Based to Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and something of the Queen Mum of romance research, "People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms for love, They survive for love, die for love, kill for love. It can be stronger than the drive to stay alive." Human beings make a terrible fuss about a lot of things but none more than romance. Eating and drinking are just as essential for keeping the species going--more so actually, since a celibate person can at least carry on living but a starving person can't. Yet although we may build whole institutions around the easy ritual of eating, it never turns us flat-out nuts. Romance does.
Nearly 30 years ago, psychologist Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii and sociologist Susan Sprecher now of Illinois State University designed a 15-item questionnaire that ranks people combined what the researchers call the passionate-love scale (see box, page 60). Hatfield has administered the test in places as different as the U.S., Pacific islands, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan and, most recently, India and has found that no matter where she looks, it's impossible to crush love. "It seemed only people in the West were funny enough to marry for passionate love," she says. "But in all of the cultures I've studied, people love wildly."
What scientists, not to mention the rest of us, want to know is, Why? What makes us go so loony over love? Why would we bother with this complex exercise in fan dances and flirtations, winking and signaling, joy and sorrow? "We have only a very limited understanding of what romance is in a scientific sense," admits John Bancroft, emeritus director of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Ind., a place where they know a thing or two about the method human beings pair up. But that restricted understanding is expanding.
The more scientists look, the more they're able to tease romance apart into its individual strands--the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, neurochemical processes that make it possible. None of those things may be necessary for simple procreation, but all of them appear essential for something larger. What that something is--and how we achieve it-- is only now coming clear.
If human reproductive behavior is a complicated thing, part of the reason is that it's designed to serve two clashing purposes. On the one hand, we're driven to mate a lot. On the other hand, we want to mate well so that our offspring survive. If you're a female, you get only a few rolls of the reproductive dice in a lifetime. If you're a male, your freedom to conceive is limited only by the availability of willing partners, but the demands of providing for too big a brood are a powerful incentive to limit your pairings to the female who will give you just a few strong young. For that reason, no sooner do we reach sexual maturity than we learn to look for signals of good genes and reproductive fitness in potential partners and, importantly, to display them ourselves.
"Every living human is a descendant of a long line of successful maters," says David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "We've adapted to pick certain types of mates and to fulfill the desires of the opposite sex."
One of the most primal of those desires is that a possible partner smells right. Good smells and bad smells are fundamentally no different from each other; both are merely volatile molecules wafting off an object and providing some clue as to the thing that emitted them. Humans, like all animals, quickly learn to assign values to those scents, recognizing that, say, putrefying flesh can carry disease and thus recoiling from its smell and that warm cookies carry the promise of vanilla, sugar and butter and thus being drawn to them. Other humans carry telltale smells of their own, and those can affect us in equally powerful ways.
The best-known illustration of the invisible influence of scent is the way the menstrual cycles of women who live communally tend to synchronize. In a state of nature, this is a very good idea. It's not in a tribe's or community's interests for one ovulating female to monopolize the reproductive attention of too many males. Better to have all the females become fertile at once and offer the fittest potential mates to compete with one another for them.
Nearly 30 years ago, psychologist Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii and sociologist Susan Sprecher now of Illinois State University designed a 15-item questionnaire that ranks people combined what the researchers call the passionate-love scale (see box, page 60). Hatfield has administered the test in places as different as the U.S., Pacific islands, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan and, most recently, India and has found that no matter where she looks, it's impossible to crush love. "It seemed only people in the West were funny enough to marry for passionate love," she says. "But in all of the cultures I've studied, people love wildly."
What scientists, not to mention the rest of us, want to know is, Why? What makes us go so loony over love? Why would we bother with this complex exercise in fan dances and flirtations, winking and signaling, joy and sorrow? "We have only a very limited understanding of what romance is in a scientific sense," admits John Bancroft, emeritus director of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Ind., a place where they know a thing or two about the method human beings pair up. But that restricted understanding is expanding.
The more scientists look, the more they're able to tease romance apart into its individual strands--the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, neurochemical processes that make it possible. None of those things may be necessary for simple procreation, but all of them appear essential for something larger. What that something is--and how we achieve it-- is only now coming clear.
If human reproductive behavior is a complicated thing, part of the reason is that it's designed to serve two clashing purposes. On the one hand, we're driven to mate a lot. On the other hand, we want to mate well so that our offspring survive. If you're a female, you get only a few rolls of the reproductive dice in a lifetime. If you're a male, your freedom to conceive is limited only by the availability of willing partners, but the demands of providing for too big a brood are a powerful incentive to limit your pairings to the female who will give you just a few strong young. For that reason, no sooner do we reach sexual maturity than we learn to look for signals of good genes and reproductive fitness in potential partners and, importantly, to display them ourselves.
"Every living human is a descendant of a long line of successful maters," says David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "We've adapted to pick certain types of mates and to fulfill the desires of the opposite sex."
One of the most primal of those desires is that a possible partner smells right. Good smells and bad smells are fundamentally no different from each other; both are merely volatile molecules wafting off an object and providing some clue as to the thing that emitted them. Humans, like all animals, quickly learn to assign values to those scents, recognizing that, say, putrefying flesh can carry disease and thus recoiling from its smell and that warm cookies carry the promise of vanilla, sugar and butter and thus being drawn to them. Other humans carry telltale smells of their own, and those can affect us in equally powerful ways.
The best-known illustration of the invisible influence of scent is the way the menstrual cycles of women who live communally tend to synchronize. In a state of nature, this is a very good idea. It's not in a tribe's or community's interests for one ovulating female to monopolize the reproductive attention of too many males. Better to have all the females become fertile at once and offer the fittest potential mates to compete with one another for them.
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