stimulate the production of hormones eliciting pleasant sensations and contentment. Love facilitates commitment in partnerships and provides a supporting structure for procreation. Love for our children is critical in nurturing them to reproductive age and providing them with the knowledge necessary for survival. Not surprisingly, love for our children is deeply rooted in us and is often described as the easiest, most naturally occurring love.
In addition, love fosters relationships and communities within our species and has likely been instrumental in the proliferation of the human race.17 By forming large groups, humans have been able to defend themselves against predators and hostile environmental conditions, locate and secure food sources, and support one another in times of illness or injury. Within these groups, love has been instrumental to peaceful cohabitation and a comforting force for people enduring sickness, wars, and other hardships. At the same time, peaceful cohabitation has allowed different populations to exchange knowledge, which has led to advancements in crafts, sciences, and medicine.
Instincts and drives ultimately serve the purpose of promoting the species’ survival. Some do so by supporting the individual, such as hunger, thirst, and aggression; others, such as the sex drive, work directly to foster population growth without promoting the individual’s survival. In contrast, love supports the human species’ survival by directly serving both the population and the individual. People with loving characteristics find it easier to build relationships and social alliances that provide protection for themselves and their progeny. Living in loving relationships is associated with better health and survival.18
The impulse for love seems to stand in opposition to other evolutionary human drives, such as aggression, egotism, and pursuit of power, which are directed toward self-preservation. In other words, love, despite conveying some benefits to the individual, appears to be largely aimed at directly preserving the species. The drive of love competes with and may even supersede the instinct of self-preservation. Consider a person whose family is caught in a burning house. The person is well aware of the risk of perishing in the flames, but many, if not most, of us would still try to enter the house to rescue our loved ones. We all know stories of people drowning or freezing to death while trying to save other people. From an evolutionary point of view, the fact that love trumps survival in these incidents is intuitive, because the drive for preserving the species (represented by fellow humans in danger) should be stronger than the survival impulse of the individual, if both are at risk. When people risk their lives to save others, we consider them heroes, not fools. Our intuitive admiration for self-sacrificing people may indicate that certain structures in our brain are wired to reward such acts, ultimately prioritizing the species over the individual.
From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, then, we might conclude that love is merely one of many human impulses geared to preserve the human species. This view is supported by evidence from research in other primates that show behavior similar to that of humans in loving relationships.19 But why does love feel so important to us? Why is it among the first things anybody wishes for? Why does it even trump our desire for power, which provides a strong, proven evolutionary advantage?
The answer, again, may be quite sobering and mundane: the impulse for love is associated with more lasting and more pleasant feedback from the reward centers in the brain than other impulses are. A burst of aggression and the associated surges of adrenaline may cause brief feelings of empowerment and strength, but after these fleeting sensations subside, we typically feel empty and even remorseful. Many common activities, such as eating and sex, are associated with the blood hormones that induce euphoric feelings, but their effect is transient also. We tend to engage in these activities repeatedly to gain recurrent satisfaction, but they will never provide sustained contentment. On the contrary, allowing our self-serving impulses to prevail may cause dissatisfaction because they preoccupy our mind until they are satisfied. Particularly in Buddhism, desire is identified as the root cause of human suffering and dissatisfaction. Even the fulfillment that derives from powerful social status does not grant lasting satisfaction, as it typically comes with a desire for even greater standing and fear of loss of status. Conversely, allowing love to prevail and to steer our actions is associated with feelings of deep, sustained contentment and satisfaction, the sensations connected with lasting happiness.
Through natural selection, our brain has developed a system for rewarding certain impulses that support the individual’s survival. These typically result in short-term pleasure and gratification. It appears, however, that the satisfaction from controlling self-serving instincts and responding to our drive to love supersedes that of all other impulses — not necessarily providing maximum euphoria but leading to lasting contentment. Once again, this outcome is logical from an evolutionary perspective, as love promotes both the survival of the individual and that of the species.
An impulse that preserves the individual is important, but it is overtaken by a drive that is even more critical for the survival of the species. Thus, the drive to love receives the greatest reward from our brain. Rewarding the process of rejecting self-serving impulses (rather than allowing them to prevail for short-term satisfaction) results in sensations of contentment.
In practice, both self-serving and altruistic impulses are instrumental in fostering the species’ survival. The key concept of life is balance. An individual who ignores instincts for self-preservation is likely to perish prematurely; on the other hand, someone who behaves unlovingly risks social isolation (and lack of protection). Given the reward system of our brain, we are most closely aligned with our biology — receiving reinforcement for our behavior through sensations of contentment — if we focus our thoughts and actions on love while conceding to other impulses only as far as is necessary to sustain ourselves. Philosophical and spiritual conceptions of love as the vehicle that helps us achieve our destiny or natural state of grace follow analogous reasoning.
I have discussed why we love and why love is important to humans. But why do we love some people and not others? Fromm proposed that anybody can love anybody, as long as a person dedicates sufficient effort to loving. Most of us, however, do not love everybody equally. It is obvious why we love our children: there is a strong biological bond from the day they were born or even before. This love is effortless and powerful, typically lasting as long as we live. Understanding why we can love a stranger, a person we have never met before, is less intuitive. Physical attraction often triggers an initial interest in an individual, but it serves only as an opportunity for developing love.
Love at first sight is a misnomer, because while we may become infatuated with a new acquaintance (I avoid the phrase falling in love here to avoid the confusion with love, which is discussed in chapter 1) based on superficial information, such as physical appearance, we really don’t know the person. We essentially fall in love with our perception of this person (usually based on our own hopes and desires), which may or may not be confirmed by longer acquaintance. To truly love somebody, on the other hand, typically requires us to get to know a person. It is not accidental that many successful romantic relationships arise in situations where individuals spend a lot of time together: at work, in social clubs, and so on. Through knowledge of a person we may identify the true beauty of that person, something valuable that we want to preserve, protect, and nurture.
Many great thinkers have described the recognition of the transcendent nature of love. Plato surmised that loving a person — in the true, ideal sense — connects us with supreme beauty. Like many after him (including Fromm), Plato believed that only a few — after realizing the superficial nature of physical attraction and after freeing ourselves from the constraints of self-centered thoughts — are capable of reaching this highest state of love. The ideal lover, according to Plato, has gained deep insights into the human existence through knowledge and contemplation, which enable the lover to perceive an absolute, eternal beauty in the beloved. The nature of this eternal beauty remains open to interpretation.
Going back to biology, love may entail the recognition of goodness in a person. This goodness or beauty, which may be demonstrated by habits such as kindness, thoughtfulness, and compassion toward others, is a reflection of the goodness in humanity. As these characteristics are favorable for maintaining the species, this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary