Choosing and Chasing Love

Do we choose love, or does it choose us?

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Nearly everyone has experienced it: the sudden, overwhelming sensation of meeting someone who captivates you, body and soul. It can happen at any time of life, but it affects us most acutely in adolescence, before we have even barely begun to realize that such intense feelings are possible, and certainly before we could articulate a desire to find another person to love passionately. Seemingly from nowhere, you discover a void in your heart that you did not even know was there, and, astonishingly, you realize in the same instant that this void is the exact shape of the magical person standing before you. From this moment on, you will hardly be able to think of anything other than your newfound beloved. Your heart has made a fateful choice, for reasons that you can hardly fathom, and has overturned your entire existence in ways that you can scarcely foresee.

How does this happen, and what does it say about the way we make great decisions about our lives? The biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, who died in August, spent decades studying the neurological basis of romantic love, in an attempt to understand the science of this strange and universal affliction. By examining the brains of individuals in love using functional MRI, she discovered that romantic love has a distinct pattern in the brain's circuitry. It is different from both the fleeting pangs of sexual desire as well as the lasting bonds of long-term relationships, though there is quite a bit of overlap among them. Sexual encounters often lead to romantic feelings — though not always, clearly. And romantic feelings can lead to enduring partnerships — though not always, even more clearly. But the literal chemistry of romantic love is a phenomenon unto itself: a whirlwind of reactions and sensations that has induced human beings for thousands of years to write songs and poems about it, die for it, kill for it. Romantic love is the insatiable hunger that launched a thousand stories, and drew a thousand swords.

For all of the considerable progress that Fisher made in this field, one fundamental question remained a mystery: why do we fall for one person and not another? As her work determined, there may be very sensible evolutionary reasons why we are hard-wired to find a mate, and why we might be drawn to someone from within a particular sphere of social, economic, cultural and educational characteristics. But that would tend to suggest that just having a life partner matters more than who the partner actually is. The evolutionary imperative cannot explain why, among a universe of equally eligible prospects — say, college students from similar backgrounds — we become utterly entranced by one person and not another. The unavoidable conclusion is that we do not choose a romantic partner as much as we have one chosen for us: not by our parents, matchmakers, or village elders, as in former times, but by a panoply of unconscious predilections of which we are utterly unaware.

This conclusion leads to a more general question about how humans make decisions. Psychologists and sociologists — such as Kahneman and Tversky, among many others — have long demonstrated that the human brain is subject to all manner of unconscious biases, leading to all manner of irrational and ill-considered decisions. In opposition to the economic, utilitarian view that people are rational actors who can be trusted to make choices in their own best interest, there is a preponderance of evidence that we generally have no idea why we choose one path versus another, and that careful reflection seldom yields a better result than random chance. In support of the epistemological argument that intelligence does not automatically bestow good judgment, and that knowledge alone does not constitute wisdom, romantic love is Exhibit A.

And what makes us suppose that romance is isolated from the rest of the constellation of curious human decision making? It may be the case that the lovesick brain releases a torrent of hormones and neurotransmitters that addles our otherwise normal thinking processes. But what in the long, sordid history of human experience would give us the idea that "normal" thinking consists mostly of sober rationality? Since when have homo sapiens been paragons of critical thinking and dispassionate observation? Love may be blind, but the patient was already living in the dark.

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Consider the penguin. Accounts of monogamous birds, among other animals, intrigue us because they seem to reveal similarities with humans. But penguins are not at all like us — because we aren't especially monogamous. No sooner do we fall hard for one person than we often start doubting ourselves and noticing others. Even the most mutually passionate relationships among humans often disintegrate over time, and infidelity is common throughout every human society. The question we should ask about penguin couples isn't how they "choose" one another, and whether they "love" one another, but why, once they've mated, they always stay together, and we do not?

The penguin is presumably unconscious of why it chooses a certain mate, though it is acting upon some unwitting set of criteria, mainly concerning the fitness of a potential partner. It is unlikely that uniqueness is among those criteria, which is quite unlike humans, to whom the perception of uniqueness is a signal part of the appeal of a romantic partner. (Imagine two penguins speaking to a couples therapist: "Why did I fall in love with him? Well, look at him, he isn't like all the other penguins...") In fact, a specimen that most closely matches the species standard, like the breed standard in dog shows, would probably be considered the most suitable. After all, the purpose of mating is the perpetuation of the species, not some abstract pursuit of personal fulfillment.

"But he's not like all the other penguins."

Then again, in most human societies throughout history, marriage had nothing to do with one's own choice. Arranged marriages are now anathema to those of us in the free-to-choose world, and we suppose that this antiquated practice was a recipe for systematic unhappiness. But this is mere prejudice. Just as we cannot easily envision an alternative to marrying for love, those who were told whom they were to marry could probably not envision an alternative, either. Direct comparisons are of course impossible, but we should not be surprised if we were to find that people in arranged marriages were, on average and in the long run, as happy with their spouses as those who are free to choose their own. Of course, people still fell in love, as the annals of history make clear, but marrying the object of one's affections was rarely an option (except in movies). This is in no way to suggest that parents of old "knew better", that they decided their children's marital fate with any more rational thought that humans exhibit in other of life's endeavors. A "good match" was primarily about the other family's social position relative to one's own — not unlike the relative fitness of penguins, and the breed standard for dogs. (Social position is also, interestingly, one of the unconscious factors that likely plays a big role in determining who we fall in love with.) The prevalence of divorce in our times does little to support the assertion that our way of doing things is "better". Again, as a predictor of happiness, the torment of love may have no advantage over a roll of the dice.

The dog offers another confounding illustration. We suppose that a person's relationship with a dog is a unique bond, but dogs become attached to any person who takes care of them. The connection between a person and a dog is more or less the same regardless of who the person is and who the dog is (with some exceptions for uncommonly cruel people and uncommonly untrainable dogs). But if dogs (and people) weren't so similar, then we would not commiserate with one another so readily about our experiences of living with them, nor find nearly all strange dogs so predictably agreeable and eager to please. Of course we love our dogs, and are disturbed by the suggestion that they are interchangeable, like parts in a machine. But if we ask whether dogs' uninhibited displays of affection amount to love, we are back at the penguin monogamy question: how can we put a label on what they experience when we have little if any understanding about what WE experience? Even though we (i.e., our unknown forebears) bred dogs specifically to be our companions, we prefer to imagine that our one and only puppy is uniquely suited to us, and we to them. In other words, that we love each other. We chose them, after all.

Because we possess consciousness, we are under the illusion that we make decisions for conscious reasons, when in fact, much like the penguin and the dog, we are mostly responding to the dopamine-fueled turmoil in our brain. Ironically, consciousness probably does more to ruin our human, romantic relationships than to preserve them: by sowing doubt, arousing jealousy, and questioning our commitment, to which a totally unconscious mind would be blissfully immune. One is reminded of Charles Ryder, the protagonist in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, telling his father that he is getting divorced and marrying someone else. His father says, "Well, I do call that a lot of nonsense. I can understand a man wishing he hadn't married and trying to get out of it ... but to get rid of one wife and take up with another immediately, is beyond all reason ... If you couldn't be happy with her, why on earth should you expect to be happy with anyone else?"

He may as well have been talking about pets.

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It may have occurred to the reader by this point that we are on the slippery slope of a moral abyss, wherein the lack of awareness of the factors and forces that motivate our decisions would inevitably lead to a lack of responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. But wishing to live in a moral universe in which there is individual accountability, if only because this is the version of human agency which we have believed to be real for the last few thousand years, doesn't make it so. Either we are capable of making conscious choices — not simply aware of what we are deciding, but fully in control of our decisions — or we are not.

In truth, you are no more aware of why your heart is set on fire by a smile or a pair of eyes than why you choose a flavor of ice cream, a model of car to drive, a sports team to root for, or a candidate to vote for. Certainly, we can sometimes articulate reasons, but we have no way of knowing if these are actually the reasons that are driving our choices or are no more than post-facto justifications for unconscious proclivities that have more or less total control over us. We cannot even explain as simple a choice as why a certain color is our favorite. (You may remember Michael Palin's Sir Galahad in Monty Python and the Holy Grail being asked by the guardian of the Bridge of Death, "What is your favorite color?" He answers, "Blue. No, yel-", at which moment he is hurled into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. The joke lands because stating one's favorite color is something even a small child can do without hesitation, despite having no underlying understanding whatsoever. In an adult with consciousness, doubt renders him a fool.)

The driving metaphor is apt. In Paul Auster's last novel, Baumgartner, the title character, a professor of philosophy, is writing a book in which people are likened to self-driving cars. He likes this metaphor, in part, because of the literal meaning of "automobile": self-moving, just like people. But the reader finds it hard to avoid the connotation that humans are no more "driving" themselves than the car is "driving" itself. Who is in charge exactly? We need to believe in our own agency, and not merely because of the Hobbesian nightmare that society might become if we were not guided by some moral self-restraint, regardless of the source of that restraint. More fundamentally, we find it hard to contemplate the idea that our consciousness is an illusion, or that the actions and reactions that seem to emanate from our minds are likewise illusions. No matter how safe self-driving cars may yet prove to be, and no matter that nearly every accident that ever happened was caused by driver error, it will not stop many of us from feeling unsafe without the hands of a supposedly decisive human on the wheel.

In the arena of love, we can allow ourselves to fall madly, passionately, painfully in love, and chalk it up to the mysteries of the human heart. After all, the song also says this:

But for the rest of life's decisions, not so much.