There’s often this idea of the romantic mystique: love is a mystical feeling, like magic,
like a mystery that we can never truly understand. In fact, that mystery is what makes romantic love so mesmerizing.
If we overanalyze love, if we question it too much, it will lose its magic.
In the survey I posted about love, I asked what made relationships romantic, to which many answered:
“It just *felt* romantic, not sure how else to explain it.” “It just feels more special than being with other people you're close with.”
I really can’t describe it other than you just feel at peace and happy for what the future holds."
Unlike objects, physics, illness, pretty much everything else in the natural world, it seems we can’t really explain love, and maybe we don’t want to…
but is that the right approach? When I was first studying romantic love, I wrote an academic paper.
One of the peer reviewers wrote: "Oh, but you can't study this. It's part of the supernatural." And I thought to myself, you know,
I mean, anger's not part of the supernatural, fear's not part of the supernatural, joy's not part of the supernatural,
Why would this be part of the supernatural? So... I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Helen Fisher
who is a famous biological anthropologist known for her work about love. You may have seen her on this video from WIRED
where she answers love questions from Twitter, or her TED Talks about love as an addiction. She thinks love can and should be studied.
Even though I know an awful lot of it, it's never spoiled the feeling. It's a little bit like when you eat a piece of chocolate cake.
You know every single ingredient in the piece of chocolate cake but you still feel that joy of eating it.
And so even with everything I know about romantic love and attachment, and the sex drive, all three of the basic brain systems for love,
I still get the incredible rush just the way that everyone else does. I agree that we should seek to understand such a powerful force.
Many people make their most significant life choices based on love: Should I buy a house with this person?
Should I raise a child with them? Should I trust them with my deepest insecurities? As Carrie Jenkins writes in her book What Love is: and what it could be,
“Love is an extreme sport, and we don’t skydive without parachutes.” Now Dr. Fisher aims to explain love through biology,
through brain systems and evolution. But that’s not the only way people have tried to study love.
Social constructionist theories argue that romantic love is a product of society and culture,
but it isn’t universal or necessary. People no doubt feel those warm, fuzzy feelings
caused by chemical reactions in the brain. There's no denying those biological reactions,
but that’s not what romantic love really is. For example, are tomatoes fruits or vegetables?
The biological answer is that tomatoes are fruits. Like all fruits, they grow from the flower of a plant and they contain seeds.
But many people, including me, think that’s a stupid ass answer. Tomato is clearly a vegetable because I use it exactly like a vegetable.
I cook tomatoes in a pan, I mix it into sauces for pasta, I sprinkle all sorts of savory spices with it.
I don’t bring it to work and munch on it like an apple. I don’t put it into my oatmeal or yogurt bowls.
I wouldn’t dream of putting soy sauce on my fruit. Yet notice how others would disagree with me.
Many Chinese people, like my mom, do, in fact, eat a tomato like an apple and sometimes she’ll sprinkle a little bit of sugar on top.
Some people do put tomatoes into their fruit salad. There's even ... tomato sorbet?
I mean, couldn't be me, but okay ... The point is, when I passionately defend tomatoes as vegetables,
what “fruit” and “vegetable” track are not biological classifications of a plant,
but their social function in our diets and recipes dependent on our cultural environment.
You can think about social constructionist theories of love in the same way. When we say people are romantically in love,
social constructionists think we are referring to a type of love which takes on a distinctive social function,
one that separates it from other types of love such as love like family or platonic love.
Right now in North America, we consider people to be properly in love if they form a monogamous lifelong bond.
A couple may love each other for twenty years but if they fall out of love and separate on the twenty-first year,