A Natural History of Love

by Diane Ackerman

  What the eyes caress, the memory fondles. As infants, using our fingers as eyes, we learn the world has depth and all of life a quirky topography, a three-dimensional feel. Then the merest glimpse of a clamshell or a shoulder is enough to kindle the touch-memory for curve. Then seeing a naked man lying in a shallow riverbed is enough to recall the feel of round, hard, flat, bulging, knobbly, interflowing. Then a woman holding a photograph of a large airy feather applied to an anonymous woman’s nether parts can’t help but imagine the feel of the feather. Then a photo of a woman’s face, her eyes closed in carnal reverie, her cheek muscles limp, blissed-out by love, as a man’s thumb gently presses open her bottom lip, is enough to make one utter a vicarious sigh.

  The hands have already been where the eyes long to go, and we can imagine the terrain in painstaking or delight-taking detail. That is enough. Indeed, it is the all some people desire. PET scans show that it makes no difference whether we experience an event or imagine it—the same parts of the brain light up. No wonder we are ardent voyeurs, savoring the visual Eden of photograph and film. They offer us homeopathic doses of love, exhilaration, mystery, sexual adventure, and violence—all enjoyed from a safe remove. To feel but not feel. To gamble but not risk. To undress and unravel and penetrate with mere thought. These are heady thrills. A creative brain makes its own virtual reality every day. In a certain frame of mind—that of a devoted paramour—all of life is erotic. To love the world with the eyes, one uses them as hands; to love the world with ideas, one uses them as eyes.

  Visual images are sticky. They attract meaning and emotion, and then quickly become unforgettable. No image is an island; it includes much that lies unseen. The lithe, giraffe-like woman nakedly feeding a real giraffe had to take her clothes off somewhere. Soon enough the giraffe, with a long insinuating tongue, will reach for the leaf she offers. And what is her relationship to the clothed person standing in the shadows behind her? Images work somewhat like pictograms. For example, in the scrapbook of my own memory, the image of a man holding a woman’s face in his hands means “tenderness.”

  I remember the time a friend picked a ripe apple from his tree, took a bite from its firm flesh, and offered it to me to sample. We were not lovers. But, biting into the crater his teeth had just left, I joined him in the apple’s flesh, which tasted sweet, sex-wet, and open. In that small oasis, our mouths met. Now when I see a photograph of such an apple, I don’t think of Mom, Country, and Apple Pie. The image is tinged with the erotic. I think kiss.

  Someone may find a telephone receiver sensuous, because it reminds him of the hot calls that inflamed an entire summer, and the delicious hours he held a phone’s smooth, plastic knob as if it were his beloved’s hand. Someone else may have more straightforward tastes, and be set atingle by a curvaceous back, a mischievous smile, or a ravenous glance.

  What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.

  PATTERNS IN NATURE

  In the diamond quarter of Amsterdam, where hearts are cut every day, I sat on a bench during the violet hour, watching the sun drain out of the sky and a half-moon rise like an Inca god. A woman in a blue scarf, hurrying home with a net shopping bag full of produce, swerved awkwardly to avoid something in the road. A moment later she swerved again, and it wasn’t until the third swerve a few steps on that I saw the pattern in her gait. Perhaps caused by a hip injury?

  Just then I realized that a necklace of lights had been forming across the throat of the brick buildings along the canal. At night, Amsterdam opens its veins and pours forth the neon milk of cities. We are obsessed with lights. Not random lights, but carefully arranged ones. Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.

  We crave pattern. We find it all around us, in sand dunes and pinecones; we imagine it when we look at clouds and starry nights; we create and leave it everywhere like footprints or scat. Our buildings, our symphonies, our fabrics, our societies—all declare patterns. Even our actions. Habits, rules, rituals, daily routines, taboos, codes of honor, sports, traditions—we have many names for patterns of conduct. They reassure us that life is stable, orderly, and predictable.

  So do similes or metaphors, because seemingly unrelated things may be caught in their pincers, and then the subtle patterns that unite them shine clear. This is how the mind sometimes comforts itself, and often how the mind crosses from one unknown continent of perception or meaning to another, by using the land bridge of metaphor. In conversation, we meander like a river. Rocking with grief, a mourning woman keens like a wind-bent willow. The river sings. Unanswered letters dune on a cluttered desk. Families branch. Music curves, spirals, and flows. The spidery mind spins a fragile, sticky web between like things, gluing them together for future use. Patterns can charm us, but they also coax and solicit us. We’re obsessed with solving puzzles; we will stand for hours before a work of abstract art, waiting for it to reveal itself.

  Why do the world’s patterns require our attention? Perhaps because we are symmetrical folk on a planet full of similar beings. Symmetry often reveals that something is alive. For example, the five deer standing at the bottom of the yard right now all blend perfectly into the winter woods. Their mottling of white, brown, and black echoes the subtle colors of the landscape. No doubt the deer were there for some time before I detected them. What gave them away was the regular pattern of legs, ears, and eyes. Then all at once the word deer flashed through my mind, and I retraced them with my eyes, this time picking out some flanks and noses, too. Deer! my mind confirmed, checking the pattern.

  Once is an instance. Twice may be an accident. But three times or more makes a pattern. We crave something familiar in a chaotic world. Thought has its precincts, where the cops of law and order patrol, looking for anything out of place. Without a pattern, we feel helpless, and life may seem as scary as an open-backed cellar staircase that has no railings to guide us. We rely on patterns, and we also cherish and admire them. Few things are as beautiful to look at as a ripple, a spiral, or a rosette. They are visually succulent. The mind savors them. It is a kind of comfort food.

  In the courtyard of my house, two doves are strutting like petitioners. Bobbing and posing, tossing in the occasional operatic warble, they are caught up in a drama whose goal is to establish territory, make alliances, and keep the peace. Each knows the dance steps the other will perform. It is the habit of the dove to bob and strut. Societies like to invent new rituals, to cushion nature’s laws under some of their own. So they agree upon rules for everything, even for flirting, courtship, marriage, and the other so-called customs of love. But, when all is said and done, they reflect one of our oldest and deepest needs: to fill the world with pathways and our lives with design.

  THE COURTSHIP

  A man and a woman are seated at a small, candlelit table in a restaurant. He has invited her out to dinner, and as they eat and talk their eyes meet often. They hold each other’s gaze a little longer than normal, an extra second or two. She smiles, tilts her head up, and looks shyly at him, then drops her gaze and glances away for a moment. She looks back, laughs, tosses her hair. As they talk, he rests his arm near hers on the table. His blue eyes shine with animation, excitement, and a tinge of nervousness. The pupils, normally narrow as pencil leads, now are swelling open wide like the shutter of a camera, allowing more and more of her in. The couple talk about everything, about nothing. They try to present themselves as positively as possible to each other, and yet also to reveal their real selves, hurts, and dreams. Gradually, subtly, because they are in step emotionally, they begin to move to the same rhythm, to mirror each other’s gestures. When he leans forward, she leans forward. When she takes a drink, he drinks, too. They are like unconscious ballroom dancers. As she flirts with him, her pupils swell like his. It signals emotional or sexual inte
rest, but she can’t help herself. Nor does she wish to. They are not teenagers; they have been down this road before. Neither of them mentions how much they long for the taste of the other’s mouth, the touch of the other’s caress, the scent of the other’s body, the heat of the other’s passion.

  This is called a dinner date. But what it really is is “courtship feeding.” Many animals do it. Males who wish to copulate with females first offer them food or some other present. Penguins do it. Apes do it. Scorpions do it. Fireflies do it. Humans do it. The purpose is to prove to the female that the male will be a good provider and meet her needs. We think of men as the great seducers in mating dramas, but women do much of the choosing. Women more often initiate a flirtation, women give subtle signs that it’s all right for the courtship to continue, and women decide if they want to go to bed with the men. This also happens among most other animals. Males display for females, who then choose which males they desire. Among the cottontop tamarins, small forest-dwelling monkeys of South America, males do much of the child rearing. If a male wants to mate with a female, he shows up carrying a baby cottontop on his back. That turns the female on. Essentially, the male is telling the female: “See what a caring father I’d make? I’d be great with your kids.”

  What else do females choose in a male? High on the list is health. Females recoil from signs of disease, parasites, or infirmity. An exhausting courtship display doesn’t just impress a female with a male’s seriousness, it tells her if the male is hardy, if his cardiovascular system is strong, if he has the stamina to be her mate. She could also learn this through athletics, spirited play, or sending him out on quests. Or she could make him serenade her. Female gray tree frogs are attracted to operatic males that will sing sprightly numbers long into the Caribbean night. The males use vast amounts of oxygen in the process and tire themselves; but that suits the female fine. She wants a robust, vigorous crooner who will sire hearty offspring. For some species of frogs, more than exhaustion is at stake. A few years ago, bat biologist Merlin Tuttle discovered how Trachops cirrhosus, a Central American bat, stalked its prey by sound. Preferring the taste of the frog Physalaemus, the bat listens for the male frog’s mating call. The louder the song, the plumper and juicier the frog. This puts the frog in an awkward position. It needs to sing for a mate to perpetuate its kind—and in the tropical night it is full of sexual longing—but singing also reveals its whereabouts to any hungry Trachops cirrhosus bat. Should it sing halfheartedly, the female frogs won’t be impressed, even though the bat may think it’s a lovesick runt. If it sings about its prowess with large, croaking, swollen pride, then a bat is bound to court the frog in ways too ghoulish to describe.

  Wealth is also important. A female wants a generous male who will protect and support her offspring. When a male Pyrochroidae beetle desires a female, he shows her a deep cleft in his forehead as one of his display moves. She’s impressed all right. It’s a hell of a deep cleft. In beetle terms, he’s a hunk, a handsome, well-endowed beetle. So she grabs his head, licks it, and permits him to mate. What the male carries in his cleft is a small dose of a poison she’s immune to that will protect her future eggs from ants and other predators. He gives her just a taste of it during foreplay to let her know that it would be in her best interest to mate with him, because during intercourse she would receive a huge gift of the precious chemical along with his sperm. “It’s as though he’s showing her a fat wallet,” entomologist Tom Eisner explains, “and saying, ‘There’s more in the bank where that came from.’ “

  Female bowerbirds of New Guinea choose multitalented males, those who collect the most ornaments, design the most extravagant nests, and put on the best sideshow dance. Any male who isn’t a gifted interior decorator and builder is a nerd. So males construct architectural wonders (sometimes nine feet tall) out of sticks, lichens, ferns, and leaves. Then they decorate the nests with orchids, snail shells, butterfly wings, flowers, bits of charcoal, bird-of-paradise feathers, seeds, fungi, beetle carapaces, ballpoint-pen tops, toothbrushes, bracelets, shotgun cartridges, or whatever else they can find. A sense of decor drives the males wild. As the flowers wilt, they freshen them daily. There is always a carefully considered color scheme, blue being the favorite. Researchers have counted as many as 500 decorations on a single bower. Because fierce battles arise between piratical males trying to plunder a neighbor’s nest for decorations, a well-stocked bower advertises a male’s power. Females are attracted to males with large, artistically designed bachelor pads in good repair. For the bowerbird to build a seductive bower, Jared Diamond explains, “a male must be endowed with physical strength, dexterity and endurance, plus searching skills and memory—as if women were to choose husbands on the basis of a triathlon contest extended to include a chess game and sewing exercise.” When a female is attracted to the bowerbird equivalent of a ritzy flat and a flashy red sports car, the male grovels at her feet, cackles and squeaks his appeals as he dances around her, pointing to various objets d’art with his bill. All the male wants to give her is his seed. Therefore a razzmatazz seduction is essential; courtship is his all. The male hopes to attract and mate with as many females as possible. But the female needs to get pregnant by just one extraordinary male, and then fly off to build a modest, inconspicuous nest where she’ll raise her young by herself.

  If our couple decides to go dancing after dinner, or to a nightclub, or a bar, they’ll bathe their minds in pop songs. It won’t matter if the songs are rock, country, or easy-listening—all will be about love. Popular music has an obsession with love. Occasionally, there will be a work song, or, rather, a “take this job and shove it” song. Or a poignant song about the sacrifices Mom or Dad made to raise the kids. But there are no songs about the joys of heli-arc welding or how much fun it is to go sledding. Pop songs vivisect relationships. They are the primary source of love education for adolescents. The airwaves have become our troubadours. People all over the country can turn on their car radios, television sets, or CD players, and hear the same songs at the same time. In pop songs we share our myths and ideals about love. In a tough, mercantile way, they warn us what love may cost. But they also alert us to what grandeur it may bring. They offer advice on whom to love, how to know if it’s the real thing, what to do if one’s betrayed, how to cope if love disintegrates. We are constantly in love, looking for love, losing love, or hurt by love; in short, we are “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Our songs say it all.

  In evolutionary terms, humans have not required music for mating, but we do find it hypnotic and seductive. A language of pure emotion, music heightens courtship, and most cultures include music in their mating rituals. For the Cheyenne Indians, courtship took time and was suffused with romance. A brave would hide in the woods waiting for his sweetheart to pass and then serenade her on a special love flute. In time, his melodies worked their way into her heart. Then he would woo her with compliments, gifts, and attentions. But she would not make love with him before they wed. A Cheyenne girl put on a chastity belt at puberty and wore it until she married. She might keep her beau waiting for five years or so, which gave him plenty of time to master the flute, a phallic symbol of the beautiful music his body had to offer.

  The Cheyenne maiden wouldn’t have been comfortable if her beau sang songs with sexually explicit lyrics. I can’t imagine what she’d make of such pop songs as “Sexual Healing.” Love songs of the twenties “sang of carefree nights and frenetic days,” says Richard Rodgers, “that rushed headlong into the nightmare and fantasy of the thirties…. Breadlines seemed less burdensome if one could sing.” During the thirties, forties, and fifties, women yearned in love songs for love to save them, to give their lives meaning and direction. Without love, a woman was worthless. Nothing a man could do to a woman was too great a price to pay for the gift of his love. Hence the popularity of such songs as “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” in which the man is shiftless and unworthy but the singer is glad to love him anyway. Men idealized women as
angelic creatures with a talent for sorcery, who stole their hearts, enslaved their thoughts, and made them feel irrational. Women called the shots in most love-song relationships. The ability to drive a man crazy with love was the only real power a woman had. Enjoying sex was not something women could talk about openly. If singers like Billie Holiday sometimes cooed “The meat is sweeter closer to the bone,” it was deliciously scandalous. When rock and roll hit in the fifties and sixties, love songs suddenly reflected social revolution, uninhibited sex, love as mysticism, and a rejection of middle-class taboos. Love was a religion again, one that could save the world, as the Beatles and other groups proclaimed. By the time the eighties rolled around, men in pop songs were loners who wanted sex but not commitment. “Baby, baby, don’t get stuck on me,” a typical song warned, because men were tough and lean and troubled and they just weren’t “the marrying kind.” Today, pop songs tend to be clever and cynical. Now that sex is freely available, and inhibition and denial have given way to frankness, songs have changed from coy, romantic euphemisms to yowls of blunt desire. The lyrics have gotten sexier, even raunchy at times, and simple lamentation has turned into hard truths and stark reality. But in many of today’s songs singers croon again for head-over-heels love, and psychologists Schlachet and Waxenberg think perhaps this

  renewed interest in enduring love is a backlash against a culture of narcissism and consumption that emphasizes the primacy of the individual over the human need to relate in an interdependent way, which leaves its members feeling empty and alienated with nothing but the quick fix of a new sensation to provide temporary comfort.

  They see hope in the popularity of albums by Linda Ronstadt, Barbra Streisand, and Carly Simon that return to ballads of the thirties and forties.