Love Makes You Do The Wacky

April 15, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

I wish I could take credit for the title of the sermon. But I can’t. The title comes from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I liked so much I did a service on it a few years ago. What’s going on is that Buffy is in love with somebody and is complaining that he is acting all jealous, but won’t admit it. Buffy is talking to her friend Willow and when Buffy complains to Willow that her boyfriend is being totally irrational Willow says, “Love makes you to the wacky.” To which Buffy responds: “That’s the truth.”

I agree with Buffy. Love does make you do the wacky. I’ll bet everybody in this sanctuary has at least one story of wacky behavior caused by being in love. Which begs the question, why? Why does love make us do the wacky? Why do we risk our jobs, our friends, our futures, our very lives in the name of love? What is it about romantic love that not only does it have its own holiday, but it provides both the greatest joys and the worst agonies imaginable, because truly, what can be better or worse than the total agony of being in love?

I was looking for a definition of love and found several I want to share with you. The first is from Ambrose Bierce and states that love is a type of insanity curable by marriage. You laugh now, but file this one away for later.

How about this one. It’s from a conference of sociologists back in 1977. Listen carefully:

Love is the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feeling by the object of the amorance.

I dare you to try to turn that into a poem. In fact, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable with the person who came up with that one dating my daughter. There are, of course, long dictionary definitions, but I think part of the problem we have in defining love is that in our culture, love is required to be all things to all people all of the time.

We love our spouse or our partner, certainly. But we also love our cars, our kids, our favorite colors, our food, our jokes, our art, and on and on. The word “love” has as many meanings and covers as much ground as the word “God.” Eskimos have 20 words for snow and we have one word for love. At least the Greeks had four words for love: Eros, or romantic love; agape or spiritual love; philia or Platonic love; and storge or natural affection, like that of a parent to a child. But we English speaking people, with a language that has by far the biggest, most encompassing vocabulary, we only have one word for love. Why is that? I think part of it is that our culture is very schizophrenic about love and there are enormous sensitivities around it, especially romantic love,

For example, you may have heard of the late Leo Buscaglia who once taught a course on love at UCLA called Love 1-A and wrote many books on the subject. Dr. Buscaglia taught that love is something we need to learn about and that understanding and dealing with love isn’t something that just comes to us by osmosis. As a matter of culture and social behavior, I think we can all agree with that. As you might imagine, however, Professor Buscaglia’s course created some controversy as people complained that university is no place to teach about love – seriously – university should be reserved for important stuff like history, language, science, and engineering. Besides, love is, well, a delicate subject, one that should be kept in a brown paper wrapper and only spoken about in hushed whispers behind closed doors or on the streets or under the covers.

I don’t know about you, but I think all of that is just ridiculous. I agree with, of all people, Benjamin Disraeli, who said “We are all born to love. It is the principle of existence and its only end.” Disraeli was right on at least two counts: first, as I’ll explain in a minute, we are born to love. The mechanisms of romantic love are hard wired and we are bound to that drive, those desires, like nothing else in life except eating and drinking. And second, I believe that romantic love, sex, and reproduction are the very purpose of our natural existence, the focus of life, and the only inherently meaningful thing about life itself beyond simply being.

I have a book called Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice for All Creation by Olivia Judson. It is a very clever book written as if Dr. Tatiana were answering letters about sex, reproduction, and other related issues from a wide variety of members of the animal kingdom. Talk about wacky. I’m telling you, insect reproduction in particular is bizarre and often deadly. Males in several species literally die for the opportunity to mate and pass on their genes. If life on this planet is the design of some intelligent creator, then he or she was on serious drugs when they came up with the myriad methods of sexual reproduction extant in the animal kingdom. If you want to get educated and blown away at the same time, I highly recommend reading Dr. Tatiana.

Now, insects don’t have the capacity for rational thought. At least we don’t think they do. Their behavior is thus controlled by their genetic code and is hard wired into their very being. How else can you explain the sometimes suicidal and often dangerous behavior indulged in by a whole host of critters in the animal kingdom? For a long time people believed that humans were immune to that sort of hard wiring, that our big brains removed us from the ranks of creatures who were programmed for certain responses and behaviors in the world of romantic love sex, and reproduction.

It is becoming crystal clear that we were very wrong about that. Very wrong indeed. Study after study has shown that desire and what we call romantic love is the result of chemical processes in the brain that are not only hard wired, but result in brain activity that is virtually indistinguishable from being on hard drugs, and in particular, drugs like cocaine. Now think about that for a second. Being head over heels in love results in or from, take your pick, brain activity that is indistinguishable from being on hard drugs. Robert Palmer was right: we are addicted to love. Is it any wonder that people routinely behave insanely when they are in that stomach wrenching, sleep deprived, dramatic phase of love? The poets who wrote about love didn’t know the half of it.

It turns out that the brain is, in fact, the most important organ related to love, sex, and reproduction. At every turn, genetic programs, working through the brain, guide humans in their dances of love. And, I know it’s not exactly politically correct to say this, but the scientific truth is that men’s and women’s brains are significantly different in the programs they run, the systems they create, and the desires they generate when it comes to romantic love. This is true about almost every aspect of romantic love and reproduction, including sexual orientation, desire, and how the sexes view their role in the courtship dance. And the most recent studies show that socio-cultural influences are less important on these very fundamentally hard wired programs than anybody suspected. Thus, while it is true to there is a large variation in what signals and stimuli people respond to in actualizing romantic love impulses, those impulses and the genetic programming underlying them are resistant to socio-cultural influences.

Here are a few specific (and I think amusing) results to ponder:

In a study of the effect of pictures of beautiful women on the brains of men, researchers found that the pictures activated the same reward circuits in the brains of heterosexual men as did food and cocaine. Here is proof – as if we needed it – that men truly are visually stimulated. As co-author of the study, Dan Ariely of MIT, said, “This is hard-core circuitry. Beauty is working similar to a drug.”

Another study showed men a slide show of random women, each being projected for several seconds; but the men could extend the viewing time for each picture by pressing keys on a keypad. You can guess the result. The men worked frantically to keep the beautiful women on the screen, on average pressing the keyboard more than 4,700 times over a 40 minute span, prompting one researcher to observe that “these guys look like rodents bar-pressing for cocaine.” As far as women are concerned, studies have demonstrated, for instance, that a woman’s choice of which men she says she finds “sexy” changes depending on how close she is to ovulation.

When close to ovulation, women tend to prefer the almost stereotypical tall, dark, rough-hewn guys, while selecting more round faced “nice guys” at other times. Women are also thousands of times more sensitive to musk-like odors than are men, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.

When it comes to studying romantic love, there is one person who stands out beyond all the rest. She is Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Dr. Fisher is a leader among the army of scientists who are studying the biological bases for romantic love.

Dr. Fisher has written two popular books on the subject, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love and The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. And in 2002, she published a landmark study on what is happening in the brains of people who claim they are head-over-heels in love. I cannot possibly do justice to her work here, but let me talk about Dr. Fisher’s theories on how human beings fall in love.

Dr. Fisher has proposed that human beings fall in love in three stages.

Stage one consists of simple and generic lust – that undifferentiated general sense of desire. Studies show that lust is mediated in the brain by the hormones testosterone and estrogen, with testosterone having been shown to play a large role in women. These hormones appear to function to get people out looking, so to speak.

The second stage is attraction to a specific person. This is that truly love-struck phase where each instant apart is a lifetime, where you call each other 20 times a day, and where you can’t eat, can’t sleep, and can think of nothing else. In the attraction phase, a group of neuro-transmitters called “monoamines” play an important role. These include dopamine; adrenalin’the chemical of fight or flight; and serotonin, which plays a role both in romantic love and depression – big surprise there, right?

Dopamine is the “reward” chemical and its production is what we are after when we desperately need to be with our beloved. It’s also the chemical that is made in bucket-loads when are brains are exposed to cocaine. Serotonin is the tricky one in that it can actually induce temporary insanity. Thus, many of the millions of people who do crazy things for love, who swim rivers naked, jump out of airplanes with friends to hold up gigantic signs of proposal while they parachute into a lover’s back yard, and all the other stuff you’ve ever heard about, many of those people may actually qualify as temporarily insane.

The third phase in Dr. Fisher’s scheme is called attachment and it involves becoming bonded with and attached to a specific person. It is marked by the sense of calm, peace, and stability one feels with a long-term partner and is driven by the brain chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Crazily enough, oxytocin and vasopressin seem to interfere with the production of dopamine and adrenalin, which is why the madness of the head-over-heels attraction phase fades as the attachment phase progresses – a finding that actually provides a basis for the otherwise cynical definition of love I quoted earlier as a type of insanity curable by marriage.

In fact, studies have shown that vasopressin is responsible for monogamy in a critter called the prairie vol. Once vasopressin is triggered in the brain of the prairie vol, that vol is faithful to its mate for life. Block the vasopressin and that very same vol becomes promiscuous. These are very powerful chemicals. Things are obviously much more complicated in humans – history teaches us that vasopressin does not work nearly as well in people as it does in prairie vols – but, Dr. Fisher nonetheless cautions that you should never mess around with somebody you do not want to fall in love with, because if you generate enough oxytocin and vasopressin, you very well might fall in love despite yourself.

As a result of her’s and others’ studies, Dr. Fisher has drawn the remarkable conclusion that romantic love is not actually an emotion like joy or sadness. Instead, she claims it is a motivation system, a drive, a need that compels people to go out and find a partner and is more akin to the need to eat than being happy or sad. Romantic love, the attraction phase, says Dr. Fisher, is an even stronger desire than simple lust. “People don’t kill themselves just because they don’t get sex,” she says. But they will and do kill themselves over failed romantic love adventures.

There is so much more going on in evolutionary biology, but I don’t have the time to go into even a fraction of it. What I will say is the discoveries of how deeply hard wired we are for lust, attraction, romantic love, and attachment are not a surprise to me. Put simply, reproduction is much too important to leave to the whims of consciousness and culture.

And it makes sense that humans would be subject to the same forces that other higher animals are since we share common ancestors and evolved together on this planet. Said another way, before there was consciousness, there was reproduction and all the drives and hard wiring that nature provided to insure the continuation of life. For the last handful of millennia perhaps, humans have been able to cogitate about love and sex and reproduction. But a million years ago, those things just had to happen for the species to continue and nature had to insure that they would by hard wiring in the proper mechanisms. And nature was obviously successful since we are all here today. Science has and continues to confirm that we have inherited those mechanisms and we call them romantic love.

My point in telling you all this is not to pretend to be able to fully explain

why or how we fall in love, or even the biological basis for romantic love. It’s much more complicated than this, of course. Rather, my point is to simply suggest that there is in fact a powerful biological basis for romantic love, that it matters, and we should openly and fearlessly take account of it in our lives.

But these revelations do not sit well with many people, who bristle at the

thought that humans might be subject to instincts, hard wired instructions, and that something as sacred in our culture as romantic love and all the trappings of courtship, marriage, and the like that go with it, might be the product of brain chemicals that mimic the actions of drugs. As unsettling as the scientific discoveries may be, I think the truth is that we humans are a natural part of the natural world and are certainly a product of evolutionary biology. But we are also conscious beings with the ability to make choices that either compliment or reject the signals, motivations, and desires that our DNA has made part of our experience of life.

This is why it is useful to think of ourselves as both a “what” and a “who”.

The what is the primate creature that Mother Nature created out of the raw materials of life and that is subject to the same laws, the same forces, and the same desires as the other higher level creatures on the planet.

The who is a relatively new entity, a conscious being who seemingly at least,

can make choices about how to proceed with existence and at present, seems to be a little bit confused about what life, the universe, and everything is supposed to mean. These two aspects of humanity coexist in one body. Both matter.

This is also the reason I think people are often confused when they ask the

question, “What is the meaning of life?” Life is a process that goes on all around us, has been going on for millions upon millions of years. Humans are included in the process of life, but so is a snail darter or an elephant or a wasp. So when we think of life in the broadest sense, it is clear that the purpose and meaning of life is survival, reproduction and all that goes with it.

But when they ask the question,”What is the meaning of life?”, many people use

the word “life” to substitute for consciousness and sentience. And that, as they say, is a very different question and not one I have any desire to tackle today. Well, actually, I will say this. Whatever purpose or meaning there is to human existence, as opposed to life generally, has to been created, invented as it were, which is the role of culture, religion, and other philosophical enterprises that seek to imbue our conscious existence with meaning. But the meaning of life itself, the purpose of life, that is clear: it is to survive, today, tomorrow, and always.

Up until thirty to fifty years ago, most educated people saw a human baby as a

tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which anything could be written without the pesky influences of instincts and other hard wired instructions, or drives. Virtually nobody who studies these things today thinks of a baby as a tabula rasa. That concept has been relegated to the same graveyard as phlogiston and the ether.

Having said that, I must emphasize that just how much has been pre-programmed

or hard wired and how powerfully is subject to debate, some of it fierce. Still, it is clear that we are born with hard wired drives, call them instincts, call them predispositions, call them an inborn style, but they are there. And probably the most powerful, the one that dominates so much of our lives, is the need for romantic love. Like every other creature on the planet, human beings modify their behaviors to accommodate those incredibly powerful desires – or as Willow says, “we all do the wacky.”

Can these drives and desires be overcome by the who that we are – our conscious

selves? Of course they can. People routinely choose to do behaviors that conflict with the urges and desires brought about by romantic love and its chemical addictions to a person. It happens all the time. It’s one of the things that distinguish us from insects and the rest of the animal world. A praying mantis will go ahead and get its head bitten off in exchange for the opportunity to mate. Even the most testosterone and dopamine driven man, however, is most likely to decline that offer.

But does the fact that we can control our behaviors mean we should not acknowledge the drives and desires that are making our lives both wonderful and miserable? Shall we pretend that we have conscious control of who -and what gender – we find attractive and that any feelings we experience that are not sanctioned by the dominant culture are to be labeled as sinful and wrong?

My answer is an emphatic no. I think it is time we looked at these feelings,

these desires, without embarrassment, without shame, without feeling defensive that we are, after all, the product of evolution and are children of the Earth as much as children of our conscious souls.

While the idea that romantic love is a hard wired mechanism might spoil some of our notions of romance, it is also liberating. I suggest that if people would let go of the notion of the tabula rasa, would let go of the notion that falling down the rabbit hole of romantic love is a conscious choice, and realize that all those powerful feelings and urges are perfectly natural and are deeply imbedded into the essence of our natural being, perhaps we could all relax a little and not be so harsh with each other and ourselves.

Moreover, once that admission is made and the feelings themselves brought out into the open without embarrassment, they are much easier to deal with. Suppressed feelings and desires have a way of growing in the dark, just like mushrooms, but tend to lose their almost preternatural hold on us once we put them in the light of day.

Preachers routinely, and for thousands of years, have taken nature to be sinful. Western culture definitely assigns passion to the dark side, the night side, the female side of life, the side that is opposed by the light of reason, the cold hard facts of rationality that is ruled by the day and the male sky god. But when you pull all of nature over into the side of sin, you degrade the deepest and most fundamental parts of what we are as living creatures and deny the

importance of millions of years of evolutionary biology.

Our behavior matters, of course, and I am not advocating or justifying rampant

infidelity and wackiness just because we are hard wired for romantic love and all the feelings and desires that go with it. But I do think our ancestors and our Western religions got it totally wrong. I think that the world being split into male and female with romantic love and sexual reproduction, however those drives and desires may manifest in any individual, creates most of the pure joy

and happiness we experience in life.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that when we accuse a young man or woman of being “superficial” because they are attracted to somebody because that person is beautiful or sexy, we’ve got it backwards. There’s nothing superficial about it; rather such attraction is one of the most deeply rooted aspects of our natural existence. It is not only not sinful, it is part of the very essence of the inherent meaning of life.

Let me conclude by reaffirming that Willow was absolutely right when she told Buffy “Love makes you do the wacky.” We understand why that is so just a little better now than our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers did, but the feelings, the desires, the power of love remain undiluted and are eternally ours. No matter the cultural spin we put on them, love, sex and reproduction are simply fundamental to us and our beings. We truly are born to love. It is our birthright, our purpose, our meaning, and our glory.

Presented April 15, 2007

Revised for print