Seven Sins: Courtship and how you find a partner has changed, says Helen Fisher
Down To Earth (DTE) speaks to scientists and authors to take stock of what we know so far about the emotions of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth; the historical debates around them and the critical gaps in our understanding.
In the sixth part, DTE speaks to Helen Fisher, a visiting research associate at the department of anthropology, Rutgers University, US. Fisher works on the evolution of sexuality, marriage, divorce and gender differences, and has authored six books.
Q. Humans experience love, lust, as well as attachments. How would you differentiate between the three?
A. I have figured out that we have evolved three basic drives for mating and reproduction: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love, and feelings of deep attachment. Different brain systems run these three basic drives.
The sex drive is run largely by testosterone in both men and women. Romantic love, and we have proven this in brain study, is run largely by the dopamine system (dopamine is a monoamine neurotransmitter, which is also the chemical messenger, “communicating messages between nerve cells in brain and brain and the rest of the body”). The feelings of deep attachment are run by the oxytocin system (oxytocin is the hormone responsible for “key aspects of the female and male reproductive systems, including labour and delivery and lactation, as well as aspects of human behaviour”).
They have evolved for different reasons. The sex drive evolved to get people to look for partners. Roma-ntic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one person at a time. Feelings of deep attachment enable you to stick with this person at least long enough to have a child together and raise that child.
Being different systems, they have different feelings. Romantic love, for example, comes from the ventral tegmental area (structure in the midbrain involved in reward, consumption, learning, memory, and addiction behaviours) which is a tiny little factory near the very base of the brain. It spews out dopamine and leads to craving, focus and motivation. The first thing that happens when you are madly in love with somebody is that the person takes on a special meaning for you. Everything about him/her becomes special. The car s/he drives is different from other cars in the parking lot. The street s/he lives on; the music s/he listens to; everything is special about him or her. You focus your attention on him/her. You can list what you do not like about him/her, but you just sweep that aside and just focus on the positives. You also experience mood swings into despair when things go poorly.
Real emotional dependence also occurs when you wait for them to send you a text, to give you a call, to invite you out. People experience separation anxiety and they do not like to be apart. When they do not call or write, you focus even more. There is high sex appeal, jealousy and possessiveness. There is intrusive thinking and it feels like there’s somebody camping in your head, and you are constantly thinking about that person. There is an intense motivation to win the person. To sum up, these three brain systems have evolved together to run our reproductive lives.
Q. This means these drives contributed to the evolutionary success of humans?
A. In fact, the little factory that pumps out the dopamine and gives you that feeling of romantic love lies right next to the factory that orchestrates thirst and hunger. Thirst and hunger keep you alive. Romantic love drives you to form a partnership and send your DNA into future generations. It is a basic survival mechanism, not just an emotion. It’s a drive to find and love a certain person. They drive us to have babies so that our species survives. From a Darwinian perspective, if you have four children and I have no children, you live on, and I die out. So these brain systems evolved to enable us to have sex with a group of people, figure out who we fall in love with, form a marriage or a partnership, and have babies and send our dna into tomorrow.
The human brain has been around for 300,000 years. But we came down from trees—from our ape ancestors—about 4 million years ago. And these brain systems evolved to pass our DNA into the future.
In animals, all kinds of foxes and wolves form a partnership; they form a pair bond and send their DNA into the future. What is unusual about humanity is that we bother to pair up; our closest relatives, chimpanzees, do not. A female chimpanzee experiences romantic attraction. But that does not last long, and she does not form a long-term partnership. And the reason she does not is she does not have to. She can put the baby on her back; continue to feed herself; she can race into the trees; and protect herself. She does not need a partner to raise her babies. Elephants form a courtship for about five days, and then it is over.
Only 3 per cent of mammals, including humans, pair up. The reason is when we came down out from the trees, we had to begin to stand up on two feet to carry food and weapons in our arms. And how are you going to carry the equivalent of a 20-pound baby in one arm, and sticks and stones in the other arm and protect and feed ourselves? So females began to need to have a partner to help protect and provide for them. And males could not provide for a whole harem of females, but could provide for one. And so we evolved a drive to form real partnerships.
Now, the pairing need not necessarily last forever. Most of us have had more than one relationship and a lot of people have had more than one marriage, but we do form pair bonds. The bottom line is that we are a pair-bonding animal. We do tend to have a series of partnerships, kind of a serial monogamy. And I often wonder if you have a relationship with one person and two children, why do you break up and form a new partnership with somebody else and have another child? What you are really doing is creating children of more genetic variety. And for millions of years, that was adaptive. So we tend to marry, divorce, remarry, have a series of partnerships, probably for a Darwinian reason of having babies by more than one person.
In our ancient hunter-gathering societies, people tended to have about three marriages during the course of their lives. Then they settled down on the farm where they really could not leave. You cannot dig up half of the field and move out to other destinations—you are stuck. So we evolved this belief that marriage should be for life. And of course, in a modern world where most people are not on the farm, people are free to have more than one partnership. I am not advocating it. Divorce is very complicated and very painful, but I am not surprised that people do tend to have a series of partnerships. It is not only because they are unhappy in the relationship, but because, from a Darwinian perspective, it has been an evolutionary adaptation for millions of years.
Q. Has the idea of love changed over the years?
A. Basically, love has not changed. This is a brain system, like the anger, joy and the fear systems. It is too primitive a system. It will never change. It is just a basic brain circuit. But courtship has changed, and how you find a partner has changed. Millions of years ago, they met at a waterhole on the grasslands of Africa and then started going out. A thousand years ago, in the farming age, people met at a dance and were introduced to people by relatives. And today, until these dating apps came along, people met at college, at work, or through friends.
And today, actually in America, a lot of people meet on the internet. I study American singles because I am chief science advisor to a dating site. I would not like to call them dating sites. They are introducing sites. And what is interesting is the newest thing—video chatting. In 2015, only 6 per cent of singles were using video chatting before the first date. In 2020, some 19 per cent did. And today in America, one in four people meet on the internet through video chatting before the first date and 37 per cent are willing to do it. And it is a great way to save time and money. You can just talk to somebody over the internet and it is a great way to vet somebody, to decide whether you want to go out with the person.
Q. Love is typically seen as a cocktail of chemicals. Is there more to it?
A. People are selective. You are not going to fall in love with everybody, say, just because culture is involved. We develop what I call a love map, which is a list of things that you are looking for in a partner. And most of us do not find all of them, but we find somebody with enough of those characteristics. Bingo, then the brain triggers the romantic love system—the dopamine system—and you fall in love.
(as told to Rohini Krishnamurthy)
This is the seventh of an 18-part series.
This was first published as part of the cover story of the 16-31 May, 2024 Print edition of Down To Earth