Theres No Such Thing as Everlasting love
A new book argues that the emotion happens in micro-moments of positivity resonance.
Paramount Pictures
In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love.
Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
Rather, it is what she calls a micro-moment of positivity resonance. She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another personany other personwhom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in Its a Wonderful World when he sang, I see friends shaking hands, sayin how do you do / Theyre really sayin, I love you.
Fredricksons unconventional ideas are important to think about at this time of year. With Valentines Day around the corner, many Americans are facing a grim reality: They are love-starved. Rates of loneliness are on the rise as social supports are disintegrating. In 1985, when the General Social Survey polledAmericans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 20xx, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.
According to the University of Chicagos John Cacioppo, an expert on loneliness, and his co-author William Patrick, at any given time, roughly 20 percent of individualsthat would be 60 million people in the U.S. alonefeel sufficiently isolated for it to be a major source of unhappiness in their lives. For older Americans, that number is closer to 35 percent. At the same time, rates of depression have been on the rise. In his 20xx book Flourish, the psychologist Martin Seligman notes that according to some estimates, depression is 10 times more prevalent now than it was five decades ago. Depression affects about 10 percent of the American population, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
A global poll taken last Valentines Day showed that most married peopleor those with a significant otherlist their romantic partner as the greatest source of happiness in their lives. According to the same poll, nearly half of all single people are looking for a romantic partner, saying that finding a special person to love would contribute greatly to their happiness.
But to Fredrickson, these numbers reveal a worldwide collapse of imagination, as she writes in her book. Thinking of love purely as romance or commitment that you share with one special personas it appears most on earth dosurely limits the health and happiness you derive from love.
My conception of love, she tells me, gives hope to people who are single or divorced or widowed this Valentines Day to find smaller ways to experience love.
You have to physically be with the person to experience the micro-moment. For example, if you and your significant other are not physically togetherif you are reading this at work alone in your officethen you two are not in love. You may feel connected or bonded to your partneryou may long to be in his companybut your body is completely loveless.
To understand why, its important to see how love works biologically. Like all emotions, love has a biochemical and physiological component. But unlike some of the other positive emotions, like joy or happiness, love cannot be kindled individuallyit only exists in the physical connection between two people. Specifically, there are three players in the biological love systemmirror neurons, oxytocin, and vagal tone. Each involves connection and each contributes to those micro-moment of positivity resonance that Fredrickson calls love.
When you experience love, your brain mirrors the persons you are connecting with in a special way. Pioneering research by Princeton Universitys Uri Hasson shows what happens inside the brains of two people who connect in conversation. Because brains are scanned inside of noisy fMRI machines, where carrying on a conversation is nearly impossible, Hassons team had his subjects mimic a natural conversation in an ingenious way. They recorded a young woman telling a lively, long, and circuitous story about her high school prom. Then, they played the recording for the participants in the study, who were listening to it as their brains were being scanned. Next, the researchers asked each participant to recreate the story so they, the researchers, could determine who was listening well and who was not. Good listeners, the logic goes, would probably be the ones who clicked in a natural conversation with the story-teller.
What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the storyif he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got ithis brain activity actually anticipated the story-tellers in some cortical areas.
The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which is a single act, performed by two brains, as Fredrickson writes in her book.
Oxytocin, the so-called love and cuddle hormone, facilitates these moments of shared intimacy and is part of the mammalian calm-and-connect system (as opposed to the more stressful fight-or-flight system that closes us off to others). The hormone, which is released in huge quantities during sex, and in lesser amounts during other moments of intimate connection, works by making people feel more trusting and open to connection. This is the hormone of attachment and bonding that spikes during micro-moments of love. Researchers have found, for instance, that when a parent acts affectionately with his or her infantthrough micro-moments of love like making eye contact, smiling, hugging, and playingoxytocin levels in both the parent and the child rise in sync.
