Why We Love, at last

I am reading an interesting new book by Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, titled, “Why We Love: the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.” In the book, she links love to high levels in the brain of a drug called dopamine.

At the end of the third chapter, Dr. Fisher provides an answer to a question that I was first asked in 1958. I was 15, with enough dopamine loose in my head to make my ears glow. Being in chemistry-crazed love was a brand new thing for me, and the cause of it all asked me, “Do you need me because you want me, or do you want me because you need me?”

I remember that I needed her bad, as a matter of fact. We were driving north on Barrow between the stadium and South 7th when she asked this. Dr. Fisher states in her book that it is common for young people being overrun by dopamine to remember such minutiae years later.

At the same time, I didn’t know up from down. “Dope” must be short for dopamine. It was not a good position from which to impress the teen goddess, but I tried to understand the question and decide which was the answer that would cause her to scoot over the last one-eighth inch between us on the seat – no bucket seats in those days – and press her body tightly against mine.

I truly don’t remember what I answered. I believe I liked the “need because I want” option, because want implied brain function and need implied function, period.

Forty-eight years later, Dr. Fisher informs me that “I want you because I need you” is the correct answer. Romantic love, she discovers, is not emotion, but motivation, created by mysterious but observable chemical activity in the brain. Her work over the years shows that a human being’s “basic drives,” such as thirst, hunger, cold, etc., are what are called “primary motivating systems” in the brain. Her new work indicated that romantic love is among these, a primary motivating system.

I didn’t know what kind of grip I was in, that afternoon on Barrow, but I agree completely that it was primary. “Romantic love is a need, a craving,” Dr. Fisher writes. “We need food. We need water. We need warmth. And the lover feels he/she needs the beloved. Plato had it right over two thousand years ago. The God of Love ‘lives in a state of need.’ “

I am glad to know these things at last. The book is very readable, and it will provide you a lot of things you could have told your parents that were true, when you tried to sneak in so late.