'', by
Marianne Stokes Romantic love is believed to have evolved in
hominids about 4.4 or 2 million years ago (depending on the theory), although the exact time has not been identified yet. One prominent
evolutionary theory developed by the
anthropologist Helen Fisher states that romantic love is a brain system evolved for mammalian
mate choice (also called courtship attraction), an aspect of
sexual selection, for focusing energy on a preferred mating partner. For example, the
anthropologist Audrey Richards lived among the
Bemba people in the 1930s, and once told them a
folk story about a young prince who "climbed glass mountains, crossed chasms, and fought dragons, all to obtain the hand of a maiden he loved". The Bemba, however, became bewildered by the story, prompting an old chief to ask the question "Why not take another girl?"
Margaret Mead studied the
Samoans, and also believed that deep attachments between individuals were a foreign idea to such societies: The tribal mentality, according to
Nathaniel Branden, is that the family ought to exist for the optimization of physical survival. The individual is subordinate to the tribe "in virtually every aspect of life", with emotional attachments given little importance. This study looked at 166 cultures with relevant ethnographic reports,
folklore and other available material from the
Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Romantic love was indicated as present in a culture if at least one account was found of either personal
anguish and
longing,
love songs or folklore highlighting romantic involvement,
elopement due to mutual
affection, a native's affirmation of passionate love, or an ethnographer's affirmation of romantic love. On that basis, passionate love was documented in 88.5% of cultures. For the other 11.5%, the authors believed the lack of record was probably due to ethnographic oversight rather than a genuine absence. It is therefore argued that although not everyone
falls in love, it is the case that in almost every culture some people do, even in those cultures where romantic love is muted or repressed. Despite being evolved and a cross-cultural experience then, the phenomenon is still influenced or constrained by culture in a variety of ways.
Chinese culture, for example, does not have a "romantic love" culture equivalent to the
United States. It was considered "
bourgeois", and even outlawed during the
Cultural Revolution. The puritanical injunctions have long since been dismantled, however, a "shyness" remained in the culture, which is not identical to that of the West.
Divorce is allowed, but
arrangement is also common, and there's much talk of "protecting the family". A cross-cultural survey in the early 1990s found that
Chinese people thought Western ideas about love were inaccurate, and that Chinese participants linked "passionate love" to concepts like "
infatuation", "
unrequited love", "
sorrow" and "
nostalgia". Many seemed to as much want to "fall in love" as to develop a
mental illness. A twin study has investigated genetic and environmental influences using the
Love Attitudes Scale, developed to measure Lee's love styles. This study found that individual differences in love attitudes are almost exclusively due to environmental influence, with genetic factors having very little influence for most love attitudes (from most-to-least heritable: mania, storge, pragma & eros), and even no influence at all for others (ludus & agape). The authors interpret the result as meaning that love styles may be influenced by one's childhood familial environment (for shared environment) and unique experiences with parents, peers, adolescent and adult lovers, and so on (for nonshared environment). Of these, the influence from the nonshared environment was larger than the shared environment. According to Lee's earlier observations, typical eros lovers recall a happy childhood, while typical manic lovers recall an unhappy one. Using the
Love Attitudes Scale, romantic love styles have also been
correlated with different
personality measures: eros (with
agreeableness,
conscientiousness,
extraversion &
secure attachment), mania (with
neuroticism &
anxious attachment), and ludus (with
avoidant attachment). For other love styles: storge (friendship love, with agreeableness & insecure attachment), pragma (practical love, with conscientiousness & insecure attachment), and agape (selfless love, with secure attachment). The formation of attachment styles is complicated, often being attributed to childhood, but with twin studies finding both genetic and environmental contributions. There's also a problem called a
person–situation debate, where people can have different attachment styles with different people, for example, an avoidant partner can make a secure partner feel and act anxious.
Romance and sexuality In the Western tradition of ideas, romantic love and
sexual desire have been closely linked, although still considered separate. Many writers have used terms like "romantic love", "erotic love" and "sexual love" interchangeably, without the relation being made clear. In the 2000s, a scientific consensus emerged that romantic love and sexual desire are actually functionally-independent systems, with distinct neural substrates. Self-expansion is the human motivation to expand one's physical influence, cognitive complexity, social or bodily identity, and self-awareness. Self-expansion is used to explain the "strong attraction" of romantic love, including intense varieties of
passionate love or
limerence, when the rate of expansion is rapid and approaches the maximum total possible from all sources. •
Similarity, also known as "
birds of a feather flock together". •
Propinquity, in other words similarity of location, and the
mere exposure effect, for example. •
Being liked, which tends to also cause liking in return, called
reciprocal liking. •
Matching of admirable characteristics, so people tend to pair with those who have similar attractiveness, called the
matching hypothesis. •
Social and cultural influences, which constrain who people are likely to meet, and what is considered attractive or important. According to self-expansion, attraction should result from the
opposite of these five predictors (because, for example, similarity would seem to
minimize self-expansion—resulting in less attraction). Therefore, the Arons propose that these are five
preconditions which make a relationship
possible, whereas attraction according to self-expansion increases when an opposite condition is present. For example, a person may be attracted to similarity when it provides the basis for effective communication or predictability, whereas differences provide the basis for self-expansion: new challenges, new experiences, new resources, etc. Self-expansion also suggests that people would prefer to maximize admirable characteristics (rather than matching), and that people would occasionally violate social norms as an opportunity for
autonomy.
Passion seems to decline when interactions with a love object become frequent, showing that both propinquity and distance can facilitate attraction. Accordingly, in the tradition of
medieval romance, the love object was always inaccessible, and modern people still seem to be "obsessed with the unknown, mysterious lover".
Barriers to fulfillment It has been reported by many theorists (and even agreed) that adversity actually tends to heighten romantic passion. Obstacles like rejection, parental, spousal or other interference, physical separation, temporary breakups, or uncertain situations spark interest and emotional volatility. The curious phenomenon has been called "the
Romeo and Juliet effect", or "frustration attraction". According to
Dorothy Tennov, "The recognition that some uncertainty must exist has been commented on and complained about by virtually everyone who has [seriously studied] romantic love." love and
slot machines thrive on
intermittent reinforcement. Uncertain reciprocation has also been interpreted in terms of attachment anxiety.
Helen Fisher believed that obstacles and confusion heighten romantic ardor (as in
Romeo and Juliet) because
dopamine neurons fire in anticipation of an expected reward which is delayed.
Bertrand Russell: "The belief in the immense value of the lady is a psychological effect of the difficulty of obtaining her, and I think it may be laid down that when a man has no difficulty in obtaining a woman, his feeling toward her does not take the form of romantic love."
Sigmund Freud believed that romantic love was generated by suppressed (or
repressed)
sexual desire: "It can easily be shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love. This is true both of individuals and of nations. In times in which there were no difficulties standing in the way of sexual satisfaction, such as perhaps during the decline of the ancient civilizations, love became worthless and life empty". It has been argued that romantic love—in the sense of "being in love", or
passionate love—evolved as a "
commitment device" which overrides rationality to suppress the search for alternative mates. This ensures one is committed to their partner, even if a more desirable mate becomes available. Romantic love might therefore be the reward one experiences when this problem of commitment is being solved. When real
emotions evolve, a niche is created for sham emotions which are less risky to express (like fake
facial expressions). An honest signal can evolve without becoming worthless (because of competing fakers) only if it's
too expensive to fake. One example in nature is the
peacock's tail: a cumbersome display which consumes nutrients. Only a healthy peacock can afford it, so it may have evolved
because it was a handicap, signaling health to females of the species. According to the
psychologist Steven Pinker, the way to a person's heart is to declare you're in love "because you can't help it", so romantic love might have evolved to signal true commitment. In this story, the two drink a
love potion by mistake when Iseult is due to be married to Tristan's uncle, a king, and they become clandestine lovers. A drama ensues when their affair is discovered, Tristan is exiled, and eventually they die. Tristan (which means "child of sadness") is royalty himself, and kills a relative of Iseult's earlier in the story; Tristan and Iseult claim not to even "love" each other, aside from the potion. Iseult exclaims: "You know that you are my lord and my master, and I your slave." Critics of romance have claimed that Tristan and Iseult have a kind of "love of death" (or "
liebestod"), rather than loving each other, and use the story as an
allegory to claim that passion leads to suffering. In
ancient Greece and
Rome, they did not marry for love, and both cultures saw passion as a kind of madness. Despite the Greeks having many depictions of love in their
art and
mythology, if Greek men were to
fall in love, it would have likely been
extramarital with
courtesans, or
homosexual love between men. Women were subservient, segregated, and mostly kept inside and isolated. In the
Middle Ages, after the
fall of Rome, marriage in
Europe was also regarded as
economic and
political. By the 6th century, it was regulated by the
Catholic Church in all respects, which declared
passionate love and
sex to be
mortal sin for any other purpose than
procreation. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the phenomenon of
courtly love emerged to idealize a precursor to romantic love, but only when
unconsummated or in the form of
adultery, not as a basis for marriage itself. At this point, marriage and love were still believed to be incompatible, and additionally the ideals of courtly love only applied to nobility. It was not until the 18th century that people began to marry for romance. During this period,
Romanticism emerged with new perspectives on
individuality and
egalitarianism, and through the 19th century it became a cultural question whether passion, love and companionship could become a basis for marriage. New norms were adopted, but romantic attitudes later waned and became tame throughout the
Victorian era in Europe. During the 18th and 19th centuries,
Puritanism also dominated the culture in
post-revolutionary America, with an anti-romantic tradition. Romantic love really only flourished as a basis for marriage at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, when men and women socialized more equally, when
dating replaced other structured
courtship practices, and romance became more
secular and
consumerist. During the 20th century, a "transformation of intimacy" occurred, where
intimate relationships became less restricted by
laws,
customs and
morals, and
feminism paved the way for new kinds of relations between men and women. The rise of the romantic marriage also coincided with the rise of
divorce then, due to this heightened expectation, sensitivity to incompatibility, and increasing legal freedom. The
sociologist Anthony Giddens calls a major development of this period the "pure relationship": where a relationship is entered for its own sake based on emotional
communication, and only continued for as long as both parties are satisfied with the rewards derived from it. A "discourse of intimacy" emerged in the 1960s and '70s, promoted in
self-help books as an attempt to ameliorate problems which were a consequence of the restructuring of personal relationships on marriage. Previously, marriage was a
contractual obligation which only required adherence to law (and "romance" is seen as something one "falls" into, not an act of
will); therefore, a new concept of "
commitment" emerged, with the "pure relationship" marriage requiring a new kind of willful involvement previously unconceived of. Much of the discourse also focused on communication as a means to intimacy and a cure for conflict. According to David Shumway, a professor of
cultural studies, one of the problems is that as with "romance", "intimacy" is elusive to define. This new conception meant something more than "companionship": it also came to entail emotional, economic, and political equality of the partners, or what Giddens calls a "
democratization" of personal life and emotions. The
clinical psychologist Frank Tallis has criticized the romantic tradition as a disappointment, citing studies which actually show higher satisfaction among
arranged marriages than marriages for love. In
Asian and other
Eastern cultures where arrangement is preferred, it's assumed that a couple will fall in love, but after their marriage, and often they do. About half of arranged couples claim to stay together for love, albeit probably not for romantic love.
Bertrand Russell, a
philosopher considered influential in the 20th century, has been critical, but also optimistic about the prospects of romantic love. Despite his assertion that romantic love is only found in the difficulty of its obtainment, he also called it "the source of the most intense delights that life has to offer", and thought it important that it was socially permitted. Russell, however, critiqued the cultural movement that romance ought to be essential for marriage: "Whether the effect has been as good as the innovators hoped may be doubted. [...] In America, where the romantic view of marriage has been taken more seriously than anywhere else, and where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters, the result has been an extreme prevalence of divorce and extreme rarity of happy marriages." According to Russell, "it should be understood that the kind of love which will enable a marriage to remain happy and to fulfil its social purpose is not romantic but is something more intimate, affectionate, and realistic". In his view, it's good that romance can lead to marriage, but as a necessity it's "too anarchic", and "forgets that children are what make marriage important". The
anthropologist and renowned love researcher
Helen Fisher believed the current drive for a more passionate romance in Western partnerships (what she called a return to an "antique habit"—something she believed is natural and evolved) is good news. However, she argued in favor of a longer, more drawn out "pre-commitment" stage prior to marriage, which she called "slow love", for the purpose of becoming familiar before making a lifelong commitment. == Modern romance ==