Dog-eared: On Love

An equilibrium must be obtained between too much and too little concerning love, perhaps the mercurialist (I’ve made that word up; I often make up words) of emotions. Tell someone you love him or her. Hear someone say he or she loves you. Bask.

But beware.

“I love you is the most unoriginal thing one person can say to another,” Jeanette Winterson writes in her novel, Written on the Body. “I love you is always a quotation.”

I think we use the word love when we really mean I enjoy your company and I’m happy when we’re together and I can’t think of a better way of spending my free time than being with you; please feel the same.

Winterson further writes: “Love is Wonderland, isn’t it? Love makes the world go round. Love is blind. All you need is love.”

Lately, or maybe just for the last year, everything seems to come back to Alice and her Wonderland.

But there is a science to love. We pass through the three stages of love — lust, attraction, attachment — as if we’re sprinting, but love is a marathon and requires endurance, occasional pauses for rest, and someone willing to catch you when and/or if you fall.

Scientists think three main neurotransmitters are involved during attraction. Hormones drive lust. Chemicals propel attraction. Sex cements attachment. Our brains release an irresistible cocktail of chemicals.

• When you’re first falling for someone, you activate your stress response, which increases the levels of adrenaline and cortisol in your blood, explaining why you may start to sweat, feel your heart race, and unexpectedly have dry mouth.
• Then there is dopamine. This chemical stimulates desire and reward by triggering an intense rush of pleasure, kind of like your brain has taken cocaine or snorted pills. We need less sleep and food and intensely focus on the smallest details of the relationship.
• Serotonin completes the cocktail, which convinces us that the relationship is unlike any other we’ve had before and any we think we could have again.

Attachment keeps couples together. Oxytocin and vasopressin fuel attachment, creating a covalent bond. Oxytocin, or the cuddle hormone, is released during orgasm, deepening the bond couples have after sex. Scientists theorize that the more sex a couple has, the stronger their bond. Vasopressin is also released after sex. It enforces a desire for a long-term commitment.

Psychologist Arthur Arun studies why people fall in love. He asks two people to reveal intimate details about their lives to each other for a half hour, and then stare deeply into the other’s eyes without talking for four minutes. Nearly 80 percent of these couples report feeling deeply attracted to the other after the 34-minute experiment ends.

Pause. How many books have you read with moments that pivot around love, or an I love you, or the lack of an I love you? How many characters get their happy ending? Cinderella and Charming do, but only after.

A moment from the film Ever After (I say this film, a retelling of Cinderella, counts as literature, if only because I love the movie so much) about 43 minutes or so into the film. The actors portraying Prince Henry and Leonardo da Vinci are walking on a beach and talking about predestined love.

Henry: Do you really think there is only one perfect mate?

Leonardo: As a matter of fact I do.

Henry: But how can you be certain to find them? And if you do find them, are they really the one for you or do you only think they are? And what happens if the person you’re supposed to be with never appears, or she does, but you’re too distracted to notice?

Leonardo: You learn to pay attention.

Henry: Then, let’s say God puts two people on earth and they are lucky enough to find one another. But one of them gets hit by lightning. Then what? Is that it? Or per chance you meet someone new and marry all over again. Is that the lady you’re supposed to be with or was it the first. And, if so, if the two of them were walking side by side, were they both the one for you and you happened to meet the first one first, or was the second one supposed to be first? Is everything just chance or are some things meant to be?

Leonardo: You cannot leave everything to fate, boy. She’s got a lot to do. Sometimes you must give her a hand.

In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, the titular prince decides to explore the universe. He visits planets with rich men and kings and poor men and businessmen and a drunkard who doesn’t want to be a drunkard. The prince thinks these men peculiar, but he interviews them just the same. The prince is lonely. He doesn’t have friends. He wants to have friends. His only friend is a rose he has sealed beneath a glass dome on the planet where he lives.

He meets a fox. The fox asks to be tamed. The prince asks how to tame a fox. The fox says he must sit nearby and sit quite still and the fox, in time, will become aroused with curiosity and will come near the prince, and the prince must sit quite still and the fox will begin to trust, and the prince, in turn, will come to love the fox. The fox, once loved, will love the prince.

The prince loves the fox and the fox loves the prince and the two tame each other. They spend time in a garden picking out their favorite flowers. One afternoon, the prince decides to continue his journey. The fox is sad. The fox cannot go with the prince. The fox begs the prince to stay. The prince says he must leave. The fox suggests the prince visit the flowers one last time. The prince visits the flowers, but they seem less flower-like than the rose he has sealed beneath a glass dome on the planet where he lives.

The prince returns to say goodbye to the fox. The fox offers the prince a secret. The prince wants to know the secret. The fox shares his secret.

One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

The prince does not understand.

It is the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important. … You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose …

The prince grows to understand. He is responsible for his rose, and now he must go home.

Love, in the simplest of words (if you can simply describe love in words) is – and here, in writing, I paused to look at the words on a building in a picture I took last month Influence With Purpose­­, and I was going to define love as just that, influence with purpose – but in that moment of pause, I realized that love is. Plain and simple. And the equilibrium it achieves balances between always and never.