I am not only a neuroscientist of love but also a hopeless romantic. And I am here to make the case that, in this time of social flux, when more of us are choosing to live alone and are tempted to turn away from romantic relationships, we should take heart. The world is changing, yes, but love will change with it. This is one of love’s best features, its adaptability.
Yet while love is endlessly customizable, we must remember that it is never expendable. It is not something we can do without. Love is a biological necessity. My scientific research on the brain has convinced me that a healthy love life is as necessary to a person’s well-being as nutritious food, exercise, or clean water.
Evolution has sculpted our brains and bodies specifically to build and benefit from lasting romantic connections. When those connections are frayed or ruptured, the consequences to our mental and physical health are devastating. My research has revealed that not only are we wired for love but we cannot realise our full potential as human beings without it.
While I discovered this in the laboratory by spending hundreds of hours scanning and analyzing the brains of those in love (as well as the heartbroken), I did not fully understand the importance and true beauty of love until I found, lost, and rediscovered it in my own life.
When I was 37, in a flash of serendipity, I met the great love of my life, my late husband and fellow scientist Dr. John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist renowned for his groundbreaking research on loneliness. We dated across an ocean, got married in Paris, and like two lovebirds, became absolutely inseparable. We travelled together, we worked together, we ran together, we even shoe-shopped together. If you put our seven years of marriage on the time clock of normal couples—who typically spend about six waking hours per day together—our union felt like the equivalent of 21 years. We loved every minute of it. We didn’t feel time go by—we were too happy together—until the clock stopped. He died in 2018 aged 66 from cancer.
A new definition of ‘love at first sight’
I fell in love with John’s mind. Yet I could not deny that I found him physically attractive: his intelligent eyes, his broad smile, the way he moved, the fact that he was in such great shape. And it makes me wonder, if John were the same person, exactly the same on the inside, but less attractive to me on the outside, would we have clicked the way we did? Put another way, what role does physical attraction play in forming long-lasting romantic relationships? Can romantic attraction exist without physical attraction?
Poets, songwriters, and philosophers have posed versions of these questions since the dawn of time, yet clear answers have eluded them. Much of the confusion goes back to how we define love. If you’ve ever felt intensely and passionately in love with someone whom you find intellectually and physically irresistible, you know you can’t easily disentangle your feelings. In contrast, if you’ve ever had a friend crush, you know that you can “fall for” someone without wanting to sleep with them. You can develop an intellectual infatuation, thinking about a person obsessively, feeling a jolt of excitement when they send you a text. And yet, the idea of physical intimacy does not cross your mind.
This describes all close relationships for the small share of the population—approximately one per cent according to recent studies—that is asexual. Back in the 1960s, the psychologist Dorothy Tennov surveyed five hundred individuals on their romantic preferences. About 53 per cent of the women and 79 per cent of the men agreed with the statement they had been attracted to people without feeling “the slightest trace of love”; and a majority of the women (61 per cent) and a sizable minority of the men (35 per cent) agreed with the statement they could be in love without feeling any physical desire. To our modern sensibilities, these numbers may seem surprising.
More on Love And Relationships
Today we barely need to look at the evidence to know that lust can exist without love. But what about the possibility of romantic love without lust? Can true love ever be truly platonic? That might sound far-fetched, yet when, in 2009, AARP surveyed a nationally representative sample including more than two thousand American adults about their attitudes around love and relationships, they found that 76 per cent of respondents eighteen and older agreed with the statement true love can exist in the absence of “a radiant/active” physical connection.
Women, interestingly, are only slightly more likely to agree with this statement compared to men: 80 versus 71 per cent.
This gets us back to the sticky issue of definitions. If you define romantic love in a broad and polymorphous way as just a deep affection and attachment, it is of course possible to love a person without desiring them physically. But, if you define love based on its unique neurobiological blueprint, it is clear that desire is not an incidental feature of a loving relationship but an essential ingredient.
This desire doesn’t necessarily need to be sexual but it must be physical. By that I mean it must involve not just the mind but the body as well. When you combine desire and love, you go from having a physical experience to making love. We think of the former as more about the body, more individualistic, more about fulfilling one’s biological desires and needs, more about the now than the future. We think of the latter as less about the body than about the mind or the heart and soul, less about the individual and more about the relationship, less about me than we.
When a couple makes love they are intentionally fusing together, communicating mentally and physically that which they cannot find the words for, sharing, realigning and resolving differences, embodying the harmony and fluidity and connectivity that couples so often seek. Yet on a neurobiological level, the more you look at the dividing line between love and desire, the blurrier it gets.
Think of a person whom you find extremely physically attractive. As much as you might believe your feelings are merely physical, with every (real or imagined) touch and kiss, your brain is complicating matters. The pleasure you’re experiencing results from the same neurochemicals, from dopamine to oxytocin, that flood your body when you’re in love. This is one of the reasons why people may grow attached to those they once considered just a “friend with benefits.”
Physical desire helps us not just form an emotional connection with our partner. It also makes us feel the importance of the physical body, makes us understand what the literary scholar Joseph Campbell called “the rapture of being alive”. We experience and react to desire even before we’re conscious of what’s going on. Let’s say you’re going for a walk in the park on a sunny day and holding hands with your partner. Suddenly, a beautiful runner crosses your path, and your partner’s eyes are drawn like a magnet to the runner’s body. In many cases, your partner won’t even notice that they are looking until you point it out, usually with an annoyed glance. “What?!” your partner asks, uncomprehendingly.
We rarely realise the extent to which our gaze, our attention, is automatically and unconsciously directed by the nature of our interest in someone. Using eye-tracking studies, which can identify exactly where a participant is looking, my research team and I have found that when both men and women are shown a photograph of someone whom they find physically attractive, their gaze instinctively falls on that person’s torso (even when dressed). But when they look at someone they later say they could imagine falling in love with, their gaze falls directly on the face. And the stronger the potential connection, the more likely they are to focus on the eyes.
We knew from previous research that eye contact is one of the most reliable markers of love between couples, but this study showed that people fixate visually more on a person’s face (relative to their body) when they are thinking about feeling love instead of lust.
The fact that our eyes are drawn to someone’s face, the way that I was drawn to John’s when I met him for the first time, signals to us that this person may be someone special.
The importance of eye contact in loving relationships was indirectly reinforced in 2020 when a team of researchers from the Yale School of Medicine showed that real-time direct eye-to-eye contact awakens activity in a core brain area of the love network—the angular gyrus. In this study, thirty healthy adults (fifteen pairs) were seated across a table from each other. Each partner was asked to gaze at their partner for a total of ninety seconds (alternating every 15 seconds between direct eye gaze and rest).
Overall, these results suggest that reciprocal eye-gaze between partners increases activity in neural circuits that play a key role in love.
Maybe this is a component of what people call “love at first sight”?
Dr Stephanie Cacioppo is the author of ‘Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss and the Essence of Human Connection’ (Little, Brown, £20)
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