Next year, NASA’s Europa Clipper will travel 1.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s icy Galilean moon. Engraved on the spacecraft will be a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón called “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” It may seem ironic, emblazoning a vessel on a fact-finding mission to outer space with an ode to mystery. Yet the vast puzzle of space remains exactly that. “I like a universe that includes much that is unknown,” the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in a 1979 essay, “and, at the same time, much that is knowable.” This tension lies at the heart of all the sciences—perhaps, especially, the science of love.
Since the 1980s, the study of romantic love and attraction has coalesced into a formal discipline. The interdisciplinary field of relationship science—which encompasses neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology—is currently experiencing a boom: A search of the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database reveals that more than half of the papers written about romantic love since 1953 are from the past 10 years. Today, the findings of such studies are disseminated by popular and scientific media outlets; TED now has an entire playlist of recent talks on “the weird science of love.”
Many researchers are drawn to the subject because love, like space, is an enigma, and humans are naturally curious about mysteries—especially when they pertain so intimately to our own lives. But the writer Ron Rosenbaum (known for his books on Hitler, Shakespeare, and nuclear warfare) wants love to remain an enigma. His new book, In Defense of Love: An Argument, is its own kind of ode to mystery—namely, the ineffable experience of being in love. Because of its beauty, nuance, and “ethereality,” Rosenbaum argues, romantic love is simply “not amenable to scientific inquiry.” Yet agents of what Rosenbaum calls “neuroscience imperialism”—otherwise known as researchers—continue to wage an “assault on the soul of love,” reducing its complexities to brain scans and data points.
Early in the book, Rosenbaum cites debates about “what qualifies an emotion as Love—is it a numinous feeling or a chemical equation?” A false dilemma, to be sure; the two need not be mutually exclusive. Exploring the biological mechanisms of romantic feeling doesn’t cheapen that feeling; by and large, scientific inquiry is an attempt at illumination, not an act of desecration. We do eros a disservice not by studying it but by exalting it to some sacrosanct, quasi-mystical realm.
Rosenbaum seems to disagree. Behind In Defense of Love is a stubbornly single-minded impulse to accept love’s power, as well as a certain piety (the word numinous appears a dozen times in the book). In her aptly titled 2003 polemic, Against Love, the cultural critic Laura Kipnis posits that “secular society needed another metaphysical entity to subjugate itself to after the death of God, and love was available for the job.” Fittingly, Rosenbaum censures love researchers, whom he calls “deniers,” not unlike Catholic authorities did Galileo for his theory of heliocentrism. (Though he stops short of suggesting they stand trial in an inquisition.) The Church has since evolved; for instance, it now acknowledges that evolutionary theory is compatible with Catholic teachings on Creation. In the same vein, an understanding of the biochemistry of love can comfortably coexist with the profound experience of being enamored.
The heresies that seem to vex Rosenbaum most are those of researchers like Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, whose 2004 book, Why We Love, made the controversial claim that romantic love is no ordinary emotion, but rather a biologically driven survival mechanism. Fisher’s assertion that love is a “drive,” Rosenbaum argues, “tells us precisely nothing about the infinitely variegated, subtly differentiated spectrum of human feelings.” He is perhaps right that science can’t capture how love makes us feel. But Fisher isn’t making any such claims. Rather, she’s looking at why love makes us feel the way it does.
Today, Fisher-style books that look to scientific research for insights about finding and keeping a partner abound. In the past decade alone, the genre, which Fisher helped pioneer in the ’90s with her book Anatomy of Love, has exploded (see: Sue Johnson’s Love Sense, Ty Tashiro’s The Science of Happily Ever After, Hannah Fry’s The Mathematics of Love, Stephanie Cacioppo’s Wired for Love). Naturally, some of these sorts of books extract dubious takeaways from legitimate scientific studies. But Rosenbaum makes little distinction between valid research and its sometimes less convincing applications, condemning the entire pursuit of love science.
Curiously, Rosenbaum doesn’t seem to wonder why so many readers gravitate toward these books in the first place. Fisher and co. are in fact meeting a very real demand. The genre has become an essential part of what the scholar Jane Ward calls the “heterosexual-repair industry,” or the business of giving romantic advice and instruction, mostly to straight women. And amid growing frustration (especially among women) with heterosexual relationships, that business is booming.
Perhaps put off by the sexist advice found in books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, which reigned supreme in ’90s-era self-help aisles, more readers are turning to what they see as impartial science for romantic guidance. Moreover, the idea of love as a mysterious, magical force is no longer cutting it for many people. For those who have not found transformative romance, or have not achieved total fulfillment solely by coupling, it makes sense that hard science appeals. If anything, the popularity of these science-oriented books affirms the enduring power of romantic love by showing just how desperate people are to have it in their lives.
Of course, a healthy dose of cynicism is merited—for instance, when Fisher declares in her 2009 book, Why Him? Why Her? (the shoddiest of her oeuvre), that a “personality type test” she has derived from her studies can help you find romantic chemistry more easily. We should indeed be skeptical should someone announce that they have found the secret of love; about this, Rosenbaum is absolutely right.
But even when clear-cut answers prove elusive, exploring big questions—such as why we love—is a worthwhile and generative pursuit. One of the greatest gifts research gives us is perspective: on our smallness in the universe, for instance, or about the sophistication of our own biology. Relationship science is thus valuable for its descriptive, rather than prescriptive, insights. But Rosenbaum opposes even this. He particularly dislikes the “Delphic fMRI machine,” which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow (tracking, for instance, which parts of the brain are activated when a subject thinks about their beloved), and suggests that neuroscientists ascribe to it undue oracular capabilities. In fact, he seems to take their research as a personal slight: “Don’t try to tell me it was never real,” he writes of his own romantic experiences. “I wasn’t duped by some crack-littered dopamine neural pathway.” At no point have scientists proposed that all lovers are “duped” or that love isn’t “real.”
In the hands of scientists, love has, in Rosenbaum’s view, been “stolen away from the poets.” In actuality, love belongs equally to poets and scientists, because it belongs equally to the soul and the body. To pit one against the other is a losing wager: A truer understanding of love relies on both. Love is magic and hormones, spiritual union and synaptic firing, an emotional experience and a biological mechanism. As Sagan wrote, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” We’ll never fully understand love, but there is so much we can know—about it and thus about ourselves. In this way, bringing love back down to earth is not a sacrilegious impulse but a human one.
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2023-08-21 11:00:00Z
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