Romantic Love

Consumption habits are most salient when entwined with a desired emotional experience that upholds a valued social relationship. Throughout human history, there are few social relationships that have been more deeply valued, albeit often in secrecy, than the pair bond. The worldwide transformation from a society that is family focused and family dependent into a more individualistic oriented culture resulted in the pair bond moving out of a culture's shadows into the public light and approval. In the process, new forms of consumption, especially those concerned with specific feeling states, such as romantic love, have been eagerly adopted that highlight the pair bond as a cherished ideal.

Romantic, or passionate, love refers to any intense attraction involving the intrusive thinking about one person within an erotic context with the expectation of the state enduring for some time into the future. It also involves the reordering of personal priorities that favor being with the loved one combined with feelings of dependency.

Romantic love is not a modern subjective experience. As William Jankowiak (1995) shows, cross-cultural research has found it to be near universal, being found in 174 out of 193, or 90 percent, of known cultures. Moreover, the budding physiological research on the evolution of the mammalian autonomous nervous system lends further support to the interpretation that passionate love is a human universal. Research by Stephen Porges finds that humans have a neurophysiological substrate that enables them to have certain kinds of emotional experiences conducive for developing and sustaining a pair bond relationship. Porges further suggests that “conditioned love with its enduring social bond might require a prerequisite neurophysiological state that might be conceptualized as an [emotional] monogamy switch” (1998, 857). In a related study, T. C. Burnham and colleagues found a link between decreased levels of testosterone in men and men in committed relationships. Clearly, hormones play an essential part in the evolution of human behavior.

Recent endocrinology research is significant for its evidence supporting the biological underpinnings of pair bonding. If humans were by-products of just cultural construction, then they would never have evolved neurological adaptations such as oxytocin and vasopressin designed to support maintaining a pair bond relationship. Nor would the neurological basis of love have so many similar biological underpinnings that range from the capacity to experience sexual arousal to romantic love and deep attachment. It is the existence of these sex hormones and related neurological mechanisms that accounts for anthropologists noting similar labile psychological responses that include “psychophysical responses to the loved person that include exhilaration, euphoria, buoyance, spiritual feelings, increased energy, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, shyness, awkwardness,… flushing, stammering, gazing, prolonged eye contact, dilated pupils,… accelerated breathing, anxiety” (Fisher 1998, 32). Further research by Arthur Aron and colleagues on brain wave patterning found that sex and romantic love involve different brain systems. It is love's unique behavior traits that enable onlookers to readily recognize its presence.

[Page 1235]For the couple involved, however, what may be most striking is their difficulty in keeping the twin emotional states of love and arousal separate rather than merging them as identical experiences (see Jankowiak 2008). From a biochemical perspective, this makes sense: sexuality and emotional bonding are mutually reinforcing. Porges found that a sexual orgasm (combined with prolonged physical caressing) can trigger an oxytocin release that further serves to strengthen personal memory and attachment and thus contributes to sustaining a love bond.

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