. . . love, is nothing but a blind instinct . . . an appetite which directs us toward one object rather than another without our being able to account for our taste.
—Ninon de L’Enclos (Seventeenth Century)1
Love is like a fever that comes and goes quite independently of the will.
—Stendhal2
The disease that is love brings into conflict our conscious intelligence and our basic will.
—André Maurois3
Another aspect of the pattern is that one falls in love not by design and conscious choice, but according to some accident of fate over which the victim has no control.
—Sidney M. Greenfield (1965)4
The idea that human beings are unique among creatures is so fully accepted that most of us, and throughout most of our history, have spoken of either people or animals, not people and other animals. The absence of “missing links,” either in the anthropological record or in existence at present, is increasingly explained as resulting from a human tendency to destroy closely related species. With a logic and persistence similar to that which finds human beings special and superior, we have also tended to view ourselves as free of such constraints as are imposed on animals through genetic influence on behavior. In contrast with the beast moved by “blind instinct,” human beings are rational and free, acting through our individual inclinations, not because of a wired-in animal necessity uninfluenceable by experience.
But if it were experience alone that makes us what we are—experience and reason—then even the extended time available for human development after birth seems insufficient to produce the effect of the complex emotional and behavioral repertoires shared by humans whatever their culture.
Granting that we do not operate through full-blown instincts in the old-fashioned sense of a complex pattern fully prewired, it is still hard to believe that we do not at least have built-in reactions in our basic natures that mpke the learning of significant strategies for biological survival (evolutionary development) easier than if culture operated on the proverbial blank slate. Furthermore, if any of our behaviors are under direct influence of the genes, surely those related to reproduction are most likely candidates. Consider, for example, the unthinking, involuntary components in our “purely” sexual behavior and reactions. They are sometimes stronger than we are!
Similarity of experience among diverse persons as well as involuntariness suggests that limerence is well rooted—whatever our cultures and lifestyles—in the very nature of our humanness. Consider what possible advantage limerence might bestow on the human who houses its gene.
In many species, mates form attachments that aid survival of resulting offspring. Some mechanism is needed to guide individuals toward potential partners who are suitable. Inclinations must fit biological necessities. In other words, ancestors with the more effective inclinations reproduced themselves and also avoided inbreeding (mating with very close relatives), by overlooking those nearest and dearest both through reason and learned preference. As a response to the immediately invisible but large and transcending inevitabilities that control who gets to live on and who perishes, limerence answers nature’s imperative. Cupid’s arrow bends us to a stronger will.
I have not forgotten that the onset of limerence has a voluntary feel about it. We go readily and willfully toward its promises of joy. It is only later that images of LO intrude unbidden and the mind suddenly cannot be set elsewhere the way a wayward volume might be returned to the bookshelf. Then the long hours of sustained and lovesick reverie can only be relieved by imagining some moment of consummation with LO. Surely even these thoughts emanate from a foolish will, but nevertheless a will. Except that then there comes the time when you have had enough and want to finish it. Rational bases for hopefulness have been exhausted. The intrusions and literal aches of unfulfilled desire and precious wasted moments of life force the recognition that control may not be total. You even wonder about the past when control seemed possible, if not assured. Uncertainty increases. You wonder if you had the control you thought you had and whether you ever will again.
As we have seen, most writers on love talk of madness, and a part of the madness is the victim’s lack of control. Not all call it illogical or abnormal, it must be admitted, but even so strong an advocate as Stendhal spoke of it as a disease. Recovered former limerents tend to agree. Those whose limerence was replaced by affectional bonding with the same partner might say, “We were very much in love when we were married; today we love each other very much.”
When I began my investigations, the multitudinous contradictions in what was said about love suggested that it was capable of appearing in numerous guises depending on time, circumstance, and persons.5 What I found instead is that the condition follows a common course and produces common symptoms. Its ubiquitous sameness across diverse situations was not something I initially perceived. Finally I could no longer deny the data, and was attracted to ideas that had begun to emerge from certain of the biological sciences, especially from the study of hereditary mechanisms and genetic theories, and from new disciplines attempting to cross a traditional barrier between the study of human experience and behavior (psychology) and biology. These new disciplines have been variously called “psychobiology,” “sociobiology,” or “biosocial approaches.”6 Only recently have scientists begun to consider the possibility that over the course of biological history, certain social behavioral tendencies have evolved along with anatomy and physiological structures and systems. According to David P. Barash of the University of Washington, this view has produced what amounts to a “conceptual revolution” in which evolutionary theory will greatly influence the study of human behavior.7
In fact, the relationship between inborn tendencies and environmental (physical and social) influences is complex. Even among lower animals, learning may be involved in the development of basically instinctive reactions.8 Very few complex behavioral reactions are fully programmed in the nervous system.9 The mere existence of a reaction does not imply that it is inborn. On the other hand, evidence suggests a clear genetic base for certain human traits. For example, in a recent survey of sculpture and paintings from various parts of the world and different historical eras, it was found that roughly 93 percent were rendered with the right hand, a proportion maintained regardless of historical era or culture, supplying strong evidence that handedness is not learned but built in.10
At present, study of a possible biological base for limerence would be closely related to a growing scientific field called “ethology,” a branch of biology traditionally concerned with the behavior of animals in natural settings from an evolutionary perspective, and increasingly applied to human beings.11 First ethological attempts at theorizing about humans concern aspects of the reproductive process.12 Courtship, mating, the nature and duration of the pair bonds (if any) that exist between partners, sexual behavior, child rearing—these have tended to be the focus of the many animal studies that are being looked at in light of sociobiological conceptions. Any behavioral pattern observed, whether it be salmon migration, the retrieval of pups that stray from the maternal rat’s nest, courtship displays by certain birds, or limerence in humans, can be considered in the light of how the specific behavior was adaptive; in other words, how did the existence of this pattern increase—or at least not decrease—the chance that the genes controlling it survived in subsequent generations?
Evolution is not an ever continuing drive toward perfection, but an often bungling and inefficient (as well as cruel) series of essentially random accidents. The fundamental principle is disarmingly simple. The inherited you (or genotype) is the product of a “selection” of traits running in a continuous line back from your parents to theirs and on through all the organisms that were your progenitors to the primordial substance in which the spark of life first began on this isolated planet. Step by minute step across the eons of incredible duration, life proliferated and changed through the single essential principle of selection, whereby some hereditary substances endured and others were lost. The “best” was not necessarily the best by any standard except the happenstance of survival.13
The issue here is the possible usefulness of evolutionary concepts to the understanding of limerence. If a behavior or a state is genetically programmed, it is one which enhanced the “fitness” of organisms carrying its controlling gene or genes. Evolutionary theorizing wonders why. What is behind the irrationality that seizes otherwise reasonable human beings, forcing them to set aside other goals and strivings and to focus on a single other individual, who may be of little interest prior to limerence and also of little interest afterward?
In sampling evolutionary thinking, let us consider another type of experience, motion sickness. Psychologist Michel Treisman of the University of Oxford noted that vomiting induced by motion had been viewed as an evolutionary anomaly. Evolutionary theorists usually begin by speculating about hidden advantages, perhaps from a former time, with vestigial carry-over. Yet those species that experience motion sickness (some birds, horses, monkeys, and even certain fish) and those that do not (rabbits, guinea pigs) present a confusing array of possibilities. In what way is a monkey like a codfish but not like a rabbit?
Treisman reasoned that the phenomenon of malaise and vomiting in response to some forms of motion is unlikely to be the result of sheer accident and is in fact so disruptive—sometimes leading to death, as in the case of those people who are unable to hold out on a life raft until help arrives—that one would have expected natural selection to have eliminated it unless there existed positive reason for its persistence. Treisman reasons that the syndrome of malaise and vomiting is inappropriate in the case of motion but highly adaptive when it functions to eliminate ingested poisons. It turns out that certain types of motion create triggering conditions similar to those produced by the ingestion of toxins. Corroborating evidence that it is this fact which is responsible for the existence of an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon is supplied by the finding that motion sickness does not occur in infancy, when food is likely to be free of toxins and also when being carried about is frequent, or in species which subsist on highly specialized diets. Although the malaise that accompanies vomiting does not assist the process of toxin elimination, it serves to teach the organism to stay away from such substances in the future.
Thus vomiting and the malaise are part of an early defense and warning system inappropriate in the case of motion, but lifesaving in the case of toxin ingestion. Treisman’s evolutionary hypothesis is that motion sickness is an accidental by-product of the organism’s response to certain head and eye movements that occur in the case of food poisoning but unfortunately also in the case of certain types of motion.14 Thus evolutionary thinking assists the scientific process of theorizing, and it may become far more complex than simply conjecturing about the “survival value” of the phenomenon observed.
The force behind the way a particular trait functions to permit its own survival through a continual supply of individuals who “carry” it is known as the ultimate cause of the adaptive process. The specific way the trait functions is known as the “mechanism” or proximate cause. For what ultimate cause is the state of limerence a mechanism or proximate cause? Why did limerence evolve and persist, that is, why were people who became limerent successful in passing their genes on to succeeding generations?
To explain why limerence occurs we might consider the behavior it induces. Some limerence-inspired actions, as we have already noted, are generally judged socially undesirable, even socially disruptive. It is often noted that limerence causes couples to remove themselves from the presence of other persons. It deflects interest from affairs of business, state, even family, and turns them instead toward LO. Limerence intrudes. In the midst of battle, the soldier’s despair over the morning’s letter of rejection from his LO back home is not forgotten. A king gives up his crown. An artist lets her career languish while she spends a year overseas accompanying him on a new assignment. But such visible disadvantages should not constitute the sole basis of judgment.
The most consistent result of limerence is mating, not merely sexual interaction but commitment, the establishment of a shared domicile, a cozy nest built for the enjoyment of ecstasy, for reproduction, and, usually, for the rearing of children.15 Fear of rejection, an integral aspect of limerence, may have some adaptive value of its own. In other species, especially in birds, courtship tends to be something of a drawn-out process. In many species, it involves behavior that bears resemblence to the flirtations and game playing of limerents. Ethologists have guessed that the long period of courtship ensures a better ability of the individuals to be sure they have found a satisfactory partner. What we experience as fear of rejection may, in other words, be part of the process that ensures (or at least tends toward) making the process drag out a bit. The fear is the proximate cause. Since limerence goads one toward action, fantasy based in reality (as limerently perceived, but reality nevertheless) can be conceived as intricate strategy planning.
Limerence frees the young from too strong an attachment to the parents. It may not ensure in human beings the kind of permanent monogamy sometimes found in other species, but its average duration of about two years allows a female to become pregnant, bear a child, and begin the new family. The much longer duration of limerence-inspired relationships tends to keep both parents around and cooperating with each other in protecting and caring for the young, at least for a time.16
Not that limerence is the only mechanism in the human system to help the child on its way in life. There is for example an inborn response to characteristics of infants perceived as “cute,” characteristics such as large eyes low in a head somewhat out of proportion, at least out of adult proportion to the rest of the body, a set of characteristics shared by most mammalian young.17 Because human beings are not the only animals to respond favorably—and protectively—to these features, some species have actually capitalized on the reaction. Such responses to infants occur in men as well as in women. Even domestic animals such as dogs sometimes treat babies and young children with solicitude.
Mammologist Devra G. Kleiman of the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., has observed that the bush dog, like the human being, may develop emotional bonds which serve as a substitute for aggression and prevent adultery.18 She further believes that while human beings may not have begun as monogamous creatures, monogamy was essential to the growth of human intellectual power, since mental development required a longer period of childhood dependency, dependency extending beyond the time of weaning and requiring assistance from the father or other adults.
Many animals also form pair bonds, and in some species partners remain monogamous for life. Others are monogamous for only a season. The type of pair bond formed, if any, is related to the species’ overall reproductive pattern (or “strategy”). In some, by the time the young emerge from egg or pupa, the parents have long since departed, and the generations never even meet except perhaps by remote chance. The new generation fends for itself from the outset. But the range is wide. Wolfgang Wickler, professor of zoology at Munich University and ethologist, describes the behavior of the native European bird, the Panurus biamicus (the bearded tit):
The partners spend their whole lives in very close permanent monogamy and can only be separated by force. . . . Two or three days after the male has concentrated his attention on a particular female and she has tolerated it willingly, the matter is decided, and the two sleep closely clumped together at night and not with [their] brothers and sisters as before. During cleaning and drinking, foraging, bathing, and sleeping, the one will hardly leave the side of the other, and they continually preen each other’s ruffled feathers. If one flies a grass blade farther away, the other will land beside it a moment later. If one loses sight of the other, it will call loudly until they have found each other again. About two months later the call-bond is enough . . . so that they can tolerate a separation of a few meters. But the marital partners sleep close together throughout their life. If one dies, the other will fly around excitedly, searching and constantly calling and becoming extremely agitated the moment it hears the call of another bearded tit or a sudden rustling in the bulrushes, as though hoping that at last its partner was about to land beside it.19
The duration of a typical limerence in humans is comparatively shorter than the lifelong attachment of these little birds. On the other hand who can say that what the bearded tit feels for its mate is not basically the same as what the human limerent feels for LO. The outward actions look very similar, and if limerence evolved because the monogamy it induces helps set the next generation on its course, it may have begun even before human biological development was quite finished.
Originally, the term “imprinting” referred to a kind of fast “exposure” learning postulated to explain the finding that young birds would thereafter follow in the wake of whatever it was they happened to see at a certain critical period during early development. Under natural conditions, that stimulus would be the mother bird; in the laboratory, chicks and ducklings have picked up and taken after red rubber balls, experimenters, toy trains, or whatever it is that has been substituted for the mother during the critical moment of life. This phenomenon is a good example of built-in potential for adapting to a particular environment. If something happened to the mother, the animal would come to “love” the father, foster mother, or whoever happened to be around at the time. (Even a predator, I presume, but that would be a shortlived love affair.)
The vision of little birds hopping along in the wake of an experimenter (ethologist Konrad Lorenz in a famous photograph) excited the imagination of many behavioral scientists, some of whom attempted—with varying degrees of success—to detect the phenomenon in other species and at other points in the life span. Controversy broke out in the scientific journals concerning appropriate use of the term when some seemed ready to apply the label wherever the faintest degree of resemblance appeared.20 One investigator reported prenatal imprinting of the human infant to the mother’s heartbeat which he felt might predispose the child to certain musical tempos in later life, but others contended that imprinting, when it occurred, was limited to visual, not auditory stimuli.21 (At least one attempt to repeat the heartbeat research was unsuccessful.)
Inevitably, someone would wonder whether falling in love could be classified as imprinting. Utilizing findings in genetics, embryology, endocrinology, neuroendocrinology, psychology, and anthropology in an analysis of gender identity focusing on the interactions of heredity and environment, John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt remark on romantic love (which by their definition includes prepossession and emotional dependency on the actions of the loved person) in a manner generally consistent with limerent theory. Not only do they speak of imprinting, but they do not, for example, find falling in love to differ particularly for the two sexes, and they assume that it is both involuntary and largely genetically determined. Although it may precede or follow the onset of hormonal puberty, Money and Ehrhardt clearly assume a biological basis for falling in love.22
There seem to be some obvious similarities between what researchers call imprinting and certain aspects of the limerent experience. When you become limerent about a particular person, there comes a point in the process at which the emotional gates close and you do not shift your feelings to another LO until your reaction to the first has subsided considerably. In the retrospective account of one interviewee, “I know that I would have fallen in love with any fairly decent-looking, unmarried man who showed interest in me. I was so ready, all I’d need was a look.” Crystallization fashions an image of “perfections” from LO’s actual attractive features, the process, as described earlier, being one of emphasis rather than complete invention. In the laboratory, it was found that prolonged exposure to the imprinting object or person was unnecessary. In fact, the attachment could be undermined by too much familiarity.23
An impressive case for a kind of negative imprinting and for the role of involuntary and unconscious (genetically programmed?) factors in limerence is provided by the findings reported by Yonina Talmon in an article on mate selection in Israeli kibbutzim published in 1973 in the American Sociological Review. Kibbutzim children reared together in the same infants houses during their first five years did not in later life, “regard each other as erotically desirable.”24 Despite parental preferences to the contrary, data on 2,769 marriages that took place in second-generation offspring of kibbutzim dwellers indicate that not one occurred between persons reared together uninterruptedly during the first five years. In other words, intimacy during early childhood seemed to have left an “imprint” that prevented limerence. This finding appears consistent with the idea that limerence is a genetically transmitted individual reaction rather than the result of a culture “saturated” with romantic love in its stories and songs.
The function of anti-incest imprinting is, of course, obvious; too close relatives tend to have inferior offspring when they mate. I think it is possible that the imprint functions in limerence more forcibly than in sexual attraction, at least at the human level. Recent observations of higher primates revealed disinclination toward mating on the part of mothers and male offspring. In one group, a female had been observed to copulate with every male except her two adult sons. It is also interesting to wonder whether the antipathy toward this form of incest operates mainly in the mother or in the sons. Among humans, and possibly among other primates, sexual activities between fathers and daughters is probably far more common than generally realized. For the most part, it appears, the man may experience jealousy of the daughter’s other potential partners but little limerence. Indeed, a man unfortunate enough to develop limerence for his own daughter might be disinclined to try to seduce her or force her to submit to him sexually, although I must admit that here the ice is very thin indeed. My sample did not include any men who spoke of either sex or limerence in relation to minors, or adults of either sex who spoke of childhood limerence for a parent.25
Without limerence as a guide to mate selection, inbreeding might lead to genetic weakness, as has been suggested to have occurred among European royalty, which mated for centuries according to considerations of ownership of property and the development of royal lineages. Even if individuals themselves selected a partner rationally by true worth, there might still be insufficient mixing. The relative arbitrariness of limerent fixation promotes matings among persons outside the limerent’s immediate group, who may have no reason to be acquainted. Cultures have differed in their reactions to limerence, in their approval and/or disapproval, as well as in relation to who is and is not an acceptable marriage partner or to whether the selection is made by the individuals or by their elders. The kibbutzim finding does not rule out cultural influence over some aspects of the limerent reaction, but it clearly supports the notion that limerence is at least partly governed by forces outside the influence of social, as well as conscious control.
When in love you get very concerned about your lover’s image of you. Thus you alter your posture and try, as you talk, to hide with your hands or clothing, your unattractive chin or nose, or other blemish. You might also, if especially unsure that your appearance is pleasing, make nervous gestures to distract the viewer from the ugly sight.
—From an interview
The role of physical attractiveness is one of the few aspects of romantic attachments and human courting behavior that have been researched with some thoroughness by psychologists and sociologists. In study after study, the result was the same: the better-looking people had the advantage. Looks count, and they count in nonsexually related as well as sexually related attractions. Although we claim that you can’t tell a book by its cover and beauty is only skin deep, we fall for beauty. Psychologist Vernon Grant holds that “esthetic qualities” are all important to the arousal of the “amorous emotion.”26 Furthermore, the feeling that appearance is of importance reflects itself in limerent persons’ intense concern about their own attractiveness. Hair dyes, makeup, attire, diet, and exercise regimens are regularly featured in popular magazines because they make the user feel more able to stimulate the limerent reaction in LO. No wonder so much print space is devoted to such topics. To the limerent at the height of the reaction, no aspect of living is as important as is hope of achieving the persistently envisioned goal of reciprocation. Surely it is no accident that the time of life during which, by group consensus, we are most attractive—post adolescence and early adulthood—is also the time at which most reproductive matings and marriages are initiated. But why biologically does physical appearance assume so potent a role in the development of the limerent reaction?
One possible answer is that physical attractiveness, and youth, in particular, may function as a rough indication of good health and other attributes that relate to breeding capability and thus genetic fitness. Perhaps this explains why youth and early adulthood are times in which limerence is most probable.
There are other issues as well. Sex differences in the importance of physical attractiveness to human beings is well documented. Is the greater reliance on appearance by males biologically rooted, or is it mainly a result of cultural pressures? Furthermore, given that physical attractiveness plays a role in mate selection, have people, and particularly women, become more “beautiful” over the course of evolutionary development? With current emphasis on the role of culture and/or society in the formation of human values, attitudes, and behavioral patterns, many people would point to the fact that there are fashions in what is considered beautiful, just as there are fashions in clothing styles. If beauty is, as many would contend, culturally decreed rather than inborn, then what is there to stop a culture from choosing, for example, extreme obesity as beautiful, despite the fact that obesity predicts a less healthy and well-functioning organism, one more subject to disease, disability, and early death, and not at all the best prospect for producing fit offspring?
And isn’t it wasteful for standards of physical attractiveness to be universal within a society? Isn’t one of the biggest problems of living that of trying to meet standards that can only be achieved by a few at the top? Wouldn’t transmission of the most favorable genetic material to future generations be better served by a mate selection process that did not depend so much on stereotypes of appearance but rather depended on assessment of a possible mate’s aptitudes and capabilities? In other words, wouldn’t producing healthy and desirable children be more likely if it did not depend so heavily on admittedly superficial traits?
The answer might be that the large role physical attractiveness plays in mate selection permits traits uncorrelated with beauty to be selected randomly. That is, there may be greater genetic benefit from not allowing us to decide by rational means which individuals will mate with each other to produce the next generation. What appears to be a good match by “rational” criteria might in fact amount to a genetically unfit form of inbreeding. Physical attractiveness draws us to a mate who may be unlike ourselves in other respects. The ability of the culture to shift specific standards of beauty seems to occur only within a certain range. That it can occur at all suggests interplay between external influence and genetic makeup, something scientists have found in abundance wherever they have looked for it.27
Whatever factors cause an individual to “select” a specific LO, limerence cements the reaction and locks the emotional gates against further intrusion. This exclusivity, which always occurs in limerence, weakens the effect of physical attractiveness, since the most beautiful individual in the world cannot compete with LO once limerence has taken hold. Clearly, persons across a wide range of physical appearances secure mates.