman can be one or the other, but not both.

In this case it’s the woman who is thus split, between good-man hubby and bad-boy boyfriend. Freud and many thereafter assumed that this split was inherent in human nature. If so, then how can we possibly have a series where the shoe is on the other foot, as it were? Either Sex/Life is a complete fabrication, or Freud was wrong, along with many others. I think Freud was wrong about human nature. And, this being the 21st century and this is Netflix, we even have a scene where Cooper tries, and fails, at a sexual practice called “coital alignment technique,” of which bad-boy Brad was a master (S1, e5). [If you’re curious, read the Wikipedia entry and search YouTube for instructional videos. It’s not rocket science.]

And then there’s best-friend Sasha, who is a successful academic and single. Earlier in her life she had a choice between following her lover to graduate school on the West Coast or staying east to finish her own education. She chose to stay east. This inverts another trope, the man who’s split between the career on which his identity is staked and the woman he loves. In this case it’s the woman who is thus split.

Where Sex/Life fails is that, in the last episode, it all works out. Billy gets to marry Brad, who’s no longer bad-boy, and is in fact a dad, with another woman, a model who divorced him. And Sasha gets her old love-of-her-life boyfriend, who gives up his job to be with her. And, yes, good old Cooper is taken care of as well. So, we get to be happy for them, but we haven’t got the foggiest how that all happened. Or, rather, we have ideas, but they're all foggy.

As one commentator put it:

...the tale has many inconsistencies. Truthfully, it is impossible for values to change and advance at this rate. Additionally, this season’s conclusion leaves a bitter aftertaste, as Billie gets back with her toxic ex, Brad.

It seems like it’s high time for shows to tell stories that accurately depict relationships, or at the very least, reveal how unhealthily connected people don’t yield desirable results. Towards the end, this show achieves none of these things. In actuality, it encourages and directs the viewers to tolerate unhealthy relationships.

Can we work it out?

I think so, though don’t ask me to work it out here and now. But I will make some observations.

There’s a name for the problem, or at least one aspect of it: essentialism. That’s the idea that things, including men and woman, have an irreducible and ineradicable nature, an essence. Madonna and whore are two essentialist views of women while bad-boy and good-hubby are essentialist views of men. Why not drop the essentialism and allow both men and women to embody both bundles of behavioral traits?

If it were that easy, we’d have done it long ago. Why’s it troublesome? Because the problem is not fundamentally a logical puzzle to be solved by the rational part of our minds. It’s a problem lodged in the so-called lizard brain, where attachment (Madonna, good-hubby) is one behavioral system while sexual passion (whore, bad boy) is another. I think if we examine the ethological literature on our primate ancestors – here I’m shooting from the hip; it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that literature – we’ll find that they have no need to combine the two systems into a coordinated way of interacting with a member of the opposite sex. Adults do not form long-term monogamous pair bonds. Thus the problem does not arise.

Humans do, or at least that has been the ideal in Western society (and in others as well) going back to the early modern era. Shakespeare wrestled with the problem in many of his plays, something I examined (and in terms of modern “evolutionary psychology,” though I didn’t use the term) in an essay I published three decades ago: At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? [I’ve appended the abstract as an appendix.] But I don’t think he came up with a viable solution. Why do I say that? Because it he had done so, half a century ago, the problem would not be with us today. Obviously enough, it is.

Bonus: An exercise for the reader: Compare this series with The Seven Year Itch (1955), which starred Marilyn Monroe. It dealt with the issue by some very clever flim-flammery which simply denied that men and women seeking active sex lives were at all problematic, or perhaps even real. For extra credit, follow the problematic through Mad Men.

Appendix: How Shakespeare struggled with the problem

Abstract: The plots in three of Shakespeare's plays are launched by the same device: the protagonist mistakenly believes that his beloved has betrayed him. One of these plays is a comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, one a tragedy, Othello, and one a romance, The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare thus considered this one problematic situation, which has to do with a male difficulty in accepting one's beloved as both a sexual and a nurturing person, at three times in his life and produced different kinds of plays. By looking at his career through modern studies of adult development, we can see that the shift from one genre to another follows the reorganization of Shakespeare's psyche. The ultimate fruit of that development is Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, whose protagonist, Prospero, has managed to integrate those aspects of himself which had been in conflict in earlier plays. If we then place Shakespeare's career in a broader psycho-historical context we can see how he helped make the modern nuclear family psychologically possible. 

Finally....

I note, as an afterthought, that plays to my current hobbyhorse project, Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena, I note that in a world where social organization is dominated by Homo economicus, “whores” and “bad-boys” will always be a threat to society and so will always be marginalized. It is quite possible that in such a society, this problematic cannot be satisfactorily resolved.

I follow that thought in a new post: Sex/Life: I don’t buy it. [Media Notes 162B] {Blame it on Homo economicus}

Magic Mike XXL [Media Notes 159]

As I watched Magic Mike XXL on Netflix the other night I realized that I’d seen it when it first came out in theaters, 2015. I don’t know what I thought about it then, but this time, I know: WTF?

I know almost nothing about the world of male strippers. Oh, I’ve seen them show up on TV shows and movies now and then. You know, a policeman or fireman shows up somewhere, a party perhaps, with a boom box. They put it down, and start dancing, wiggling their hips in and out and around and around and zip! Off comes their pants and we’re down to a gyrating jockstrap on legs. But what they’re like in clubs, clubs frequented by women, or how a troop of them perform, I haven’t a clue.

Thus I don’t know how to calibrate this movie. Is it a complete made-up fantasy? Probably not. But I don’t know where the reality is. That’s my problem.

The story is simple. A troop of male strippers from Tampa had disbanded three years ago. They decided to get back together so they can perform at a male stripping convention in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The movie follows them on the road and at the convention where, of course, they are triumphant.

Of course they have adventures, the kind of adventures you’d expect from a troop of male strippers for whom stripping is very important, (almost) existentially so, which I can understand. I am after all a musician, with a great deal of performing experience. Playing music, fully clothed, on stage in a concert hall, in a bar, or club, is different from stripping. But when you get deep into the psychological core of what’s going it, it’s not as different as you might think.

On the performing surface, that’s a lot different. A lot. Musicians generally don’t grab members of the audience, sit them down on stage, dance in front of them, and then pick them up and toss them over their head. Do male strippers actually do that? Perhaps they do, perhaps they do. The ones in this movie certainly did.

Here’s my favorite sequence from the movie, as described in the Wikipedia entry:

Arriving at a mansion, Tito tells them he knows the girl who lives there, and she is expecting them. Walking in, they are greeted by her mother Nancy and her friends, all middle-aged women. Nancy's teasing initially makes them feel awkward, but as the night progresses, the mood lightens. Mike meets Zoe again, and she tells him about how another photographer, under the guise of needing an assistant, tried to have an extramarital affair with her. Mike urges her to regain her smile at the convention.

After sleeping with Richie, Nancy lets them drive her ex-husband's car to Myrtle Beach.

Now I’ve never been in that situation, a mansion, a half-dozen middle-aged women feeling neglected, wine, music, and talk. Nancy, owner of the mansion, and Richie, one of the strippers, I get that.

It’s when we get to the convention that I get lost. The guys do have some kind of act worked out – though they abandoned their policeman’s and fireman’s uniforms along the way and have different costumes – and the act is elaborate enough that an emcee is required.

Each guy gets his turn on the stage. And the women are yelling and screaming. And each guy – I think it was each guy, but maybe not, it doesn’t matter – brings a woman up and dances to, for, and with her, with a suitable ration of athletic tossing and turning.

What I’m having trouble with is all the “queen” rhetoric being offered up by the emcee (who is a woman). I don’t remember any specific lines but something like “the queen that you are” seems typical. These guys are performing for women. Fine. And the emcee is saying that they are queens. I don’t know what that’s about.

Oh, yes, there was a game show on TV called Queen for a Day. The contestants each had fallen on hard times. The audience picked the one who’d fallen the hardest, and she’d get prizes, and the losers would get lesser prizes. At the end the host would sign-off: “This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make every woman a queen, for every single day!” This was harmless entertainment.

But males strippers dancing for female Queens, that’s a bit different I’d like to think. In that context the queen rhetoric feels forced and a bit phony. It’s like no one really believes it, but we’re putting on a show.

Well, William Shakespeare knew how to put on a show. Here’s how he described Cleopatra:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

–Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene 2

I would like to think that, when he wrote those lines, Shakespeare had a real woman in mind, perhaps his wife, but who knows, we know so little about him. And, in turn, we know relatively little about Antony and Cleopatra. We know that they were real people and that they had an affair. Beyond that, their feelings and desires, hopes and fears, about those we can only conjecture.

Shakespeare was in the same position. He may have set his play in ancient Egypt and Rome and told his story about real people. But the feelings and desires he gave to them, their hopes and fears, their dreams and motivations, they were his own and of his time.

I would like to think that the hopes, dreams, and attitudes in those six lines about Cleopatra, I would like to think that they are of our time as well. Perhaps we learned them through Shakespeare. But I don’t feel those attitudes in the queen rhetoric of Magic Mike XXL. That rhetoric is but a pale simulacrum of what Shakespeare conveyed without using the word “queen” at all. Am I asking too much of this movie? Probably. But I didn’t write the word “queen” into the script all those times. I can’t help but think that the presence of the word betrays the absence of the feeling, not simply there in the club and on stage – which is only an act. No, the feeling is absent from that world. That’s what bothers me.

Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture

[I'm bumping it yet again in 2024]

Once more I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. Why? It discusses a methodological problem that is of current interest to me.  [2021]

* * * * *

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue because it's one of my favorite posts. FWIW, this is the post that got me my monthly slot at 3 Quarks Daily.

Note: This post grew out of reflection on older earlier post on bundling.

When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins I took a course in Medieval literature and was thoroughly gobsmacked when I learned that romantic love had been invented in 12th century France. Until then I’d believed it to be a human universal – one and only, forever and ever, that was just how it was, no? Well, not quite.

What arose in Medieval Europe is something called Courtly Love, a set of conventions used by high-born men in wooing their lovers. And these lovers were not their wives, nor wives to be. For aristocratic marriage had little to do with personal preference; it was politics. Powerful families would forge alliances by arranging marriages among their young.

In time, over the course of centuries, so the story went, romantic love was transformed from an aristocratic game into a set of conventions used to define the necessary, or at least the ideal, precondition for any marriage. This set of conventions was in place, at least among the middle class, by the time Jane Austen wrote her novels in the early 19th Century. Those conventions have remained more or less in place up to the present, though they’ve become a bit tattered in the last decade or three as a soaring divorce rate has made it abundantly clear that true love does not last forever. That, of course, is not exactly news – why, for example, did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? – but the myth is so attractive that it dies hard.

That was the state of things during my undergraduate years – which coincided with the emergence of feminist activism in the late 1960s. Whatever their personal experience, everyone gave lip service to one and only forever and ever and believed that it was human nature. In that context, then, the revelations of the learned scholars shook my world.

Counter-Revolution

Learned scholars, however, do not constitute a single tribe. Their tribes are many, and often contentious. Even as the literati were blissfully proclaiming the recent and Western origin of romantic love, other scholars set out to prove them wrong. In 1992, for example, W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer published “A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love” (Ethnology 31: 149-155). They defined romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future” and they contrasted this with “the companionship phase of love . . . which is characterized by the growth of a more peaceful, comfortable, and fulfilling relationship.” They examined ethnographic data on 166 societies from around the world and discovered romantic love in 88.5 percent of them, suggesting “that romantic love constitutes a human universal, or at the least a near-universal.”

More recently Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland published Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? (Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006). They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales from 79 cultures and found at least one reference to romantic love in 55 of those collections and multiple references in 39 collections. They assert that their study “offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal.” “Statistical universal” is a term of art meaning that something is in a lot of places, but not everywhere, yet. It seems clear that if Gottschall and Nordland were to place a bet, they'd bet that further research would find that romantic love is a true cultural universal, present in every culture for which we have reliable records.

Still more recently, just yesterday in the time-scale of academic publishing, Brian Boyd has asserted, with the calm assurance of a senior scholar in command of wide learning, that “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (The Origin of Stories, Harvard 2009, p. 341). To this, Michael Bérubé has replied, with the calm assurance of a senior scholar in command of wide learning, but learning leavened with a dash of school-boy wit:

This just won’t wash. Other species might court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.

What’s going on here? Who’s right?

Back to the Drawing Board: There's that pesky elephant

I don’t know. We don’t know. Not any more.

I’m inclined to invoke that hoary old story of the blind men who, upon examining a large beast, are unable to decided what beast it is, or even whether or not it is a beast at all. We, of course, know that they’re examining an elephant, but such different parts of the elephant – tusks, years, legs, tail – that they reach vastly different conclusions about the object under scrutiny.

In the case of romantic love, I believe we’re in much the same position as those blind men. But, in our case, there is no transcendent story-teller who actually knows what creature is under scrutiny. Rather, it is up to us to approximate that story-teller by making more and more sophisticated observations and examining them through richer concepts and models about human culture and behavior.

There is no point in continuing to argue using existing observations, methods, and theories. In light of the existing contretemps we would do well to consider such arguments to be ideological in nature and thus pointless, except, of course, to all-knowing ideologues. Meanwhile, let’s take a look around and see what else is there to be explained.

Companionship, Conversation, and the Novel

Let’s return to Jankowiak and Fischer, and their contrast between the romantic phase and the companionship phase of love, a distinction, I believe, that is common, and which I accept. This companionship, is it too universal?

Take those Medieval aristocrats who were playing courtship games on the side: Did they have a companionate relationship with their spouses? I’m guessing that in some cases, yes, and in other cases no. These marriages, after all, were arranged by parents for political ends. If companionship developed in the marriage, fine; if not, no big deal. For companionship was not the point, it was not part of the ideology.

And then we have my standard passage from John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Preface to Book 1:

God in the first ordaining of marriage taught us to what end he did it, in words expressly implying the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in dignity, though not in necessity: yet now, if any two be but once handed in the church, and have tasted in any sort the nuptial bed, let them find themselves never so mistaken in their dispositions through any error, concealment, or misadventure, that through their different tempers, thoughts and constitutions, they can neither be to one another a remedy against loneliness nor live in any union or contentment all their days…

That strikes me as an assertion of the need for companionship between spouses – cheerful conversation – and a rather emphatic assertion at that. Would Milton have made such an assertion if it had, in fact, been the common understanding of the day? That seems unlikely to me, though I could be wrong, as I am not a scholar of 17th century English family practices.

But the late Lawrence Stone was, and in 1977 he published a ground-breaking study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Harper & Row) in which he argued that, over a period of three centuries, family organization underwent a transition that started with the Open Lineage Family – permeable by outside influences, with strong “loyalty to ancestors and to living kind” (p. 4). It was succeeded by the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family P. 7):

which saw the decline of loyalties to lineage, kin, patron, and local community as they were increasingly replaced by more universalistic loyalties to the nation state and its head and to a particular sect or Church. As a result, ‘boundary awareness’ became more exclusively confined to the nuclear family, which consequently became more closed off from external influences, either or the kin or of the community.

Finally, during the last half of the 19th Century, the Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family emerges among “the upper bourgeoisie and squirarchy” (pp. 7-8):

This was the decisive shift, for this new type of family was the product of the rise of Affective Individualism. It was a family organized around the principle of personal autonomy, and bound together by strong affective ties. Husbands and wives personally selected each other rather than obeying parental wishes, and their prime motives were now long-term personal affection rather than economic or status advantage for the lineage as a whole … Patriarchical attitudes within the home markedly declined, and greater autonomy was granted not only to children, but also to wives.

This was a family in which companionship between husband and wife was important, for that companionship was now the foundation of family organization. And this is the family structure that is at the heart of the British novel in the late 18th century and into the 19th century. The novel and the family structure had a reciprocal relationship (dialectical?) in which the demands of this family structure created an audience for the novel and the novel, in turn articulated the inner-workings and hidden designs of the family.

Out of what biological equipment did the novel help people construct their familial relations? Let us speculate, and freely – for what else can we do? If we’re to search for evidence, we’ve got to make a guess about what we’re looking for before there’s any point to setting out. However, we do want our speculation to be biologically plausible. So, calling on chess as a metaphor, let’s select our pieces from biology while our speculation will be the game play.