The Incurable Romantic

by Frank Tallis

  As I sat there, listening to the professor’s ripe English, I couldn’t help wondering if any memory traces were interred in those slices. Some residual organisation that—with the aid of some impossibly advanced technology—might be translated into moving pictures. I stared at those anatomical slivers with a melancholy fascination, as if my sustained attention might eventually force the dead matter to give up its secrets. I began to imagine scenes from a life, and it was curious, because everything I imagined concerned love and intimacy: a woman lying on rumpled bedsheets—her naked body illuminated by rays of sunshine streaming through a high window; lipstick on the rim of a wine glass; long hair whipped up by a sea-breeze and trained into baroque curlicues against a cloudless sky. Were they still there, in some shape or form, memories like these?

  What is life about if it isn’t about love? Finding love, being loved and loving others? Yet, love is something we rarely engage with intellectually. We all experience falling in love but take little or no interest in how it works.

  When love attracts literary interest, it does so more commonly in genre form. Romantic fiction has never been taken very seriously, and love is diminished even further in the context of romantic comedy, where the standard devices of misunderstanding and cross-purposes make us laugh at the folly of love. More peculiar still is the belief that love is of great importance to women, but of only negligible importance to men. Lord Byron famously said: ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a part; it is a woman’s whole existence.’ Love is pink with feathered trim, perfumed and mildly diverting, a form of intellectual needlepoint. Frippery.

  In reality, love is shaped by Darwinian imperatives. It is another facet of wild nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. Falling in love is a combustible state that reproduces the symptoms of psychiatric illness, and when love goes wrong the results can be fatal. Passions can become twisted and ugly.

  So why do we joke about love?

  Freud believed that we play down those things that make us most anxious. The destabilising nature of love reveals the fragility of the self; in a moment—in the time it takes for eyes to meet across a crowded room—we can lose ourselves. We can become obsessed and mad with desire. A whole life can be overturned and plunge into chaos. And when we consummate love we are humbled. As we explore each other’s orifices it is self-evident that we are just animals. We cannot sustain comforting illusions of superiority, cultivation or divinity while exchanging body fluids. The uncomfortable tension created by our contradictory natures—civilised and bestial—is unsettling. No wonder love and its febrile consequences make us anxious.

  Love can be other things too—wonderful things. It can be oceanic, transcendent and rapturous. It can make us feel complete. Countless studies show that love—in the context of a satisfying long-term relationship—is associated with well-being and longevity. Love is so powerful it can command Death to come back another day. Conversely, many report that a life without love feels aimless, superficial, lonely and lacking in substance. Love facilitates the tumbling of genes through time, from generation to generation; a never-ending process of recombination that cross-stitches the whole of humanity. It is the greatest of all commonalities.

  Love has been selected by evolutionary pressures to maximise reproductive success. Children in the ancestral environment had much more chance of surviving when raised by two committed parents. But how did this situation arise in the first place? What is the ultimate explanation for the evolution of love? The answer to this question can be squeezed like a sponge beneath a tap, sliced and spread out in a series of transverse sections.

  Compared to most animals, the human infant is appallingly ill-equipped to find food and fend for itself. Somewhat paradoxically, the reason for this extraordinary helplessness is brain size. Intelligence gives human beings an almost incalculable advantage and it has allowed our species to dominate an entire planet; however, enormous brains make childbirth extremely dangerous. Big heads have a tendency to get stuck in the birth canal—babies and mothers die. In evolutionary terms, it is imperative that brain size is optimised, but it is also imperative that offspring survive and reproduce. This problematic contradiction necessitated a compromise. Human babies are born approximately twelve months early compared with other mammals and their brains finish growing outside the womb. Consequently, human babies are extremely vulnerable and must be closely attended. In the ancestral environment, this kind of attention, essential to ensure survival, could be provided only by two parents bonded together for at least three or four years—the time required for offspring to overcome the handicap of prematurity and achieve a level of independence. Parental pair-bonds, although temporary, had to be very strong—overwhelming, in fact—because the future of the human race depended on it. This is why love enslaves us. When we fall in love, we are no longer free. Our capacity for reason is compromised. Our genes don’t want us to approach our potential mates with cool detachment. They want us to be on fire—they want us to be impassioned and reckless. They want us to love madly.

  If our ancestors hadn’t loved madly, their children wouldn’t have survived, they would never have reached maturity or made use of their enormous brains, and you wouldn’t be reading this book.

  Evolutionary pressures selected intelligence, but—in addition to head size—intelligence comes with a further complication. Our big brains allow us to override our instincts. This is a major problem, because what our genes want (reproduction) and what we want (freedom) don’t always coincide. A big brain means that we can put our own interests and preferences first. Our ancestors might have chosen in increasing numbers to abandon their partners and children; they might even have chosen to be celibate. This would have resulted in extinction. Evolution compensated for these dangerous possibilities with another compromise. For three to four years at least, the human animal would cease to be an entirely selfish animal. It would be compelled to form an attachment, procreate and care for its offspring. And all of these objectives were ensured by disabling rational self-interest with what we now call love.

  It should be emphasised that evolution is a blind process. There is no master plan and as a result there are many ‘unintended’ side-effects. Our big brains allow us to take certain liberties with respect to our evolutionary programming. We can, for example, choose to extend pair-bonds well beyond the expedient evolutionary minimum for a multiplicity of very ‘human’ reasons: companionship, sense of humour, kindness, compatibility, shared memories, an attractive smile, warmth in the middle of the night, eyes of delphinium blue. We all have our reasons.

  Over the course of the preceding chapters I have argued for a more considered approach to the subject of love and its relationship to mental health. There is nothing new about this argument, and precedents can be found in numerous classical texts. However, it is my view, largely formed by talking to patients in hospitals and consulting rooms, that we, as a culture, have trivialised an important aspect of the human condition and at a very high cost. We have lost sight of something that Hippocrates, Lucretius and Avicenna incorporated more readily into their world view. A doctor in ancient Greece or Rome, or in eleventh-century Persia, would have had more to say, for example, about love sickness—in relative theoretical terms—than would a contemporary psychotherapist. Before qualifying as a clinical psychologist, I studied psychology for a total of eight years, during which time I received only one hour’s teaching on the subject of romantic love. People can experience significant distress when they fall in love or when love goes wrong. Yet, they are usually wary of talking about their pain openly (especially to a mental-health professional) because they have been made to feel that their predicament is adolescent, foolish or embarrassing—or that their sexual fantasies and urges are dirty or perverted. They are told to get a grip, pull themselves together or be ashamed of themselves. But it is incredibly difficult to control emotions so deeply rooted in our brains. And, even with professional help, there is no guarantee that the conditions of longing and des
ire can be successfully treated. More often than not, the goal of therapy is management rather than cure.

  One rarely gets an opportunity to look at a brain directly. Nowadays, even neuroscientists have little reason to handle their chosen object of study. With the advent of neuroimaging technology, old-fashioned brain dissections have become increasingly redundant. For me, attending a ‘brain cuts’ tutorial was curiously haunting. I often think of those slices—gleaming in a pool of autumnal light—and the possibility of residual memories of love lingering, with obscure tenacity, among those florid white and grey patterns.

  I wish I had paid more attention to the professor.

  The situation and surroundings were oddly allusive with respect to certain cinematic clichés: the hammy, East European stresses, the fact that I was sitting in a laboratory, the distinctly Gothic flavour of a human brain being prepared and displayed like a culinary treat. Where did the professor come from exactly? Somewhere quite close to Transylvania, I imagined. Perfect.

  Had I been more astute, back then, I might have estimated the professor’s age and realised that his accent was meaningful beyond films featuring vampires. I might have determined that a man like him would have an interesting history, the kind of history that would have deepened and enriched my philosophical reflections on the brain, life and love. I might have delayed my departure after the tutorial, tarried, asked more questions and engaged him in a broader conversation. But I didn’t. Regrettably, my curiosity took me only as far as Transylvania and the looming turrets of Castle Dracula.

  Recently, I discovered that the anatomy professor was a Holocaust survivor. He had spent a winter in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and his father had died there. The professor had been a child at the time. I shudder—even now—to think of what memories were preserved in his grey matter.

  Life is a precarious business and love is its essential ingredient. As I get older, I have found it salutary to remind myself of these truisms with increasing regularity. We humans—it seems to me—are inclined to forget the obvious.

  ‘I hate him. I hate him.’

  Verity was a middle-aged stockbroker’s wife from a wealthy, upper-crust family, a former debutante whose life was a continual round of coffee mornings, village fetes, gymkhanas, Wimbledon, charity events and trips to see the opera at Glyndebourne. Her children had grown up and left home but that hadn’t left her feeling bereft of purpose. Life was good. In fact, life had always been good.

  Without any prior indications and completely unexpectedly, her husband had announced that he was no longer happy. He had decided to move to his own house in rural Kent and wanted a divorce. When Verity asked if there was another woman, her husband had replied that there wasn’t. Verity didn’t believe him. Conventional methods of detection failed to resolve the issue, so Verity opted for more drastic measures. She swapped her expensive gowns and floral dresses for combat fatigues and spent nights camped out in a field near her husband’s new home. She purchased high-powered binoculars, a camera with a telephoto lens and a long-distance listening device. Verity was no longer acting like a sophisticated society hostess and mother of four. She was acting like a secret service operative on a mission behind enemy lines. It had been an extraordinary metamorphosis. Her friends thought she had gone mad.

  Verity was sitting cross-legged on her hospital bed. I was sitting in front of her on a wicker chair. A biography of Margaret Thatcher and an Agatha Christie novel were positioned on the bedside cabinet next to a jug of dusty water and a paper cup. She was wearing a baggy cardigan and track-suit bottoms. Her hair was mussed and her face was deeply lined. She had lost a lot of weight in a short period of time and this had produced a pendant wattle beneath her chin.

  ‘I hate him,’ she repeated bitterly.

  As it turned out, there was another woman—and that woman was young and beautiful. Verity hadn’t been able to stop watching. She had wanted to know everything about her husband’s new life and very soon she did. It was then that her sense of empowerment crumbled and she became clinically depressed.

  ‘I just wanted to know the truth. That’s what I told myself. I didn’t want him to get away with lying to me—I felt he was insulting my intelligence. I’m not sure why I carried on. The whole thing became compulsive, morbid.’ She clutched her head, as if her brain had been sliced into sections and she was trying to stop it from falling apart. ‘I don’t know how it came to this.’ She glanced around the room, acknowledging with frightened eyes that she was in a psychiatric hospital. ‘I don’t know who I am any more.’ She cried for a while and I offered her some tissues.

  After Verity had dried her eyes she said, ‘The girl—I think of her as a girl—she was oriental—Chinese—and…’ Misery withered the end of her sentence. ‘People think I’m ridiculous. It’ll get around, of course, these things always do. People can be very insensitive and indiscreet. But am I so ridiculous?’ She cupped her chin, thoughtfully. ‘I say I hate him. But I know that’s not right.’ Cinders of memory were rekindled by a heavy sigh: a hotel bedroom—a restaurant in Paris—a beach walk on a blustery day, perhaps? ‘If I really hated him it wouldn’t hurt this much. It only hurts this much because…’ The next words would be difficult and the strain showed on her face. ‘Because I still love him.’

  That was what I was waiting for: self-recognition, truth—something I could work with. Now we could begin.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to: Richard Beswick for encouraging me to write this book and being a creative, astute and enthusiastic editor; my agent Clare Alexander; Nicola Fox (for reading earlier drafts); and Nithya Rae for a thoughtful and impressive copy-edit.

  Frank Tallis is a clinical psychologist and the critically acclaimed author of over 15 fiction and non-fiction titles. He previously taught clinical psychology and neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry and at King’s College, London. He splits his time between London and Bonnieux, France.