There’s some are fou o’ love divine;
There’s some are fou o’ brandy;
An’monie jobs that day begin,
May end in houghmagandie.*
‘The Holy Fair’
In 1652, the Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini put the finishing touches to his latest commission in the Cornaro chapel in the rather undistinguished church of Santa Maria della Vittoria on the Via XX Settembre in central Rome. His Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila, an elaborate grouping of the Spanish mystic swooning before an angel after a vision of the face of God, was to become one of the high masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. To be honest, Bernini had been in a bit of a pique when he made it. He had been the favoured artist of the Barberini family, and in particular of Cardinal Matteo Barberini when this august personage was elevated to the papal throne in 1623 as Pope Urban VIII. When Urban died in 1644, his successor, Innocent X, was of an altogether different cut. He was less enthusiastic about Bernini’s skills and much preferred those of the sculptor Francesco Borromini. The papal commissions dried up and Bernini simmered in his studio. In due course, the Venetian cardinal Federico Cornaro began to ponder his own mortality and think about preparing a suitable tomb for himself. So he commissioned Bernini to sculpt an uplifting piece of artwork for the church where he planned to be buried. Some say that Bernini’s intensely erotic setting of St Teresa’s vision of God was a deliberate thumbing of his nose at a pope who had eschewed his talents in favour of his arch rival.
Be that as it may, Bernini’s Ecstasy is not only exquisite as a sculpture, it is also indicative of something far more interesting – namely, the fact that religious ecstasy bears more than a passing resemblance to the more secular forms of being in love. It has all the same hallmarks – the obsessively focused attention, the dreamy ‘faraway’ appearance, the internal anguish, the disinterest in worldly things like food and even sleep. At least within the Christian tradition, there has long been a tradition of mystical love for saints, the Virgin Mary, even God himself. Such relationships are not sexually consummated, of course, but they have that same feel of unrequited love.
The mystical tradition in Christianity has a very long history. Barely a century after the crucifixion of Jesus, Montanus developed an ecstatic form of Christian mysticisminthe deserts of North Africa. According to Montanus, ecstatic states gave humans direct access to God. Humans were, he opined, no more than lyres that God strummed. Though Montanus was regarded with inevitable suspicion by the mainstream hierarchy in the cities, the centuries that followed witnessed a veritable flood of individuals who took to the desert and its mystical experiences, sparked by his example. So important did many of these ascetics become that they eventually acquired the title of the Desert Fathers, among whom St Anthony was but the first among many equals. Here, in the shimmering light of the desert, they meditated and developed mystical practices that would probably not have come so naturally in the dank, rainy climate of Europe’s crowded towns.
It was a movement destined to grow and prosper throughout early Christendom. Among the names associated with this mystical tradition in later centuries are the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Meister Eckhart, the iconic St Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen (she of I am but a feather on the breath of God fame, and composer of much fine music), the fifteenth-century Englishwoman Margery Kempe, and, of course, St Teresa of Avila herself. In our own times, the tradition continues with the Capuchin friar Padre Pio and the late nineteenth-century Italian St Gemma Galgani. Read any of their writings and you have the clear sense of their being deeply in love with Jesus Christ himself. Here is the nineteenth-century St Thérèse of Lisieux in her Story of a Soul: ‘How lovely it was, that first kiss of Jesus in my heart – it was truly a kiss of love. I knew that I was loved, and said, “I love You, and I give myself to You for ever.”’ And then, later:
In a transport of ecstatic joy I cried: ‘Jesus, my love, I have at last found my vocation: it is love.’ . . . I have used the term ‘ecstatic joy’ but this is not quite correct, for it is above all peace which is now my lot; the calm security of the sailor in sight of the beacon guiding him to port. Ah! Love, my radiant beacon light, I know the way to reach You now, and I have found the hidden secret of making all Your flames my own!
It is impossible to read The Story of a Soul without being struck by the overwhelming sense of passionate, unrequited love, of an extraordinary desperation to be with and please that one special person, to do things for him, to bear endless sufferings, small and large, as gifts for him.
It is not hard to see the ecstatic aspects of religion as spilling over from conventional everyday falling in love. The difference is simply that we are falling in love with someone who doesn’t actually exist – or who, in the case of someone like the Virgin Mary or many of the saints or even Jesus himself, did exist but are long since dead. Somehow the same buttons are being pressed, perhaps because when we fall in love with a real person we are actually falling in love with a fiction of our own minds.
Alas, some have taken all this far too literally. Tanchelm of Antwerp was a hugely successful (indeed, much idolised) itinerant preacher who attracted enormous crowds in the Low Countries during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. So besotted was he both with his own fame and with the Virgin Mary, he eventually held a magnificent ceremony in a field attended by thousands of his followers to celebrate his betrothal to the good lady. (Unfortunately, it seems that she was busy elsewhere that day, so a sacred statue was conveniently found to stand in for her.) He was the medieval equivalent of today’s televangelists, able to whip up enormous crowds into a fervour of excitement.
This sense of being in love with God is not unique to Christianity: it occurs in the other Abrahamic religions. Nothing is more exquisite than the love poems that provide the core to the qawwali tradition in Sufi Islam. Sufism represents the mystical dimension of Islam, and, like most mystical sects in the Abrahamic religions (the Kabbalah in Judaism, the Gnostics in Christianity), was regarded with suspicion leading to outright persecution by mainstream sects. The qawwali tradition of Pakistan and Iran, exemplified by its greatest recent exponent in the form of the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, is a form of singing that uses driving rhythms and ancient love poems to bring the singer and listeners to a state of ecstatic joy. Many of these poems are traditional ghazals, an ancient poetic form dating back to the pre-Islamic Arabic of the sixth century that expresses both the pain of loss and separation and the beauty of love. What gives the ghazals their power is the ambiguity inherent in their words, for the poems can be read as carnal love poems or expressions of an ethereal and pure love for God.
Kali kali zulphon ke phande nah dalo
Oh you with such beautiful, long black hair,
don’t ensnare me in your bewitching net,
pleads the singer, adding:
The glance that pierces
tranquillises the heart;
spread the shadows of your tresses
to make the darkness pleasing.
And again:
Meri ankhon ko bakhshe hain aansoo
You have brought tears to my eyes . . .
I asked for love but received only sorrow.
Or, in the slightly coy words of the Old Testament ‘Song of Songs’, perhaps the most extraordinary love poem – or, more plausibly, series of love poems – ever written, included in the Christian Bible no doubt because it can be interpreted (rather doubtfully, to be honest) as being addressed to God:
I opened to my beloved,
But my beloved had turned and gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.
I sought him, but found him not;
I called to him, but he gave no answer.
It seems that this sense of ecstatic religious love can spill over terribly easily into something altogether less other-worldly – explicit sex. For all its metaphysical and moral connotations, religion in general seems to have a surprisingly intimate relationship with sex. At least according to folk wisdom, sexual acts have a special place in the rituals of many pagan and not-so-pagan religions. In the European tradition, for example, sex has a notorious association with witchcraft (intercourse with the devil traditionally being one of the identifying hallmarks of a witch); in the more modern revivals of ancient European pagan religions, ceremonies are sometimes carried out naked and end with the celebrants coupling freely (or at least, so the more lascivious tabloids would have us believe).
Given this, it is perhaps no surprise that sex has slipped into the edges of mainstream religion with monotonous frequency. In late medieval Europe, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Klaus Ludwig’s Chriesterung movement and the Münster Anabaptists all advocated free love. Each of these attracted tens of thousands of followers in their respective heydays, to the point of being considered a serious threat by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Despite mainstream Christianity’s attempts to wipe them out, the Anabaptists and the Free Spiriters survived as cults for several centuries, eventually giving rise to numerous descendents – though it must be said that not all of these now advocate sex as the route to heavenly bliss. The Anabaptists, for example, gave rise to several morally upright sects, not least among whom are the contemporary Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites. On the other hand, some of the descendents of the Free Spirit movement took the sect’s ancestral doctrines to heart. Among these were the Ranters, who were prominent in England during the Cromwellian Commonwealth of the 1650s; they provide clear evidence from their own writings that the ubiquitous accusations of promiscuity were not entirely propaganda by their opponents.
In Orthodox Russia, it was said that, even as late as the nineteenth century, the rituals of the Khlysty sect involved celebrants dancing themselves into a frenzy round a fire or tub of water chanting hymns until, in a state of ecstasy and near-collapse, they coupled freely. Hindu temples are, of course, notoriously decorated with copulating couples, sometimes intertwined in quite the most imaginative of poses – a factor that no doubt contributed to the enthusiasm with which some Western youth joined Indian religious communes during the 1960s.
Perhaps, on reflection, we ought not to be too surprised by the fact that sex spills over into religion. After all, sex spills over into almost every aspect of human life, especially in those areas that involve an intensity of experience. The surge of endorphins and other neurochemicals associated with ecstatic experiences seems to make us feel especially warm and responsive towards those with whom we are doing the relevant activity, such that only the most stern of religious and moral strictures will suffice to keep the lid on our emotions and us on the straight and narrow. But in the absence of such controls, matters can easily spiral out of control. There you are, coolly minding your own business, when suddenly your hormones take over and flip you into a completely different state of mind. How often have you said: ‘I didn’t really intend to, but . . .’? Against your better judgement, the neuroendocrines have lifted you up and thrown you helter-skeltering uncontrollably down the slope into surrender.
Of more interest to our immediate concerns, however, is the role that the charisma and sexual attractiveness of a movement’s founder play in its success. Women featured prominently in the entourages of many of the medieval Christian sects, including those of Tanchelm of Antwerp and the Free Spiriters. Jan Brockelson, the last leader of the Münster Anabaptist community before it was destroyed in 1535, had to shoulder the holy burden of servicing no fewer than fifteen women towards the end of his career (and that didn’t include the wife he left behind in the Low Countries).
Although the more established Christian churches have, of course, been at pains to discourage sexual antics of this kind, there have been some spectacular examples of individual members of mainstream churches who have indulged this particular aspect of their religious vocation with particular enthusiasm. Not least among these were the Renaissance popes, the most infamous of whom was unquestionably the Borgia pope Alexander VI – widely credited with having fathered a child by his own daughter, as well as having many other illegitimate offspring, one of whom he appointed a cardinal at the tender age of eighteen (the boy had already been bishop of Pamplona for three years by then). In more modern times, we have become used to the steady string of TV evangelists whose peccadilloes have eventually been their undoing: Billy James Hargis, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Earl Paulk and Tony Alamo all became memorable for quite the wrong reasons.
But there are also many historical examples that were just as infamous in their own times. In Victorian England, the Reverend Henry Prince’s sermons attracted large crowds of adoring female disciples, until the disapproval of his bishop led him first to declare himself the Prophet Elijah (he later reconsidered the wisdom of this and elevated himself to God instead . . .) and then to abandon the stuffiness of the Victorian Church of England altogether in favour of setting up his own religious emporium of some sixty followers – mostly women, whom he christened, with stunning lack of irony, the ‘Brides of the Lord’. In the dying days of Tsarist Russia, the ‘Mad Monk’ Rasputin acquired a reputation both for his capacities as a healer and for his influence over women, not least the Tsarina Alexandra and the ladies of the court. There were dark tales of sexual innuendo.
The leaders of breakaway sects have typically been less than coy about these things. John Humphrey Noyes was not known as ‘Father Noyes’ for nothing within the Oneida Community that he founded in 1848 in upstate New York: after the age of fifty-eight, he fathered at least eight children. In the early part of the twentieth century, Joshua the Second (he was originally christened Franz Creffield), Krishna Ventra (formerly known as Francis Pencovic) and Brother Twelfth (his baptismal entry reads, rather prosaically, Edward Arthur Wilson) all applied themselves earnestly to God’s work among their willing female disciples. Famously, on 17 July 1831 Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (better known as the Mormons), had a most convenient revelation from God instructing him that men should marry polygamously – or as God put it rather more delicately, engage in ‘plural marriage’. It is said that the revelation came about because his wife Emma was less than enthusiastic about his suggestion one evening that he should take on a second wife. Luckily, God came to his rescue and issued an edict, and she could hardly gainsay it once God became involved. Smith duly took his duties very seriously and allegedly married thirty women ranging in age from fourteen to forty, no fewer than a third of whom were already married to other men.
Continuing this hallowed tradition into modern times, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians claimed to have fathered at least twenty-one children in the community, mostly, it is said, by virtue of claiming the right to sleep with each and every woman in his church, whether or not they were married to another member of the congregation. Astonishingly, the husbands seem to have accepted this practice as enthusiastically as their wives. Then there is the justifiably infamous Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, dubbed the ‘sex guru’, of the Oregon Rajneeshpuram. He was said to have been so charismatic (at least in his younger days) that many of his women followers fell in love with him just hearing him speak.
Why are women so especially drawn to these individuals and why do these men behave in this way? The easy answer might be that women are more religious than men, and so more easily influenced. That is certainly a truism, but it doesn’t really explain why women should be willing to do more than just worship. One answer might lie in something much more fundamental: the fact that, as we saw in Chapter 4, status – and the wealth that is usually closely associated with status – is an important (though by no means the only) factor in women’s mate-choice strategies. I am not, of course, suggesting that religion arose as a by-product of human courtship. Nor am I suggesting that the only thing that motivates men’s interest in religion is the reproductive benefits they might obtain thereby. But I am suggesting that religion has often been exploited for nakedly sexual purposes. And it has been so because men have discovered that it is a strategy that seems to work with remarkable ease. It looks suspiciously like another example of the work of sexual selection – able to exploit phenomena with remarkable ease whenever there is some trait that enables judgements to be made about different individuals’ qualities as mates.
One question this raises is whether men have been able to exploit this particular loophole because women are more religiously minded than men are, and are thus more likely to be swayed by pre-eminence in this particular arena. Folk wisdom suggests that, despite the fact that men outnumber women as priests and religious authority figures, women are the mainstay of congregations in almost all religions, and this is backed up by research suggesting that women are more likely than men to be involved in religious activities. It’s conspicuous that as religion has ceased to be a route to preferment (as has been the case for most mainline religions in the West), so men have lost interest in careers as religious specialists. Vocations from men for the mainline Christian churches have dropped like a stone in the past half-century, triggering an increasing acceptance of women being allowed to train for the priesthood. Perhaps not surprisingly, men still seem to dominate the stage in the more charismatic sects, however.
One reason for women’s greater interest in religion might be their greater emotional and social sensitivity. Women express emotion more intensely than men, not only in terms of self-report, but also in terms of facial expression and physiological responses (e.g. galvanic skin conductance), and especially so in the expression of negative emotions like sadness and disgust. It has often been claimed that women’s greater emotional reactiveness is a product of how they are socialised, and while this may well be true up to a point, there are good reasons for believing that socialisation merely exaggerates existing biological differences. Recent brain-scan studies have shown that men and women respond differently to emotional cues in terms of which parts of the brain are active, and this ties in with evidence that women respond more deeply than men to emotional events. For example, although the brains of both men and women respond with bursts of activity when thinking about sad events, women’s responses are many times more intense than men’s responses and tend to involve both hemispheres of the brain more completely. Women also score significantly better than men on advanced mentalising (theory of mind) tests. One consequence of this may be that women are both more sensitive than men to reflective anxieties about the vagaries of everyday life and the uncertainties of the future, and better able to reflect on other people’s mind states. As a result, women may be more prone to seek structures and processes like religion that bolster their ability to cope with these anxieties. Given the role that religion plays in this respect, these effects would tend to make women more susceptible to religious persuasion.
A second predisposing factor is probably the fact that charisma is a major issue in women’s mate-searching strategies. Charismatic individuals, whether political or religious leaders, sports stars, musicians or even occasionally writers, seem to be especially attractive, and notoriously so in the case of male pop icons who continue to attract more than their fair share of free sex. The reasons for their attractiveness might be either something to do with their status (and hence potential wealth) or their good genes (as implied by their intellectual or physical skills). So powerful is this effect that it seems to generalise even to virtual individuals such as God. This extension of the natural processes of being attracted to someone, or falling in love, to virtual individuals may be a consequence of the fact that when we do this in everyday life we are in fact constructing a vision of the person in our minds. In other words, we are falling in love with an image we have constructed that is only partly informed by what is actually in front of us. I’ll say more about this in the next chapter when I consider falling in love on the Internet.
A third factor may be women’s greater tendency to commit themselves to a prospective mate. Although folk wisdom suggests that human courtship involves ardent males courting coy choosy females, the reality is that the business of choosing mates is a two-way process. Both sexes have a great deal at stake, even though their strategies for achieving the desired end (netting the best partner available) may be quite different, as may be the ends that they seek to achieve. Men do court and women do choose (and women’s decisions are probably made more carefully than men’s, as Chapter 4 suggested). Nonetheless, women can become very committed and persistent in their pursuit of individual males once they have made their minds up. Men are typically not quite as focused in their courtship strategies, and give up more easily if they feel they are unlikely to succeed.
Neuroimaging has begun to provide some insights into the processes involved. A recent neuroimaging study revealed that when people are thinking about God or other spiritual beings, the same areas of brain are active as are involved in mentalising (see Chapter 3). Clearly, we see spiritual beings as real people. Some years ago, Andrew Newberg (a neuroscientist) and Eugene d’Aquili (an anthropologist) found that individuals in the state of religious ecstasy produced during meditation have a unique pattern of brain activation. They show greatly reduced levels of activity in the left posterior parietal lobe (in effect, near-complete shutdown) and a great deal of generalised activity in the right hemisphere, usually associated with more unconscious, emotional responses. The area of the parietal lobe that appears to shut down during mystical states is known to be implicated in our sense of spatial self, and this almost certainly accounts for the sense of detachment from the real world that is associated with states of ecstasy. Newberg and d’Aquili argued that when the neurons in the parietal lobe start to shut down, they release a series of impulses via the limbic system (the amygdala again) to the hypothalamus, which sets up a feedback loop between itself, the attention areas in the frontal cortex (which are normally responsible for inhibiting the parietal lobe neuron bundles) and the parietal lobe. As this cycle builds, it leads to the complete shutdown of the spatial awareness neural circuits, generating as it does so the burst of ecstatic liberation in which we seem to be united with the Infinity of Being that is so characteristic of entering a trance state. They labelled this bundle of neurones in the parietal lobe the ‘God spot’.
The fact that the hypothalamus is involved rather suggests that endorphins might also be implicated: this is, after all, the main location where endorphins are produced. More importantly, many religious practices (and especially those involved in effecting trance states) involve pain and physical stress on the body. In some cases, it may involve the deliberate infliction of pain. The most infamous case in Christianity is, of course, the medieval flagellants who toured Europe during the Black Death, whipping themselves into a frenzy and attracting huge crowds in the process. Penitential discipline has a long tradition in Catholic monasticism, for both men and women, where ‘the discipline’ referred to the knotted cord cat-o’-nine-tails traditionally used during private prayer. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, the above-mentioned Khlysty (‘flagellators’) and the Skoptzy (‘mutilators’) sects aimed to achieve a state of religious ecstasy through self-imposed pain. (Since Skoptzy practices involved such things as slicing off women’s breasts, they had, needless to say, a relatively short-lived popularity. The more moderate Khlysty sect, however, had a long history from as early as the 1360s until as late as the 1890s.)
These practices are by no means confined to Christendom, of course. Islam has its own versions. The so-called ‘whirling dervishes’ of the Mevlevi order, which dates back to ad 1273, dance themselves into an ecstatic frenzy using a mesmeric gentle twirling motion. More extreme are the ‘howling dervishes’ of the Refa’i order, founded by a descendent of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, who slash at themselves with knives or pierce their bodies. These are best known for the annual Shia ceremony of Ashura that celebrates Hussein’s martyrdom at Karbala in modern-day Iraq in October of ad 680. The massed ranks of penitents process through the town to his shrine, whipping themselves over their shoulders to the point of drawing blood.
Other recent neuroimaging studies suggest that religious belief states (and especially beliefs about God’s surprisingly emotional responses to our behaviour) engage many of the same brain units involved in theory of mind. An important finding for present purposes is that religious knowledge and religious experience seem to activate different areas of the brain. Religious knowledge activates areas in the temporal lobe (adjacent to the ears), whereas religious experience activates areas in the left frontal lobe and the parietal and temporal lobes. The first probably reflects the co-ordination of associations between intellectual facts, whereas the second might be more closely related to the areas that underpin theory of mind and mentalising.
As a generality that brooks almost no exceptions, it seems that this falling in love business is always directed at one individual. We seem to find it genuinely difficult to fall in love with two people at the same time. In some cases, this focus on one person can, however, be taken to extremes, producing a rare but well recognised condition known as de Clérambault’s syndrome, after the French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault who first described it in 1921. The key symptom of this syndrome, which is about twice as common in women as in men, is that the sufferer has a delusional belief that a particular individual is very much in love with them. This belief is usually so intense that nothing the object of desire says or does will shake it: all attempts to put a stop to the unwelcome attentions of the individual concerned are interpreted as playing hard to get in order to test the suitor’s ardour and resolve. Being rude or angry with the sufferer simply results in them redoubling their efforts, now even more convinced that their initial beliefs about your interest were right. Although this condition is often associated with other psychopathologies earlier in life, it may in fact be just the tip of an iceberg, a reflection of women’s more focused courtship strategies taken to extreme – much as autism is the floating tip of a broader male cognitive style that is naturally less intensely social.
There are some striking sex differences in the incidence of de Clérambault’s syndrome. In men, it typically involves younger, lower-class individuals, and something rather similar can be seen as a form of exaggerated jealousy in younger men who have been abandoned by a romantic partner. In contrast, it tends to occur in older women, and more often women who are or have been married. Men tend to focus their attention on women who are younger than themselves, whereas women typically focus on men who are older or of higher status.
De Clérambault’s syndrome has become a serious problem for celebrities. Among the best-known real-life cases was Margaret Mary Ray’s obsession first with TV host David Letterman and later with the Skylab astronaut Story Musgrave. Ronald Reagan had an unfortunate encounter with the syndrome that nearly cost him his life when John Hinckley Jr tried to assassinate him in a desperate attempt to impress the actress Jodie Foster, whom he had been stalking. Tatiana Tarasoff was less fortunate when her fellow student Prosenjit Poddar stabbed her in an attempt to engineer a situation in which he could seem to rescue her from danger; unfortunately, he misjudged things and killed her. The syndrome has also featured in literature. It is central to the plot of Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, though, unusually, in this case the sufferer and the object of desire are both men. And it has featured in at least three episodes of the CBS Criminal Minds police drama series. And one cannot help feeling, when reading her writings, that St Thérèse of Lisieux at the very least showed tinges of it.
From an evolutionary point of view, this kind of obsession makes a certain sense. Once you have made up your mind whom to take as your lifelong partner, then the best thing is to go for it for all you’re worth. He, or she, who hesitates is lost. Make your intentions as clear as a bell, and keep battering away . . . and, eventually, even the biggest dullard will get the message. Often as not, it’s just the message they need to get: once they realise that you are interested in them, it’s usually all they need to go through that magical instantaneous flip and suddenly capitulate. Persistence is a strategy that often pays off in the mating game. It’s easy to see some advantages to a psychological mindset that in essence says: ‘If you see the perfect partner, just go for him/her before someone else does.’ Although women are impressed by attentiveness, men are probably more easily swayed by persistence – if only because they are usually happier than women to settle for whatever they can get.
In many ways, the problem is created by a combination of circumstances. Life is much too short to waste time searching for Mr or Ms Perfect. There is a fundamental trade-off between continuing to search forever and just getting on with the biological business that all this is about – reproduction. At one level, it probably doesn’t matter too much whom you do your reproducing with, providing they have a half-decent set of genes and aren’t infertile. You probably won’t do significantly better by rejecting an endless series of suitors in the search for the Perfect Mate. While there may be an advantage in not settling for the first prospect you happen to come across, there are diminishing returns to be gained by extending your search for too long. There was a famous set of theoretical analyses in the 1970s which suggested that the optimal strategy was to check out the first thirteen prospective mates you came across and then take the best of the bunch. You were unlikely to do better. Later, Peter Todd and Geoff Miller ran a series of computer simulations and proposed the ‘Try a Dozen’ strategy: check out the first dozen prospective mates you come across, decide which of those is the best, then wait for someone new to come along who outshines them, and go for that one for all you’re worth. Since life is fixed at the other end, delaying longer becomes an increasingly bad option.
There are two reasons why this might be so. One is that the business of mate searching is, as I observed in Chapter 4, a frequency-dependent problem. Even if the Perfect Mate really does exist, they know how perfect they are (if only because everyone is chasing them) and so will only be willing to settle for the Perfect Mate of the opposite sex. They end up with the pick of the bunch. Mr Perfect waits around until he comes across Ms Perfect. Once they have paired up, Mr Next-Most-Perfect settles for Ms Next-Most-Perfect, and so on down the line until it finally gets to you. But since you have held out all this time hoping that Mr or Ms Perfect might be persuaded by your overtures, you have wasted an inordinate amount of time before finally coming to the realisation that you are going to have to settle for what you can get anyway. Meanwhile, your biological clock has been ticking relentlessly, and your reproductive opportunities are dripping away before your eyes like the proverbial sand in the hourglass. In other words, we are biologically programmed to check out only the local corner of the market, and then just get on with it, for a very good reason.
A second reason why this is inevitable is that there is in fact no such thing as the Perfect Mate. They simply don’t exist. Sadly, none of us is so perfect, if only because there are too many dimensions to perfection that are often in fundamental opposition, so that perfection on one dimension can never be satisfied with perfection on another. Psychologically, however, you need to believe they exist so that, once you have made your mind up, you can commit everything to that one person, otherwise you won’t have the staying power to stick with the one you finally decide to settle for – especially once the rosy spectacles of first love fade. Even if you only remain with each one for a brief period before moving on to a new mate, you have to believe that each successive mate is Mr or Ms Perfect. Once you come to realise that this is just an illusion, your lack of commitment and disinterest will be so obvious that only the most besotted will fail to see through you.
• • •
Religious love is safe love. There is little risk that the object of desire will betray you. Like the troubadours of medieval Europe, you can worship your beloved from a distance without the complications and inconveniences of everyday relationships. But even if he (or she) does occasionally let you down, a mild version of de Clérambault’s syndrome allows you to retreat into the belief that your love is simply being tested. This is particularly characteristic of the Abrahamic religions. The Bible is awash with instances in which individuals’ resolve and commitment to God is tested, sometimes in the most extreme ways. Even if God does not himself do it, he allows Satan to do it for him. Those who falter lose the race; those who stand firm in their belief in the Beloved eventually triumph.
But there is another sense in which these relationships are safe. Because it is all in the mind, you can invent the perfect partner. Your dreams can never be contradicted by the intrusion of brute reality. The Beloved is tailor-made for you because you make it so. There need be no blemishes of character or form, because you can construct the Beloved to mirror precisely the traits you long to have in the perfect partner. In the next chapter, we will meet another case of this in the form of virtual reality – love on the Internet.
* Fou: full. Houghmagandie: fornication.