by A. J. Jacobs
I think I love my wife. At least most of the time. (Not counting when she makes me go see Henry Jaglom movies.) But what does that mean—I love my wife? And how does my love stack up against other husbands’? For the first time in the history of human mating, scientists may have found a way to pin down this most ethereal of emotions. We’re on the verge of dissecting this butterfly.
A handful of researchers, armed with MRIs, have begun to sift out the chemical mix that makes up love. “Until recently, we regarded love as supernatural,” says Helen Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers who is one of the world’s leading researchers on brain chemistry and sexual relationships and half of the team of scientists poking through my cranium. “We were willing to study the brain chemistry of fear and depression and anger but not love.”
It’s a controversial notion, that love can be reduced to a chemical cocktail. It gives conniptions to the Foucault types who see love as socially constructed.
Just think of the implications: If love is simply chemicals, doesn’t that change its meaning? And how soon before we create a scientifically valid love potion? (Already under study, by the way.) What about a love vaccine to help us from falling for the wrong person? And if you have to rely on chemical enhancements, do you get an asterisk next to your name in the book of love, like Barry Bonds?
I’ve volunteered to be a guinea pig for two of the field’s pioneers. In the past five years, Fisher and her research partner, neuroscientist Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, have put forty-nine crazy-in-love people into MRI machines to study their brains. I’m number fifty. But I’m the first not to be in the crazy-in-love, head-over-heels phase. I’m the first average married Joe they’ve ever studied.
When I told friends and family I was trying to scientifically assess my love for Julie, they all had the same response: “No good can come of this.”
But knowledge is good, right? And if I understand how I love my wife, maybe I can learn how to love her better. I asked Julie if she would mind if I opened up my brain. She had the same reaction as when I suggested we go to Dave & Buster’s restaurant and video arcade for our anniversary. “Fine,” she sighed.
Inside the MRI tunnel, the image of my wife vanishes from the screen. And up pops another female face. This woman has the tip of her pinkie perched alluringly on her lips. Huge lips.
It’s Angelina Jolie. That’s another part of the experiment. The scientists and I want to see how my love for my wife compares with my feelings for Angelina Jolie.
I start to think of naughty things I want to do to Angelina Jolie. My eyes drift down to her cleavage. My neurons spit out dopamine. The machine whirs. Hmm. No good can come of this.
THE MACHINE
A quick word about this $2 million gadget that’s trying to read my mind. The MRI is to brain science what Galileo’s telescope was to astronomy. At least if you believe its proponents. Skeptics—and there are quite a few—question its accuracy as a guide to brain function, especially when dealing with individuals, as opposed to populations. They say that overenthusiastic researchers tend to read too much into the results, committing the scientific equivalent of seeing Jesus in a tortilla.
The fMRI (short for functional magnetic resonance imaging) captures 3-D movies of your brain to chart where the blood is flowing. When you speak, blood flows to the language centers. When you blink your eyes, it flows to the eye-blinking centers.
After studying the results over the years, Fisher has come up with a theory that love is created by three distinct brain systems—those for sex, romance, and attachment. She has described her findings in several books, most recently Why Him? Why Her? Here, an oversimplified version:
The Sex Drive. One of the main lust factories in the brain is a peach pit–size lump called the hypothalamus (deep in your skull, sitting just above the brain stem). This controls hunger and thirst. It also has receptor sites for testosterone, which fuels the sex drive in both men and women. So when you’re feeling horny, the hypothalamus is working overtime. You don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to figure out why evolution gave us the sex drive: Its job is to spread our DNA as widely and often as possible.
The Romance System. This produces the cocaine rush you get from beginning love. And cocaine is more than an idle metaphor. The reptilian brain—one of the nervous system’s most ancient parts—floods you with dopamine, just as it does after you snort a line of blow. The dopamine gives you the same high, lack of sleep, delusional optimism, and obsessive thoughts. The great poet Robert Palmer was right: You can be addicted to love. Romance evolved so that you could focus your mating energies on appropriate partners—the most fertile woman, the best providing man.
The Attachment System. This is friendship on hyperdrive. While romance is thrilling, attachment is calming. It’s created by a couple of hormones: vasopressin and oxytocin (not to be confused with Rush Limbaugh’s painkiller OxyContin). Attachment evolved so that we could “tolerate our partners long enough to raise a kid together,” says Fisher.
The three systems are intertwined. For instance, sex boosts attachment. When you have an orgasm, your brain pumps out oxytocin, heightening feelings of closeness. Which is why one-night stands often last past one night. And why exhausted married couples should force themselves to hump once in a while. In fact, semen itself contains oxytocin. You literally have a love syringe between your legs.
But the systems can often be distinct, Fisher believes. I will be the first human to test all three at once.
INSIDE THE MACHINE
It’s a few days before the experiment, and I’m busy scouring photo albums in search of three perfect photos of my wife—one to spark each of the love systems. For the sex photo, I find a picture of my wife on the beach on our honeymoon. She’s got her back to me and is looking over her shoulder. (Yes, that’s her. The one with the partially exposed boob. Thank you for letting me print that, Julie.)
Later, Fisher tells me this is an echo of the classic “lordosis” pose favored by female animals. When female horses (or monkeys or pandas, etc.) want to mate, they raise their hips and look back over their shoulder at the male.
The attachment photo is harder. I choose one from a dinner for Julie’s thirty-fifth birthday. Julie disapproves. “I have red eyes there. How can you find me attractive?”
“I think you look good.”
“There are so many better ones.”
“You’re not allowed to argue,” I tell her.
This is one of the huge side benefits of this project. Fisher told me that Julie and I can’t get in a big fight before the test, lest it taint the results. This is, as Blagojevich says, a golden opportunity. Like this morning, Julie wanted me to take the early shift with our kids. I said it was her turn. She started to argue. “The MRI is coming up,” I said, and rolled over.
In the end, Julie wins the attachment-photo argument. (That’s her choice.)
On Thursday, I e-mail all three photos to Brown. And on Monday, I show up at NYU for my scan. I lie down on the table, and Fisher strokes my hand to calm me. She’s very maternal. They slide me into the tunnel.
The images flash. I’ve got a list of scenarios to think about, depending on which photo is up. I’ve got romantic scenarios, attachment scenarios (picnic with the kids, watching The Office on the couch next to Julie), and sex scenarios. (I’ll spare you.)
In between the images, Brown and Fisher try to clear the blood from my brain. The cleanser is a “neutral” face—a high school friend of Julie’s who elicits overpowering boredom in me. (I can’t show you.)
The entire exercise is at once scientific and voyeuristic. Like they’re filming the most cerebral, least sexy porno in the history of the world.
Afterward, I fill out several questionnaires about my feelings toward Julie. Do I get depressed when things don’t go right with Julie? Yes. Do I think obsessively about Julie? Not really.
THE RESULTS
A few days later, Brown e-mails me s
ome initial findings. It’s a great e-mail, full of exclamation points and capital letters. (“OOOh, this is just too exciting . . .”) It’s also quite technical. I understand a good 40 percent of it. She e-mails again a few minutes later: “I just read my message over again, and I’m not sure it’s that coherent. Sorry. I’m excited.”
Later, I get a more polished report and do a debriefing with the scientists. It’s interesting—the interpretation of the results isn’t like reading a red or blue litmus paper. It requires art as well as science—skeptics would say more of the former. The major findings:
Romance: I’m not so addicted to love. The forty-nine human guinea pigs who went before me were all truly, madly, deeply in love. Some had just fallen in love. Some had just been dumped. (In a cruel twist of bioengineering, the romantic craving actually gets more intense postdumping.) And seventeen belonged to the small, freakish subset of people who claim they are still madly in love after years of marriage. These long-term romantics did, in fact, show cocainelike responses. I am not in that freakish subset. In fact, I’m one of the first of the fMRI guinea pigs not to show the rush from my lizard brain. This wasn’t an honor I wanted.
Now, I’m not totally devoid of romance. Julie did fire up my prefrontal cortex, which is more intellectual, less visceral. “It’s a more complex picture,” says Brown. “Your brain is not just seeing pure reward, the way it is in the beginning of a relationship. Your brain is seeing some difficulties.”
I tell Julie I don’t have head-over-heels romantic feelings toward her.
“Shocker,” she says.
“Why, you aren’t head over heels in love with me?” I ask.
“Uh, no.”
As part of the study, we’d each filled out questionnaires about how passionately we love each other. One of the questions was Do you tremble when you see your lover?
“So you don’t tremble when you see me?” I ask her.
“No. Did you say you trembled?”
“A little. Sometimes.”
“You so do not tremble.”
She’s right. I was just worried she’d see the questionnaire and get pissed.
Attachment: I love like a rodent of the grasslands. Scientists who study sex and love are totally smitten with prairie voles, a breed of overgrown mice that lives in dry parts of the Midwest. What’s so special about prairie voles? They’re basically monogamous—unlike the sluts and man-whores that make up 97 percent of mammals.
So if you want to study monogamy—and the government won’t let you manipulate human love lives—you play God with the voles. Scientists do this by tweaking two brain chemicals—oxytocin and vasopressin. If you suppress the vasopressin system, normally faithful voles start acting like Eliot Spitzer. But if you boost the vasopressin in a promiscuous vole (such as the prairie vole’s randy cousin the montane vole), it settles down with a mate. Vasopressin seems to be a key to attachment in male rodents. Oxytocin is the female equivalent. They do their job in a brain section called the ventral pallidum—which lit up when I was looking at a picture of Julie and one of my sons.
“There’s lots of data on prairie voles about this area, but you’re among the first humans to show this,” says Brown. “It reveals this system may be conserved through mammals.”
Like the voles, I have a strong attachment to my mate. It’s hard to rank the three love systems, but it looks as if attachment is the winner for me, edging out sex and romance. And mine is a positive attachment, flavored with the dopamine pleasure drug. (You can be attached to someone and hate them.) This is reassuring information. On the other hand, I could block my vasopressin and be wenching in no time.
Sex: Against all odds, I’m still hot for my wife. Chemically, I’m at the most unmanly point in my life. A guy’s testosterone drops when he gets married. (I’m nine years in.) It also drops when he has kids. (I’ve got three boys.) “Every time you cuddle with your children, you’re likely to be driving down your testosterone,” says Fisher. I can feel this. My sex drive is in neutral a lot of the time. Before the results came in, Brown told me to keep my expectations low. The sex regions might stay dark. She told me, “I actually think men in your situation”—meaning married with young kids—“should be encouraged to go to the Internet and look at pornography, because it brings novelty into the home. When you look at [porn], you’re going to have some hormonal flooding. Which is needed in the ‘captivity’ situation.”
And yet, according to the MRI, my libido is surprisingly strong. Looking at a sexy photo of my wife “activated part of your ‘new brain’ that represents the sensation of touch in your genital area,” says Brown. “It’s an interesting finding, because you said you had no erection.” That’s true. I had no erection. At my age, I need some soft music and small talk.
Even when I was in the romance phase of the test, the sex regions of the brain lit up. This is beginning to look like quite a message for women, Brown writes me. Men always tell us that sex is important to them, that they are always thinking about it, it’s always a factor when looking at women, but these data are making it really sink into my thick skull and take notice.
You read it here first.
ANGELINA
Here’s what my wife said when she found out she was going up against Angelina Jolie: “If you don’t find Angelina more sexually attractive, there’s something wrong with you.” The results are in—and apparently there’s something wrong with me.
Brown writes: Julie and Angelina were exactly the same in areas associated with sexual arousal. Your midbrain thinks Julie is just as attractive as Angelina in the objective sense. But the romantic love isn’t there for Angelina. Well, it’s almost there for Angelina. Perilously close, in fact. But it doesn’t make the cut.
I do find my wife beautiful. But hotter than Angie? Like my wife, I’m not sure how to explain it. The measurements may be off. The researchers might be reading too much into the results. The MRI might have picked up the guilt and anxiety I felt when thinking about bradding Angie (and knowing my wife would see the results). Or . . . there’s the lovely possibility that I am more sexually drawn to my wife.
THE CHINESE
A colleague of Fisher’s did a study of newly-in-love Beijing couples. The results—though preliminary—are intriguing. The Chinese subjects were much more cautious about love than Americans. “They were more fearful about it, more careful about their emotions,” says Brown. The research paper (written by Xiaomeng Xu and several collaborators) puts it this way: “The Chinese participants tended to associate love with negative features, e.g., heartbreak, and spontaneously listed more negative items than Americans, who associated love with more positive features, e.g., adoration.”
The key brain region here might be the lateral orbital frontal cortex. This is a newer part of the brain, more intellectual, less instinctual, involved with weighing rewards and losses. And it fired up when both the Chinese and I thought about love.
This finding rings true. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more scared of love. I’ve come to see it as a dangerous emotion. I love the falling-in-love part. It’s the falling-out-of-love part I can’t stand. The paranoia, the depression, the aching, the gunfire.
Nowadays, if I had to sacrifice the highs to avoid the lows, I would. I’d prefer a mild emotional climate in my brain. Like the Bay Area. Fisher says she agrees with me. A few years ago, she says, “I was rejected horribly. I lost twenty pounds. My clothes looked ridiculous on me. I only had three hours of sleep at night. This is not all in fun. There’s a lot of talk about the positive aspects of love. We as a society downplay the danger, the anxiety, and the disappointment. We romanticize romance.” She adds, “Evolution really overdid it with the feeling of falling out of love.”
CODA
So, in the end, how do I love thee?
“You do love your wife,” says Brown. “It’s just in a more complicated way. The way most people love their long-term spouses.”
I love her, but not with the junkie�
�s high. “But don’t give up on that,” says Fisher. “I think those children are going to grow up and you’re going to have the experience of being madly in love.” In fact, she and Brown want to put me back in the scanner each year for several years. “We want to determine the natural history of love relationships and the corresponding changes in brain systems within individuals.”
I could even try to rev up the romance quotient for next year. Unfortunately, the best way to kick-start romance is by following that tiresome marital advice about doing exciting, novel, slightly dangerous things with your spouse. “Take a subway and get off at a random stop and eat at some dump that’s the first place you see,” suggests Fisher. It’ll get the dopamine and testosterone flowing. Not good news for housebound schmoes like me.
Then again, legal love potions may be on the market soon. That’d be easier. One company is already selling bottles of what they call Liquid Trust. It’s an odor-free spray laced with oxytocin, the chemical that jacks up trust and attachment. I got a bottle sent to me at Esquire a few weeks ago. “It might work,” says Brown, as she spritzed some on her hair, just in case. “It needs to be tested in a double-blind test.” (In fact, that holds true for the whole field of reading brain fMRIs. It’s a fascinating topic, but it’s all very new, and should be approached with healthy skepticism in those frontal lobes.)
