Oxytocin may be a neurochemical key to committed, loving relationships. In one study it was shown to bond members of one species of prairie vole in lifelong monogamous matches. Voles of another variety, who lack this oxytocin release, have sex promiscuously and never bond to a partner. In experiments where the hormone was blocked, monogamous voles that had already mated suddenly lost interest in each other. But when the hormone was released in the promiscuous voles that lacked it, they started bonding with each other.9
In humans, oxytocin may present a catch-22: the very chemistry of long-term love may sometimes suppress the chemistry of lust. The specifics are quite complex, but in one interaction vasopressin (oxytocin’s close cousin) drives down levels of testosterone; in another testosterone suppresses oxytocin. Still, while the scientific specifics wait to be worked out, testosterone can sometimes enhance oxytocin, suggesting that at least hormonally passion need not fade with commitment.10
SOCIAL ALLERGIES
“Suddenly, all you’re aware of is that there are too many wet towels on the floor, he’s hogging the remote, and he’s scratching his back with a fork. Finally, you come face to face with the immutable truth that it’s virtually impossible to French-kiss a person who takes the new roll of toilet paper and leaves it resting on top of the empty cardboard roll.”
That litany of complaints signals the blooming of a “social allergy,” a strong aversion toward a romantic partner’s habits that, like a physical allergen, at first contact causes no reaction—and would not in most other people—but becomes increasingly sensitized with each exposure.11 Social allergies typically emerge when a dating couple spend more time together, getting to know each other “warts and all.” The social allergy’s irritating quality waxes as the inoculating power of romantic idealization wanes.
In research among American college students, most social allergies in women developed in reaction to their boyfriends’ uncouth or thoughtless behavior, like that toilet-paper-roll habit. Men, on the other hand, became vexed when their girlfriends seemed self-absorbed or too bossy. Social allergies worsen with repeated exposure. A woman who shrugs off her partner’s boorish behaviors at two months may find them barely tolerable after a year. These hypersensitivities have consequence only to the extent that they prime anger and distress: the more upset they make a partner, the more likely it is that that couple will break up.
Psychoanalysts remind us that our desire for the “perfect” person who will meet every one of our expectations and empathically sense and fulfill our every need is a primal fantasy impossible to achieve. When we learn to accept that no lover or spouse can ever satisfy all the unmet needs we bring from childhood, we can begin to perceive our partners more fully and realistically—rather than seeing them through the lens of our wishes and projections.
And neuroscientists add that attachment, caregiving, and sexual desire are but three of seven major neural systems that drive what we want and do. Exploration (which includes learning about the world) and social bonding are among the others.12 Each of us ranks these basic neural drives in our own way—some people live to ramble, others to socialize. When it comes to love, though, attachment, caregiving, and sex are typically at the top of the list, in one order or another.
John Gottman, a pioneering researcher on emotions in marriages, proposes that the degree to which a partner meets the main needs of the other’s dominant neural systems predicts whether their match will last.13 Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has become the leading expert on what makes marriages succeed or fail, once coming up with a way to predict with more than 90 percent accuracy whether a couple would separate within the following three years.14
These days Gottman argues that when a primary need goes unmet—say, for sexual contact or for caring—we feel a steady state of dissatisfaction, one that can manifest as subtly as a vague frustration or as visibly as continual rancor. These needs, when frustrated, fester. The signals of such neural discontent are early warning signs of a union in jeopardy.
On the other hand, something rather remarkable tends to happen with couples who live together for decades, finding happiness with each other. Their continual rapport even seems to leave its mark on their faces, which come to resemble each other, apparently a result of the sculpting of facial muscles as they evoke the same emotions over the years.15 Since each emotion tenses and relaxes a specific set of facial muscles, as partners smile or frown in unison they strengthen the parallel set of muscles. This gradually molds similar ridges, wrinkles, and lines, making their faces appear more alike.
That marvel was revealed in a study where people were shown two collections of photos of couples—the first from their wedding, the other taken twenty-five years later—and were asked which husbands and wives looked most similar to each other. The couples’ faces had not only grown more alike, but the greater the facial similarity, the happier they reported being in their marriage.
In a sense, as time goes on the partners in a relationship “sculpt” each other in subtler ways, reinforcing desirable patterns in each other via countless small interactions. That sculpting, some research suggests, tends to push people toward their partner’s ideal version of who they should be. This quiet push to get the love we want has been called the Michelangelo Phenomenon, where each partner shapes the other.16
The sheer amount of positive looping a couple does on any given day or over the years may be the best single barometer of the health of their marriage. Consider a study of dating couples on the verge of marriage, who agreed to undergo a fine-grained analysis of their interaction patterns during disagreements.17 The couples returned to the lab for several follow-up sessions over the course of five years. Their interactions during that first session, before marriage, predicted surprisingly much about the course of their relationship over the years.
Understandably, negative looping boded poorly. The less satisfied couples tended to match their emotions the most closely during hostile arguments. The more negative the dating partners became during this early disagreement, the less stable their match turned out to be. Particularly damaging were expressions of disgust or contempt.18 Contempt escalates negativity beyond mere criticism, often taking the form of an outright insult, delivered as though to someone on a lesser plane. With a partner’s contempt comes the message that the other is unworthy of empathy, let alone love.
Such toxic loops become all the worse when spouses have accurate empathy. They know exactly the distress the other feels but don’t care enough to help. As one seasoned divorce lawyer put it, “Indifference—not caring about, or even paying attention to, your mate—is one of the worst forms of cruelty in a marriage.”
Also hurtful was a pattern where one disgruntlement triggered another, anger begetting hurt and sadness, with defiant challenges (How can you say that! ) and partners interrupting each other before the other could finish speaking. Those patterns most strongly predicted the couple would break up, whether before or after marrying. Most broke up within a year and a half after their first session in the study.
As John Gottman told me, “In dating couples, the most important predictor of whether the relationship will last is how many good feelings the couple shares. In marriages, it’s how well the couple can handle their conflicts. And in the later years of a long marriage, it’s again how many good feelings the couple shares.”
As husbands and wives in their sixties discuss something they enjoy, measures of their physiology show that they both become progressively more cheerful as the conversation continues. But for couples in their forties, their physiology rises to fewer peaks of resonance. That suggests why satisfied couples in their sixties are more openly affectionate with each other than are those in middle age.19
From his exhaustive studies of married couples, Gottman has derived a deceptively simple measure: the ratio of toxic to nourishing moments a couple has together has remarkable predictive power. A five-to-one ratio, far more positive moments than negative, indic
ates that a couple has a sound emotional bank account and a robust relationship that is almost certain to thrive long term.20
That ratio may predict more than just relationship longevity—it may also offer a reading of how physically healthy the partners will be. As we shall see, our relationships themselves form environments that can turn certain genes on or off. Suddenly our intimate relations have to be seen in an entirely new light: The invisible web of connectedness bestows surprising biological consequences on our closest human ties.
PART FIVE
HEALTHY CONNECTIONS
16
Stress Is Social
Just a week before their wedding, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, then thirty-four, shared his personal diary with his fiancée Sonya, just seventeen. She was crushed to learn from its pages of Leo’s profligate and conflicted sexual history, including a passionate affair with a local woman who had borne him an illegitimate child.1
Sonya then wrote in her own diary, “He loves to torment me and see me weep…. What is he doing to me? Little by little I shall withdraw completely from him and poison his life.” This she resolved even as the preparations for their marriage were under way.
That inauspicious beginning was the emotional prelude to a forty-eight-year marriage. The Tolstoys’ tumultuous and epic marital battle was punctuated by lengthy truces that saw Sonya give birth to thirteen children and dutifully decode and recopy from Leo’s messy handwriting neat versions of twenty-one thousand manuscript pages for his novels, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Yet despite her devoted service, during those years Leo wrote in his diary of Sonya, “Her unfairness and quiet egotism frighten and torment me.” And Sonya countered in her diary, writing of Leo, “How can one love an insect that never stops stinging?”
By midlife, their marriage as recorded in their private journals seemed to have disintegrated into an unbearable hell for both of them, living as enemies in the same household. Toward the end of their lives—and shortly before Leo died while fleeing his troubled home in the middle of the night—Sonya wrote, “Every day there are fresh blows that scorch my heart.” And these scorching blows, she added, “shorten my life.”
Can Sonya have been right? Does such a stormy relationship shorten life? We certainly can’t prove it from the case of the Tolstoys—Leo lived to be eighty-two, and Sonya lived for nine years after he died, to seventy-four.
How “soft” epigenetic factors like our relationships affect our health has been an elusive scientific question. Whether they do at all, and to what degree, can best be answered by looking at thousands of people over many years. Some influential studies seemed to suggest that the sheer number of other people in one’s life predicts better health, but they miss the point: it is not the quantity but the quality that counts. Far more telling for our health than the absolute number of social ties we have may be the emotional tone of our relationships.
As the Tolstoys remind us, relationships can as readily be sources of angst as of joy. On the upside, the feeling that the people in one’s life are emotionally supportive has a positive health impact. This link shows itself most powerfully in people whose condition is already fragile. For instance, in a study of elderly people hospitalized for congestive heart failure, those who had no one to rely on for emotional support were three times more likely to have another episode requiring a return to the hospital than were those with warm relationships.2
Love seemingly can make a medical difference. Among men getting angiography as part of treatment for coronary heart disease, those whose loved ones were reportedly least supportive had about 40 percent more blockage than those who reported having the warmest connections.3 Conversely, data from a number of large epidemiological studies suggest that toxic relationships are as major a risk factor for disease and death as are smoking, high blood pressure or cholesterol, obesity, and physical inactivity.4 Relationships cut two ways: they can either buffer us from illness or intensify the ravages of aging and disease.
To be sure, relationships alone tell only part of the story—other risk factors, from genetic susceptibility to smoking, all play their part. But the data put our relationships squarely among those risk factors. And now, with the social brain as the missing biological link, medical science has begun to detail the biological pathways through which others get under our skin, for better or worse.5
A WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL
“Hobbes” was the name given to a macho male baboon by the researchers who observed him while he invaded a troop living in the jungles of Kenya. In the grim spirit of his namesake, the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote that beneath the veneer of civilization life is “nasty, brutish, and short,” this baboon arrived primed to fight tooth and claw to reach the top of the group hierarchy.
The impact of Hobbes on the other males was measured by taking samples of cortisol from their blood, and it became clear that his raw aggression rippled through the endocrine systems of the entire group.
Under stress, the adrenal glands release cortisol, one of the hormones the body mobilizes in an emergency.6 These hormones have widespread effects in the body, including many that are adaptive in the short term for healing bodily injuries.
Ordinarily we need a moderate level of cortisol, which acts as a biological “fuel” for our metabolism and helps regulate the immune system. But if our cortisol levels remain too high for prolonged periods, the body pays a price in ill health. The chronic secretion of cortisol (and related hormones) are at play in cardiovascular disease and impaired immune function, exacerbating diabetes and hypertension, and even destroying neurons in the hippocampus, harming memory.
Even as cortisol shuts down the hippocampus, it also stokes the amygdala, stimulating the growth of dendrites in that site for fear. In addition, heightened cortisol blunts the ability of the key areas in the prefrontal cortex to regulate the signals of fear coming from the amygdala.7
The combined neural impact of too much cortisol is threefold. The impaired hippocampus learns rather sloppily, overgeneralizing fearfulness to details of the moment that are irrelevant (such as a distinctive tone of voice). The amygdala circuitry goes on a rampage, and the prefrontal area fails to modulate signals from the overreacting amygdala. The result: the amygdala runs rampant, driving fear, while the hippocampus mistakenly perceives too many triggers for that fear.
In monkeys, the brain remains ever-vigilant for signs of a Hobbeslike stranger. In humans, that condition of vigilance and overreactivity has been called post-traumatic stress disorder.
In linking stress to health, the key biological systems are the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. When we are distressed, both the SNS and the HPA axis take up the challenge, secreting hormones that prepare us to handle an emergency or threat. But they do so by borrowing resources from the immune and endocrine systems, among others. That weakens these key systems for health, just for a moment or for years at a time.
The SNS and HPA circuits are turned on or off by our emotional states—distress for the worse, happiness for the better. Since other people affect our emotions with such power (through emotional contagion, for example), the causal linkage extends outside our body to our relationships.8
The physiological changes associated with the random ups and downs of relationships do not matter that much. But when those downs continue over many years, they create levels of biological stress (technically known as an “allostatic load”) that can speed the onset of disease or worsen its symptoms.9
How a given relationship affects our health will depend on the sum total of how emotionally toxic or nourishing it has been over months and years. The more frail our condition is—after the onset of a serious disease, while we are recovering from a heart attack, in old age—the more powerful the health impact of our relationships.
The embattled, long-suffering, though long-lived Tolstoys seem a remarkable exception, like the odd centenarian who cre
dits her longevity to eating lots of whipped cream and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
THE TOXICITY OF INSULT
Elysa Yanowitz stood by her principles though it cost her her job—and possibly a case of hypertension. One day a top executive from her cosmetics firm visited the perfume counter in a flagship San Francisco department store and ordered Yanowitz, the regional sales manager, to fire one of her best-performing salespeople.
The reason? He didn’t think the saleswoman was attractive—or as he put it, “hot”—enough. Yanowitz, who felt the employee was not only a star at sales but perfectly presentable, found the executive’s demand both groundless and disgusting. She refused to fire the woman.
Soon afterward Yanowitz’s bosses seemed to sour on her. Though she had recently been selected as the company’s sales manager of the year, now suddenly they told her she was making mistake after mistake. She feared they were building a case to force her out. Over these trying months Yanowitz began to suffer from high blood pressure. When she took a medical leave, the company replaced her.10
Yanowitz sued her former employer. However that case may be settled (as of this writing, it continues to wend its way through court), it raises the question of whether her hypertension might have been due in part to the way her own bosses treated her.11
Consider a British study of health care workers who had two supervisors on alternate days, one they dreaded and one they liked.12 On the days the dreadful boss worked, their average blood pressure jumped 13 points for the systolic and 6 for diastolic (from 113/75 to 126/81). While the readings were still in a healthy range, that much of an elevation, if maintained over time, could have a clinically significant impact—that is, speed the onset of hypertension in someone otherwise susceptible.13
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 26
