Love Makes You Do The Wacky - Jim Checkley
Jim Checkley
April 15, 2007
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below:
I wish I could take credit for the title of the sermon. But I can’t. The title comes from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I liked so much I did a service on it a few years ago.
What’s going on is that Buffy is in love with somebody and is complaining that he is acting all jealous,
but won’t admit it. Buffy is talking to her friend Willow and when Buffy complains to Willow that
her boyfriend is being totally irrational Willow says, “Love makes you to the wacky.” To which
Buffy responds: “That’s the truth.”
I agree with Buffy. Love does make you do the wacky. I’ll bet everybody in this sanctuary
has at least one story of wacky behavior caused by being in love. Which begs the question, why?
Why does love make us do the wacky? Why do we risk our jobs, our friends, our futures, our very
lives in the name of love? What is it about romantic love that not only does it have its own holiday,
but it provides both the greatest joys and the worst agonies imaginable, because truly, what can be
better or worse than the total agony of being in love?
I was looking for a definition of love and found several I want to share with you. The first
is from Ambrose Bierce and states that love is a type of insanity curable by marriage. You laugh
now, but file this one away for later.
How about this one. It’s from a conference of sociologists back in 1977. Listen carefully:
Love is the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive
fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feeling by the object of the
amorance.
I dare you to try to turn that into a poem. In fact, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable with the person
who came up with that one dating my daughter. There are, of course, long dictionary definitions,
but I think part of the problem we have in defining love is that in our culture, love is required to be
all things to all people all of the time.
We love our spouse or our partner, certainly. But we also love our cars, our kids, our favorite
colors, our food, our jokes, our art, and on and on. The word “love” has as many meanings and
covers as much ground as the word “God.” Eskimos have 20 words for snow and we have one word
for love. At least the Greeks had four words for love: Eros, or romantic love; agape or spiritual love;
philia or Platonic love; and storge or natural affection, like that of a parent to a child. But we English
speaking people, with a language that has by far the biggest, most encompassing vocabulary, we only
have one word for love. Why is that? I think part of it is that our culture is very schizophrenic about
love and there are enormous sensitivities around it, especially romantic love.
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For example, you may have heard of the late Leo Buscaglia who once taught a course on love
at UCLA called Love 1-A and wrote many books on the subject. Dr. Buscaglia taught that love is
something we need to learn about and that understanding and dealing with love isn’t something that
just comes to us by osmosis. As a matter of culture and social behavior, I think we can all agree with
that. As you might imagine, however, Professor Buscaglia’s course created some controversy as
people complained that university is no place to teach about love–seriously–university should be
reserved for important stuff like history, language, science, and engineering. Besides, love is, well,
a delicate subject, one that should be kept in a brown paper wrapper and only spoken about in hushed
whispers behind closed doors or on the streets or under the covers.
I don’t know about you, but I think all of that is just ridiculous. I agree with, of all people,
Benjamin Disraeli, who said “We are all born to love. It is the principle of existence and its only end.”
Disraeli was right on at least two counts: first, as I’ll explain in a minute, we are born to love. The
mechanisms of romantic love are hard wired and we are bound to that drive, those desires, like
nothing else in life except eating and drinking. And second, I believe that romantic love, sex, and
reproduction are the very purpose of our natural existence, the focus of life, and the only inherently
meaningful thing about life itself beyond simply being.
I have a book called Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice for All Creation by Olivia Judson. It is a very
clever book written as if Dr. Tatiana were answering letters about sex, reproduction, and other
related issues from a wide variety of members of the animal kingdom. Talk about wacky. I’m telling
you, insect reproduction in particular is bizarre and often deadly. Males in several species literally
die for the opportunity to mate and pass on their genes. If life on this planet is the design of some
intelligent creator, then he or she was on serious drugs when they came up with the myriad methods
of sexual reproduction extant in the animal kingdom. If you want to get educated and blown away
at the same time, I highly recommend reading Dr. Tatiana.
Now, insects don’t have the capacity for rational thought. At least we don’t think they do.
Their behavior is thus controlled by their genetic code and is hard wired into their very being. How
else can you explain the sometimes suicidal and often dangerous behavior indulged in by a whole host
of critters in the animal kingdom? For a long time people believed that humans were immune to that
sort of hard wiring, that our big brains removed us from the ranks of creatures who were
programmed for certain responses and behaviors in the world of romantic love, sex, and reproduction.
It is becoming crystal clear that we were very wrong about that. Very wrong indeed.
Study after study has shown that desire and what we call romantic love is the result of
chemical processes in the brain that are not only hard wired, but result in brain activity that is virtually
indistinguishable from being on hard drugs, and in particular, drugs like cocaine. Now think about
that for a second. Being head over heels in love results in or from, take your pick, brain activity that
is indistinguishable from being on hard drugs. Robert Palmer was right: we are addicted to love. Is
it any wonder that people routinely behave insanely when they are in that stomach wrenching, sleep
deprived, dramatic phase of love? The poets who wrote about love didn’t know the half of it.
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It turns out that the brain is, in fact, the most important organ related to love, sex, and
reproduction. At every turn, genetic programs, working through the brain, guide humans in their
dances of love. And, I know it’s not exactly politically correct to say this, but the scientific truth is
that men’s and women’s brains are significantly different in the programs they run, the systems they
create, and the desires they generate when it comes to romantic love. This is true about almost every
aspect of romantic love and reproduction, including sexual orientation, desire, and how the sexes
view their role in the courtship dance. And the most recent studies show that socio-cultural
influences are less important on these very fundamentally hard wired programs than anybody
suspected. Thus, while it is true to there is a large variation in what signals and stimuli people
respond to in actualizing romantic love impulses, those impulses and the genetic programming
underlying them are resistant to socio-cultural influences.
Here are a few specific (and I think amusing) results to ponder:
In a study of the effect of pictures of beautiful women on the brains of men, researchers found
that the pictures activated the same reward circuits in the brains of heterosexual men as did food and
cocaine. Here is proof–as if we needed it–that men truly are visually stimulated. As co-author of the
study, Dan Ariely of MIT, said, “This is hard-core circuitry. Beauty is working similar to a drug.”
Another study showed men a slide show of random women, each being projected for several
seconds; but the men could extend the viewing time for each picture by pressing keys on a keypad.
You can guess the result. The men worked frantically to keep the beautiful women on the screen,
on average pressing the keyboard more than 4,700 times over a 40 minute span, prompting one
researcher to observe that “these guys look like rodents bar-pressing for cocaine.”
As far as women are concerned, studies have demonstrated, for instance, that a woman’s
choice of which men she says she finds “sexy” changes depending on how close she is to ovulation.
When close to ovulation, women tend to prefer the almost stereotypical tall, dark, rough-hewn guys,
while selecting more round faced “nice guys” at other times. Women are also thousands of times
more sensitive to musk-like odors than are men, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.
When it comes to studying romantic love, there is one person who stands out beyond all the
rest. She is Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Dr. Fisher is a leader among the
army of scientists who are studying the biological bases for romantic love.
Dr. Fisher has written two popular books on the subject, Why We Love: The Nature and
Chemistry of Romantic Love and The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, andWhy We Stray
. And in 2002, she published a landmark study on what is happening in the brains of
people who claim they are head-over-heels in love. I cannot possibly do justice to her work here, but
let me talk about Dr. Fisher’s theories on how human beings fall in love.
Dr. Fisher has proposed that human beings fall in love in three stages. Stage one consists of
simple and generic lust–that undifferentiated general sense of desire. Studies show that lust is
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mediated in the brain by the hormones testosterone and estrogen, with testosterone having been
shown to play a large role in women. These hormones appear to function to get people out looking,
so to speak.
The second stage is attraction to a specific person. This is that truly love-struck phase where
each instant apart is a lifetime, where you call each other 20 times a day, and where you can’t eat,
can’t sleep, and can think of nothing else. In the attraction phase, a group of neuro-transmitters
called “monoamines” play an important role. These include dopamine; adrenalin–the chemical of fight
or flight; and serotonin, which plays a role both in romantic love and depression–big surprise there,
right?
Dopamine is the “reward” chemical and its production is what we are after when we
desperately need to be with our beloved. It’s also the chemical that is made in bucket-loads when are
brains are exposed to cocaine. Serotonin is the tricky one in that it can actually induce temporary
insanity. Thus, many of the millions of people who do crazy things for love, who swim rivers naked,
jump out of airplanes with friends to hold up gigantic signs of proposal while they parachute into a
lover’s back yard, and all the other stuff you’ve ever heard about, many of those people may actually
qualify as temporarily insane.
The third phase in Dr. Fisher’s scheme is called attachment and it involves becoming bonded
with and attached to a specific person. It is marked by the sense of calm, peace, and stability one
feels with a long-term partner and is driven by the brain chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Crazily
enough, oxytocin and vasopressin seem to interfere with the production of dopamine and adrenalin,
which is why the madness of the head-over-heels attraction phase fades as the attachment phase
progresses–a finding that actually provides a basis for the otherwise cynical definition of love I
quoted earlier as a type of insanity curable by marriage.
In fact, studies have shown that vasopressin is responsible for monogamy in a critter called
the prairie vol. Once vasopressin is triggered in the brain of the prairie vol, that vol is faithful to its
mate for life. Block the vasopressin and that very same vol becomes promiscuous. These are very
powerful chemicals. Things are obviously much more complicated in humans–history teaches us that
vasopressin does not work nearly as well in people as it does in prairie vols–but, Dr. Fisher
nonetheless cautions that you should never mess around with somebody you do not want to fall in
love with, because if you generate enough oxytocin and vasopressin, you very well might fall in love
despite yourself.
As a result of her’s and others’ studies, Dr. Fisher has drawn the remarkable conclusion that
romantic love is not actually an emotion like joy or sadness. Instead, she claims it is a motivation
system, a drive, a need that compels people to go out and find a partner and is more akin to the need
to eat than being happy or sad. Romantic love, the attraction phase, says Dr. Fisher, is an even
stronger desire than simple lust. “People don’t kill themselves just because they don’t get sex,” she
says. But they will and do kill themselves over failed romantic love adventures.
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There is so much more going on in evolutionary biology, but I don’t have the time to go into
even a fraction of it. What I will say is the discoveries of how deeply hard wired we are for lust,
attraction, romantic love, and attachment are not a surprise to me. Put simply, reproduction is much
too important to leave to the whims of consciousness and culture.
And it makes sense that humans would be subject to the same forces that other higher animals
are since we share common ancestors and evolved together on this planet. Said another way, before
there was consciousness, there was reproduction and all the drives and hard wiring that nature
provided to insure the continuation of life. For the last handful of millennia perhaps, humans have
been able to cogitate about love and sex and reproduction. But a million years ago, those things just
had to happen for the species to continue and nature had to insure that they would by hard wiring in
the proper mechanisms. And nature was obviously successful since we are all here today. Science
has and continues to confirm that we have inherited those mechanisms and we call them romantic
love.
My point in telling you all this is not to pretend to be able to fully explain why or how we fall
in love, or even the biological basis for romantic love. It’s much more complicated than this, of
course. Rather, my point is to simply suggest that there is in fact a powerful biological basis for
romantic love, that it matters, and we should openly and fearlessly take account of it in our lives.
But these revelations do not sit well with many people, who bristle at the thought that humans
might be subject to instincts, hard wired instructions, and that something as sacred in our culture as
romantic love and all the trappings of courtship, marriage, and the like that go with it, might be the
product of brain chemicals that mimic the actions of drugs. As unsettling as the scientific discoveries
may be, I think the truth is that we humans are a natural part of the natural world and are certainly
a product of evolutionary biology. But we are also conscious beings with the ability to make choices
that either compliment or reject the signals, motivations, and desires that our DNA has made part of
our experience of life.
This is why it is useful to think of ourselves as both a “what” and a “who”. The what is the
primate creature that Mother Nature created out of the raw materials of life and that is subject to the
same laws, the same forces, and the same desires as the other higher level creatures on the planet.
The who is a relatively new entity, a conscious being who seemingly at least, can make choices about
how to proceed with existence and at present, seems to be a little bit confused about what life, the
universe, and everything is supposed to mean. These two aspects of humanity coexist in one body.
Both matter.
This is also the reason I think people are often confused when they ask the question, “What
is the meaning of life?” Life is a process that goes on all around us, has been going on for millions
upon millions of years. Humans are included in the process of life, but so is a snail darter or an
elephant or a wasp. So when we think of life in the broadest sense, it is clear that the purpose and
meaning of life is survival, reproduction and all that goes with it.
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But when they ask the question,”What is the meaning of life?”, many people use the word
“life” to substitute for consciousness and sentience. And that, as they say, is a very different question
and not one I have any desire to tackle today. Well, actually, I will say this. Whatever purpose or
meaning there is to human existence, as opposed to life generally, has to been created, invented as
it were, which is the role of culture, religion, and other philosophical enterprises that seek to imbue
our conscious existence with meaning. But the meaning of life itself, the purpose of life, that is clear:
it is to survive, today, tomorrow, and always.
Up until thirty to fifty years ago, most educated people saw a human baby as a tabula rasa,
a clean slate upon which anything could be written without the pesky influences of instincts and other
hard wired instructions, or drives. Virtually nobody who studies these things today thinks of a baby
as a tabula rasa. That concept has been relegated to the same graveyard as phlogiston and the ether.
Having said that, I must emphasize that just how much has been pre-programmed or hard wired and
how powerfully is subject to debate, some of it fierce. Still, it is clear that we are born with hard
wired drives, call them instincts, call them predispositions, call them an inborn style, but they are
there. And probably the most powerful, the one that dominates so much of our lives, is the need for
romantic love. Like every other creature on the planet, human beings modify their behaviors to
accommodate those incredibly powerful desires–or as Willow says, we all do the wacky.
Can these drives and desires be overcome by the who that we are–our conscious selves? Of
course they can. People routinely choose to do behaviors that conflict with the urges and desires
brought about by romantic love and its chemical addictions to a person. It happens all the time. It’s
one of the things that distinguish us from insects and the rest of the animal world. A praying mantis
will go ahead and get its head bitten off in exchange for the opportunity to mate. Even the most
testosterone and dopamine driven man, however, is most likely to decline that offer.
But does the fact that we can control our behaviors mean we should not acknowledge the
drives and desires that are making our lives both wonderful and miserable? Shall we pretend that we
have conscious control of who–and what gender–we find attractive and that any feelings we
experience that are not sanctioned by the dominant culture are to be labeled as sinful and wrong?
My answer is an emphatic no. I think it is time we looked at these feelings, these desires,
without embarrassment, without shame, without feeling defensive that we are, after all, the product
of evolution and are children of the Earth as much as children of our conscious souls.
While the idea that romantic love is a hard wired mechanism might spoil some of our notions
of romance, it is also liberating. I suggest that if people would let go of the notion of the tabula rasa,
would let go of the notion that falling down the rabbit hole of romantic love is a conscious choice,
and realize that all those powerful feelings and urges are perfectly natural and are deeply imbedded
into the essence of our natural being, perhaps we could all relax a little and not be so harsh with each
other and ourselves.
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Moreover, once that admission is made and the feelings themselves brought out into the open
without embarrassment, they are much easier to deal with. Suppressed feelings and desires have a
way of growing in the dark, just like mushrooms, but tend to lose their almost preternatural hold on
us once we put them in the light of day.
Preachers routinely, and for thousands of years, have taken nature to be sinful. Western
culture definitely assigns passion to the dark side, the night side, the female side of life, the side that
is opposed by the light of reason, the cold hard facts of rationality that is ruled by the day and the
male sky god. But when you pull all of nature over into the side of sin, you degrade the deepest and
most fundamental parts of what we are as living creatures and deny the importance of millions of
years of evolutionary biology.
Our behavior matters, of course, and I am not advocating or justifying rampant infidelity and
wackiness just because we are hard wired for romantic love and all the feelings and desires that go
with it. But I do think our ancestors and our Western religions got it totally wrong. I think that the
world being split into male and female with romantic love and sexual reproduction, however those
drives and desires may manifest in any individual, creates most of the pure joy and happiness we
experience in life. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that when we accuse a young man or
woman of being “superficial” because they are attracted to somebody because that person is beautiful
or sexy, we’ve got it backwards. There’s nothing superficial about it; rather such attraction is one
of the most deeply rooted aspects of our natural existence. It is not only not sinful, it is part of the
very essence of the inherent meaning of life.
Let me conclude by reaffirming that Willow was absolutely right when she told Buffy “Love
makes you do the wacky.” We understand why that is so just a little better now than our mothers and
fathers and their mothers and fathers did, but the feelings, the desires, the power of love remain
undiluted and are eternally ours. No matter the cultural spin we put on them, love, sex and
reproduction are simply fundamental to us and our beings. We truly are born to love. It is our
birthright, our purpose, our meaning, and our glory.
First Unitarian Universalist Church
Presented April 15, 2007
Revised for print
Copyright © 2007 by Jim Checkley