A Natural History of Love

by Diane Ackerman

  Of course, if we were attending a wedding in Africa, it would look much different. The Mbuti pygmies, who roam the forests of Central Africa, begin preparing a girl for marriage and motherhood when she reaches puberty. Then, for two to three months, she lives inside a special hut with other girls her age, and receives instruction on sexuality, marriage, and women’s ways. Toward the end of this period, a battalion of the girls’ mothers stands outside the hut with baskets of well-chosen stones. The young men of the village come calling; of course, the mothers are well acquainted with their families and character, and have a good idea which daughter a certain boy might be hankering for. If a mother doesn’t approve of the suitor, her aim is blunt and severe. If she likes him, her attack is halfhearted. In any case, if a boy passes unscathed through the barrage of mothers, he may make love to the girl of his choice, who then becomes his fiancée. He still must ask her parents formally for her hand, and present them with a killed deer, to prove that he will be a good provider. However, it’s only when the girl becomes pregnant that the engagement period is officially over and the marriage begins.

  Among the Bantu Kavirondo in East Africa, the bride and groom consummate the marriage in the presence of many women and girls, to prove to all that the union has been completed. Among the G’wi Bushmen of Botswana, girls and boys are betrothed when they’re very young. When a girl menstruates for the first time, she’s expected to fast and sit absolutely still for four days, with her legs held straight out in front of her. Then the groom joins her, and both are ritually washed and tattooed. Their hands, feet, and backs are cut with razors, their blood is mixed together and applied to their cuts, thus making them blood-wed. A paste of ashes and medicinal roots, rubbed into the cuts, guarantees that they’ll heal as raised scars. The bride’s father formally introduces her to the groom’s people, her new clan. Relatives on both sides lend the newly weds their most precious ornaments to wear for a few days. When the couple returns the ornaments, their normal married life begins.

  Some wedding customs seem to be universal: sprinkling the couple with seed or symbols of fertility, pretending to bind the couple with ropes or ribbons (a custom to be found from China to Italy to Africa), mixing the couple’s blood literally or symbolically, the taking of sacred vows. Even in the Catholic nun’s “marriage” to Christ, we find a ring and the imagery of binding together and blending of flesh and blood. This roping together of lives is perfectly understandable, but mixing flesh and blood with the loved one is quite a different challenge. In a minute sense, we can become one. Every molecule of air, every atom of matter is shared throughout the planet and throughout time. In that sense, I may indeed become one with John Donne, Colette, Marie Curie, Leonardo. Matter returns to matter, as so many creation myths tell us. But the only way for two people to become one flesh (unless they’re Siamese twins) is to be mother and fetus. Subconsciously, all these traditions may be echoing the only perfect love humans know, one based on absolute devotion, self-sacrifice, and protection—the love between a mother and her newborn. In anthropological terms, they are saying to each other: I want you to love me and protect me as if you were genetically connected to me—flesh of my flesh—because that will be your connection to our offspring.

  Once a couple marry, they have a brand-new collection of customs, rules, and regulations to contend with. It’s as if society didn’t hand round enough edicts, relatives didn’t issue enough demands, because married couples like to invent their own private rituals, too. Most couples I know have evolved elaborate customs about which holidays to spend with which in-laws, which nights to “have a date” in the bedroom, how to spend Sunday. For example, they may habitually spaniel* together with a half-read newspaper on sunny afternoons in winter, or have brunch at a favorite deli and then spend a few hours mousing† around the countryside.

  Remembering Valentine’s Day is a must. But who knows who Valentine was? One legend claims that Valentinus, a priest in fourth-century Rome, secretly married couples even though the emperor Claudius had temporarily forbidden it. Claudius was waging a war and believed that bachelor soldiers would fight harder. Another legend paints Valentinus as a Christian imprisoned for refusing to worship pagan gods. Making friends with the jailer’s blind daughter, he cured her through prayer; and on the day of his execution, February 14, he sent her a farewell note signed “Your Valentine.” Other legends link him to erotic festivals in ancient Rome, which happened to take place during February (named after Juno Februata, goddess of love’s fever). For whatever reason, he was canonized in the Middle Ages and he’s been the patron saint of lovers ever since.

  Passion may crave spontaneity and disorder, but love likes its holidays to be reliable, even commemorative, and invents rituals to give the marriage a sense of history and society. In time, long after the romance may have waned, it’s not just a couple’s vows that unite them, but a wealth of shared habits, customs, and events. For longtime spouses, the marriage becomes their homeland, complete with its own laws, myths, and routines. Divorce seems like exile, because they are citizens of the marriage, in whose bustling city-state they dwell.

  *According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the longest marriage on record lasted eighty-six years, between Sir Temulji Bhicaji Nariman and Lady Nariman, who wed in 1853, when they were five years old. The longest engagement was between Octavio Guillen and Adriana Martinez of Mexico, who took sixty-seven years to make sure they were right for each other. The largest wedding present was the entire city of Gezer, which the Bible explains was a gift from the pharaoh to Solomon when he married the pharaoh’s daughter (I Kings, 9:16). The most expensive wedding in recent times took place in 1981, when Mohammed, son of Sheik Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, married Princess Salama in Dubai. The wedding lasted for seven days, hosted 20,000 guests, and took place in a stadium that had been built for the occasion.

  *Actually, our word bachelor meant the Latin equivalent of cowhand, and it was a term that implied that one was still young and inexperienced.

  *spaniel v. (fr. spaniel, any of several breeds of medium-sized dogs): To find a shaft of sunlight pouring through a window on a cold winter day, curl up in the puddle of warmth it creates on the rug, and doze with doglike dereliction. “I think I’ll just spaniel for an hour or so before I begin work.”

  †mouse v. (fr. mouse, any of numerous small rodents of the families Muridae and Cricetidae): To explore a town with the eager curiosity of a mouse nosing down alleyways and peeking into corners, always on the lookout for hidden marvels. May refer to shopping, but only if it’s done with rodentlike verve, appetite, and joyous exploration, say, of quaint boutiques. “Okay, you stay here and make the world safe for democracy; I’ll go mouse the shops.” Other forms: mousing, mouser, moused, mouseable. “What I love about Santa Fe is how mouseable it is.” Should not be used when referring to natural wonders. For example, it would be inappropriate to say at a cocktail party: “Have you moused the Grand Canyon yet?” But it would be in perfect form, on the same occasion, to observe: “Napoleon—now there was a man who could mouse a whole country.”

  OF COCKS AND CUNTS

  We have records of cock being used as a slang term for the penis as early as the Middle Ages. Most scholars suggest that the word must have come from the sound of a rooster crowing cock-a-doodle-doo: the rooster was nicknamed a cock, then a crowing penis was nicknamed a rooster. I think it more likely came from the cock used in plumbing during the Middle Ages—a valve or faucet. Any fourteen-year-old boy could provide a fine compendium of slang terms for the penis. One old mideastern euphemism was “knee.” Indeed, the Mesopotamians used a single word, birku, for both knee and penis: In an important ritual, a father would set a boy on his knee and formally acknowledge him as his son. Our word genuine (“of the knee”) arose from that symbolic act. In Latin, the word birku became virtu, and meant virility, male-spirited, or erectness.

  Every time we say the word fascinate we are referring to penises. In Latin, a fascinum was the
image of an erect penis that people worshiped, hung up in the kitchen or bedroom, or wore around the neck as an amulet. Penises were powerful and praiseworthy, and could even ward off the evil eye. In time, anything worth appreciation and study, anything potent and magical, anything as truly terrific as a penis, was called fascinating. This penis-worship continued for some time. In fact, hundreds of Renaissance churches claimed to have part of Christ’s penis as a holy relic. His circumcised prepuce, the only mortal part of him left on earth when he ascended to heaven, was treasured as a miraculous fertility aid. Women prayed at Christ’s foreskin for help in conceiving. Thirteen of those relics survive today. The best known, at the Abbey Church in Chartres, was said to be responsible for thousands of pregnancies.

  The word cunt has an equally fascinating heritage. I’d like to think, as Chaucer did, that it derives from the word quaint, which meant a many-layered infolded mystery. The O.E.D. offers examples of usage starting as early as 1230, and including at least one street name, “Gropecuntlane,” a red-light district in medieval Oxford, later changed to “Magpie Lane.” However, a likelier possibility is that the word came from India. The Hindu goddess Kali, personifying the life-giving vulva energy of the world, was called Cunti or Kunda. Old Norse for the female genitals was kunta, perhistoric German was kunton. Cognates can be found throughout the Indo-European languages. If we look back even further, we find its origins in the Indo-European root geu, which meant “a hollow place.” Unlike cock, cunt isn’t slang, but an ancient part of our vocabulary. Many of our everyday words derive from that female source, such as cunning, kin, country, and kind.

  The Elizabethans, who liked saucy puns, had many euphemisms for the female genitals, their favorites being “lap,” “ring,” “eye,” “circle,” and “nothing.” Hence the ribald jokes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Hamlet and Ophelia are getting ready to watch a play:

  HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

  OPHELIA: No, my lord.

  HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap.

  OPHELIA: Aye, my lord.

  HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters?

  OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.

  HAMLET: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

  OPHELIA: What is, my lord?

  HAMLET: Nothing.

  OPHELIA: You are merry, my lord.

  HAMLET: Who, I?

  In time, of course, he’ll suggest she go to a nunnery (slang for a brothel), but at this stage he’s love’s pauper, who dreams of lying in the luxury of her lap.

  It’s worth noting that when we talk about gender we say that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina. This distinction, which we take for granted, hides a prejudice about the baseness of women. A man’s pleasure organ is his penis, and a woman’s pleasure organ is her clitoris, not her vagina. Even if we’re talking about procreation, it’s not accurate: a man’s penis delivers sperm and can impregnate, and a woman’s womb contains eggs, which can become fertile. Equating the man’s penis with the woman’s vagina says, in effect, that the natural order of things is for a man to have pleasure during sex, and for a woman to have a sleeve for man’s pleasure.* It perpetuates the notion that women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex, that they’re bucking the natural and social order if they do. I don’t think this will change very soon, but it reminds me how many of our mores travel almost invisibly in the plasma of language.

  If cock and cunt have a quaint and long history as language, they have an equally lush background as instruments for breaking laws, disturbing the peace, and challenging moral codes.

  *In classical Latin vagina means “sheath for a sword.” Aeneas would put his sword into his vagina.

  LOVE ON THE EDGE: ADULTERY, EXTRAVAGANT GESTURES, AND CRIMES OF PASSION

  For sensitive, refined, affectionate, altruistic folk, we humans can certainly be a savage and sadistic lot. Even knowing what we do about our biological heritage, and having been less than angelic myself at times, even reading the shocking accounts of butchery in Bosnia in the newspapers, I still do not understand in a personal, intimate way how one can feel gratuitous malice, sadism, or the wish to torture another human being, regardless of how much anger or hatred may be bottled up inside. Or even how both complexions of good and evil can rule us simultaneously. Intellectually, of course, I understand only too well.

  There have been times and places when committing adultery, for example, was the most daredevil and extravagant act anyone could risk. During the Middle Ages, husbands competed in the degree of cruelty they showed to their adulterous wives. To be less cruel than one’s neighbor was to lose face. Horror stories abound. One lady was forced to embalm her dead lover’s heart and then eat it. Another was presented to a group of lepers, who were invited to rape her. Another’s husband had his wife’s lover butchered and his bones put in a chapel, where she was sent daily to contemplate her crime and drink out of his skull. Only rarely were adulterous husbands punished. The wives risked, at the least, public humiliation (often accompanied by having their hair cut off), and at the most, gruesome torture and/or death. Their lovers risked castration or death. And yet they dallied. They gambled life and limb. They climbed onto the motorcycles of their passion, gunned the engines, and raced toward the edge of a great precipice, leaping into thin air at high speed, never knowing if they would land safely on the far rim. With so much at stake, it’s amazing people risked adultery at all; but they found it irresistible as a drug, one well worth hazarding death or dismemberment.

  My backyard contains some living monuments to love’s extremes. Deep in the woods, a large mulberry tree rakes its branches across any passerby. Occasionally I prune it, but that simply encourages it to grow hardier and more compact, and the next season its broad shoulders reach even farther. According to legend, the berries of the mulberry once were white, but turned red after the death of the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Neighbors in the cramped warrens of Babylon, the two grew up together, and fell deeply in love, though their parents forbade them to marry. Night after night, they would whisper romantic confidences through a hole in the wall between their bedrooms. Finally, unable to bear even this separation any longer, Pyramus suggested a rendezvous at the tomb of Ninus, beside a mulberry tree both knew. Thisbe crept out first and headed straight for the tomb, but when she got there she startled a lioness at a fresh kill, its mouth dripping blood. As Thisbe fled, the lioness tore her cloak, but she managed to escape. Soon Pyramus arrived, saw her torn cloak and the lioness devouring a carcass, and assumed that his lover was being ripped to shreds as he watched. Agonizing over Thisbe’s death, crazed with despair, he drove away the lioness, then took his sword and rammed it into his side; and blood spurted all over the white mulberries.

  Eventually, Thisbe began working her way back to the tomb. From afar, she could see that the lion was gone, and she hurried to await her lover, as planned. But to her horror she found him lying dead on the ground, saw his sword and her bloodstained cloak beside him, and understood at once what must have happened. “Your love for me killed you,” she cried. “All right, I too can be brave. I too will prove my love. Only death could have separated us, but now not even death will keep us apart.” With that, she plunged his sword into her heart and died beside him. As the only witness to this tragic scene, the mulberry tree felt such pity for the lovers that it stained all of its berries blood red, a reminder to passersby of the lovers’ fate, and of the lengths to which people will go for love.

  If this story sounds like that of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Iseult, it’s because many ancient tales of tragic love contain the same elements: young lovers, forbidden love, a rendezvous to consummate their love, the apparent death of one lover, followed by the suicide of the other, then the suicide of the first. A natural monument often marks the spot. Such stories revolve around the agony of separation, the sexual stimulant of having to surmount obstacles, and the need to prove the sincerity of one’s love.

  Not all gestures are s
o solemn or absolute. Some are culinary—and a few silly. Legend has it that tortellini were created to honor Venus’s belly button: a Bolognese innkeeper spied on Venus through a keyhole, noted the anatomical details, and decided his love was best expressed through pasta. When a mistress of Louis XIV became petulant and jealous, the king decided that only a bold gesture would appease her. Insisting she lie down with her naked breasts revealed, he asked his artisans to cast a mold from one breast and produce glasses in its exact shape, so he could always sip champagne from her bosom. Today we still drink champagne from glasses fashioned after his mistress’s breast.

  Why does love require such extravagant gestures? Why do lovers believe that life will be unlivable without that one, particular love? According to the hard economy that guides our lives, the more one pays for something the more precious the goods seem both to oneself and to one’s neighbors. So only a Taj Mahal is capacious enough, only a fifty-carat diamond brilliant enough, only suicide sacrificial enough.

  “How was Phantom of the Opera?” I overheard someone ask a friend recently.

  “To die for,” her friend replied in raptures.

  The mulberry in the yard thrives in damp woodland soil. In the spring, the young twigs put out bushels of dark-green, saw-toothed leaves, which feel rough on the top but softly hairy underneath. Smallish green flowers sprout in clusters, and when the coblike fruits appear, songbirds eat them. I often see them sitting on a branch devouring what looks like congealed blood. A milky sap oozes from cuts in the mulberry bark; and in the fall, the leaves glow with a soft amber light.

  Scattered around the forest, sleeping narcissus bulbs commemorate the abduction of a beautiful princess. According to one version of the Greek myth, Zeus created the flower to help his brother, the lord of the Underworld, who was in love with Persephone, Demeter’s daughter. One day, Persephone was gathering flowers with her friends when she spied a brilliant blossom across the meadow. Her friends hadn’t noticed it, and she laughed as she ran to discover what it was. She had never seen one so radiant before, with so many flowers bursting from the stems, and a seductive fragrance both sweet and animal. Just as she reached out a hand to caress it, the earth yawned open at her feet, and “out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible.” He grabbed her and held her tight, and galloped away with her to his world of the dead, far from the sunlit joys of springtime.