The Psychology of Love

It’s impossible to pinpoint precisely when our interpretation of romantic love was born centuries ago, but scholars generally agree that modern America offered an ideal cultural climate for it to take shape.

“During the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s the traditional ‘love story,’ in which two young people see themselves as ‘in love’ and start to build an enduring relationship, became a popular social convention, at least in the United States,” wrote the social psychologists Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen in 1988.

Women spearheaded the notion of romantic love, the pair argued, a means of cementing relationships that might otherwise end should men decide to seek out greener pastures. “It was greatly to women’s advantage if sexual desire could be interpreted as ‘love’ and a man’s desire for her could result in lasting commitment and economic security,” they explained, contending that the romanticizing of lust was employed as a form of social control. Love was thus a “tale” that a couple would choose to believe in, according to this theory, mirroring other arguments that the emotion is a learned or constructed device rather than a biologically determined response.

The more we seem to know about the emotion, however, the more we seem to not know. As it always has been, romantic love remains a challenge for individuals in the 21^st century, with arguably no pursuit more difficult than successfully and happily managing a relationship predicated on mutually shared strong feelings between two people. Living one’s life as a single person is itself a complex affair these days, making the addition of possessing love for and hopefully with another person yet another thing we must handle with great care.

Then why do it, one has to ask? “It’s the cornerstone of our humanity,” Hara Estroff Marano plainly put in Psychology Today in 2004, writing that, “only love protects us enough to grow and change.” Love has to be worth the effort for so many to willingly enter into it despite all the work and risks involved, we have to conclude, suggesting there is a basic human need to be part of something bigger than or outside of oneself. “Anyone who has come within waltzing distance of it, read Jane Austen or Danielle Steele, or listened to Frank Sinatra or Celine Dion, knows there’s no elixir like love,” Marano wrote, making the safe bet that it wasn’t about to disappear anytime soon.

Alongside our individual and collective love affair with love has existed, paradoxically, a deep distrust of and antipathy towards the emotion. “A lethal combination of Hollywood sentimentality, Victorian romanticism, and bridal-magazine kitsch has placed an impossible burden on love,” wrote essayist Judith Hertog in 2019, going on to explain how and why she resented “the tyranny of perfect romance.”

Many women, especially millennials (those born after 1980 and the first generation to become young adults in the 21st century), have, in fact, resisted entering into serious relationships because they may involve love. This is nothing new, however. As early as the 1930s, some scientists described romantic love as an emotion that mature adults had no business clinging to. Such love was a vestige of children’s imagination, they declared, and a sentimental state of mind that served little useful purpose.

Psychotherapists, notably Alfred Adler, have, over the years, also dismissed romantic love, thinking that marriages would be much better off without it. Many feminists of the 1970s, particularly Marilyn French, argued that romantic love presented a real and present danger to women’s independence and ability to lead lives with real meaning. Later scholars, such as Pepper Schwartz, have made a convincing case for “peer marriage” predicated on equality and “deep friendship” in place of passion and stereotypical gender roles. In short, love in America has been a contentious, highly charged site, simultaneously aggressively pursued for its emotional rewards and just as assertively avoided due to the havoc it could wreak on one’s psyche.

Some argue that biology plays a major role in encouraging us to gravitate toward love throughout our lives. Love is there for a reason, scientists and anthropologists have pointed out, a central part of the grand design of our species. More specifically, nature dangles the carrot of love through brain chemistry, making it a tempting force that is difficult to resist. The joy and euphoria to be had by a brain in early love can be matched only by strong opiates, this alone making it understandable why so many of us are seduced by the emotion.

The “discovery” of love in the brain has justifiably been recognized as an important scientific breakthrough, perhaps even analogous to those made by Copernicus and Newton in their attempts to learn the physical laws of the universe. The ability to see love via fMRI scans has shifted the study of love towards neuroscience and offered a means to more quantifiably evaluate theories offered by psychologists, sociologists, and others in the social sciences and medicine. Viewing the physical properties of an emotion is perhaps not unlike peeking inside the body through X-rays in the late 19th century, a very exciting historical development that helped advance the field.

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Still, despite all the thought devoted to the subject over the decades, it’s fair to say that the psychological workings of love remain largely a mystery, which I propose is a good thing.

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