Everyone wonders: "What is love?". So much that many don't even believe it exists. That it was invented by a Valentine-day shop-owner syndicate. This question will be answered below, along with "why is love", "why are we attracted to each other", "why we marry and live in monogamous relationships", "why the husband is always older than the wife" and "who bombed the world trade center". So you see, it's very much worth reading.
First of all, why wonder. I'm sure many would be inclined to think that love is what it is, and that it is best to find it than to understand it. Well, true enough. Finding love is probably much more agreeable than understanding it. But let's face it: People (me, you and plenty of others) spend a lot of time confronted to emotional issues related to love. People spend much time and energy thinking about love. And this pondering time is, in most cases, not agreeable at all. A bit of understanding would definitely help to sort out situations for everyone, and would not make the finding of love any less nice.
Such issues are seldom researched, as they relates to each of us emotionally. It requires a certain level of sagacity that is, to my knowledge, taught in no university. It is still pretty unexplored. So let's go after it!
Love was put in the heart of men by God so that we may adore him. He designed it one day he was drunk on ambrosia and mistuned it completely. And now instead of loving God, we have to love one another. What a failure.
Ok, for real now...
The bit below is a sort of introduction. It does not talk about love at all but still helps understanding love a great deal.
Love and hunger
Many human behaviours initiate in the cortex. Politeness, even when it is mechanic in most adult humans, originates in the brain. If one doesn't learn it from a master or another, it doesn't come naturally. It is the same for the religious behaviour and for pretty much most of the more or less rational human behaviours.
But not all. For example, the action of carefully selecting items according to their look, smell and taste, putting them in one's mouth, masticating them and swallowing them when under the feeling of "hunger" ; this is definitely innate. The newborn are able of it. But when you look at it objectively, it doesn't go without saying: putting stuff in you mouth when it is in the stomach that the feeling manifests.
The search of a sexual partner, from puberty, is a behaviour that is closer to that last example than it is to the formers. But they are still different in that:
The behaviour of satisfying hunger is required in any animal to insure its individual survival. A specie that members wouldn't know what to do when feeling hungry is unimaginable.
But in the same way, a specie that members would content themselves of satisfying their individual survival is just as impossible. Unless its members are blessed with eternal life, it is mandatory to renew the generations.
The species most motivated to feed, on one side, and to reproduce on the other is clearly more likely to multiply. Evolution kicking in, the Earth is populated of beings in perpetual alimentary and reproductive competition.
Man, of course, is of no exception. His body is made of the same matter than that of the other tenants of the planet. But since like 35,000 years, human specie has extracted itself from the evolution race. It insures its subsistence through work instead of hunt. Its offspring is few but out of reach of the predators. In some societies, including the one I'm addressing, the individual survival is assured almost at 100%, as well as that of the specie.
Old recipe
But the human bodies are still built according to the same old recipe. And the hormones planted within us by evolution, and that were vital back then in the 35,000 BC, are still expressing today. Today that they are not only useless, but unwanted. The first are responsible for the high obesity rate in the societies where the food stimulus is ubiquitous. The last are responsible of the unreasonable increase of the human population, in a world where the coming of many children is not balanced by the premature death of a great part of them under the teeth of predators. Until recently, the state of permanent warfare was enough to temperate that tendency. But since a half century, humanity has entered a peace and prosperity era, whatever might the alarmists think.
How hormones work
Let us here leave alone the alimentary issue, that I have used until now as a guide. We see now that the desire felt for some of one's peers is meeting a need of evolution. There are within the body of all humans small glands that, when the brain senses certain stimuli, unload in the blood a very specific chemical substance that in turn, modifies the response of the brain. If we were to engineer that substance in a lab (maybe slightly modified), it would be possible to have a guinea-pig to be attracted to its garden furniture. And it is really our sense of ethics, rather than a factual impossibility, that must make sure that such an experiment is never accomplished.
To the question: "why is the human not evolving anymore?" The answer is very simple : because there is no more natural selection. If selection there is, it is organised by men on men (and contrary to the most elementary ethic). The man of 35,000 BC was very similar to that of today. But the world in which he lived has changed a great deal. 35,000 years ago, there where in Europe sabertooth tigers, mammoths, cave lions that were the size of a modern horse... that evolved into their contemporary form under the pressure of natural selection. While the evolution of the human specie is halted since. Or if men have changed in any way, it is a random change, consequence of genocides or population deportation, depending on the mood of megalomaniac governments. This essay is more proficient on the subject.
Not yet. We were more talking about sexual attraction. Not attachment. So let's do that now.
Let's zoom in, from the point of view of the specie, to that of the individual.
I will talk about this very easily identifiable feeling that we could define as : “When I think of him/her, I'm on cloud nine”. That should leave little space to ambiguity. We will try to avoid the term “love”, that is way to vaporous.
It is pretty obvious that this feeling is of a different nature than friendship (attachment to a peer) or the attachment we feel for a toy, an ipod or a pet. It presents almost all the characteristics of a reaction to a psychoactive drug. A psychoactive drug triggered by a conscious thought, or and inconcious process triggering both.
If indeed it is an hormone, then its raison d'être is genetic evolution. Each one of our hormones appeared under the pressure of evolution. An easy solution takes shape : One intercourse is not always sufficient to impregnate a female. By supplementing the "attraction hormone" with an “attachment hormone”, it is made sure that a female conceives by making her mate repeatedly with one male.
It is not beneficial to make the effect last more than a month, because if after a month of relentless copulation there is no pregnancy, it is unlikely that there will ever be one. That is why the attachment that we feel evaporates after a while, to allow its victims to look for a partner somewhere else.
So, yeah, love is an hormone.
Ok, now that we have dissected love, it doesn't look like the old mysterious stuff anymore...
The human mind is a very complicated machine. Explaining love is like explaining football. Not the game, the trend. If you explain to a football fan all the social mechanic that is powering his religion, he will probably break a empty beer bottle on your head. "Football is about feelings man! It's about adrenaline man! It's the beauty of competing endeavours man! (if he is articulate enough)". In the same way, saying that love is an emotional entity made up by the human group-consciousness to justify the existence of attraction and monogamy sounds pretty crude. Because what we feel, in our flesh, seems real. And indeed it is. Since it is a feeling, it belongs to the heart and the brain has little control over it.
So even though love is a social construction that encompasses the pragmatic concepts explained above, it is still a real feeling.
Well, if you look throughout the world, almost all cultures have set up a society model based on life-lasting monogamous couples with the boy older than the girl. Like if they'd been passing the word around.
That's a bit suspicious, if you ask me.
From a simple corporate-bastard's point of view, the reproductive efficiency of the human family model is ridiculous, compared to the efficiency we'd have if everyone was fucking everyone. The number of babies per head of cattle would be way higher. But he has forgotten to think long-term again, that asshole. It is not sufficient to produce as many babies as possible, they must reach sexual maturity in good health too, in order for them to spawn the next generation. And yet, due to the size of the babies' cranium (relative to that of a women's pelvis), little homo stupidens are born a bit prematurely. If it waited more, it wouldn't go through. That's why they need more care than baby giraffe or bear cubs. There's not too many of the two of them around the craddle. And given the slow growth of human children, it is likely that by the time one is autonomous, the next one is underway, perpetuating the human family model.
It's been painful for me to try to see how evolution is responsible for that. How do you plant an hormone that makes the male want to share his mammoth with the female he has impregnated... That's a bit too specific a feeling for it to be triggered by a chemical compound. Still, I have found two solutions. The reality is obviously a blend of both, but I'm a bit clueless on the proportion of each.
The compassion hormone
It is probable that time has selected individuals capable of compassion. Compassion is a simple feeling and it could be triggered by an hormone. Actually, when you think of it, it must be triggered by something. And compassion is one of those feelings that pattern correspond to that of an hormone-triggered feeling. Compassion has been witnessed in most clever animals. It doesn't shock me unduly (scientifically speaking) to imagine that it exists in order to perpetuate the specie. A little example should clear things up :
Males that don't have the hormone and thus don't give a shit walk away on the pregnant girl. Her life expectancy and that of the baby-in-the-making are significantly reduced. In the cavern next door, a male that has the hormone shares his mammoth with the pregnant girl, their offspring will be in better shape than that of the above mentioned bastard.
As the "attachment hormone" sort of makes sure they stay together for one month or so, once they lose sexual interest for each other, they should know if a pregnancy is under way (i.e. if the female has gone through her periods).
It all falls into place. Many cultures consider the periods of a female a time when she should be secluded. That's the right time for couples to break apart, because if period there is, there is no pregnancy. If there is no period, the compassion hormone comes to the rescue of the dying attachment hormone and we have a family. I suppose that after the birth of the child, the compassion hormone gives way to a parentage hormone, but this is out of the scope of this essay.
Behaviour transmission
Homo is the most clever animal on earth. Ok, let's say one of the most clever to accommodate dolphin lovers. The fly, on the other hand, is one of the dumbest. The fly does not teach their offspring. Baby flies are born just as knowledgeable as they will ever be. Baby humans are born clueless. Most of the stuff a human knows is something they learned at one point. And there is no school in the jungle. In the jungle, you learn from your parents. Parents don't transmit only their genes but also their behaviours.
So it is not only a matter of compassion. Qualis pater, talis filius, children born from mammoth-sharing couples are likely to follow the same ways when they reach sexual maturity. Those born from the egotistical bastard, if they ever reach adulthood, will probably do the same too.
The behavioural transmission sort of "sets in stone" the natural tendency. Making the typical human family model quite hard to disrupt. As it is seen in today's society, where condoms and pills are freely available, and where all that pregnancy scheme is completely irrelevant. People still look for everlasting love and most of the time fail. In a world where fucking is not equivalent to "trying to procreate", women do not get pregnant soon after getting laid and the compassion hormone does not come to replace the waning attachment hormone. I will elaborate on that in another paper sometime.
Quickly tackled:
A women is fertile around, say 14 years old. In natural conditions (the jungle and all), the average age to give birth for the first time must be 15 or 16. If a girl finds herself pregnant at 15, it'd be nice if she could be paired with a tough guy that would fend off the bears and bring the mammoth leg home. And a 20 years old guy is much tougher than a bloke her age.
So, let's take two similar control groups, except that in one, males and females that get together have the same age, the other where there is the above mentioned 5 years difference. And let's put them to survive in the same sort of merciless jungle. The second batch is likely to do much better for the reasons mentioned above. Thus it is the most efficient, in the setting described. And evolution has a wicked tendency to favor a more efficient solution.
Now, if you want to argue that the two same groups put in our modern society would do just as good, fine. But we were made in the jungle. And our hormonal behaviour is still adapted to that.
Which might make you wonder if we shouldn't tinker a bit with it.