Beyond Cupid: The secret of human relationships

Sex with oneself

The imagination spawns fetishes for neutral objects that are charged with sexual electricity. Large enveloping hands, or fingers that are long and gentle like a pianist’s; a black bob haircut or hair swept back; red lace panties or leather boots. They will not act as an aphrodisiac for any animal other than the imaginative human being. Thus do the paths of imagined sexuality develop and intertwine, rendering humans the most erotic species in the animal kingdom. However, this imaginative ability comes with a price. As they set out to encounter one another amid the dense tangle of words and metaphors, people in a relationship can only kiss through a veil, never touch completely.

That is why, in so many relationships, the sides try to compel each other to change: To make the partner at last match the image which they harbor in the recesses of the imagination.

Sexual contact is not an exception to this rule. In sex, each side takes his available collection of images and projects them onto the other. The more closely the sexual partner matches the conscious and unconscious image and fantasy in the other’s head, the more marvelous he will be. It follows that one conducts sexual relations basically with oneself. That is, with the multiple fantasies one
projects onto the other’s body − among them, what he imagines the other wants and experiences. So fraught is the imagined fantasy of the other that, in long-term or routine relationships, it may need upgrading in order to renew the attraction. Here, too, the stimulus is projected from the mind, so that the awakened sexuality is again with oneself, albeit of a new quality.

The feeling of distance, even loneliness, that often arrives precisely after moments of close contact, such as an intimate conversation, a mutual orgasm or a sense of oneness, is an expression of the same dynamic. Each side suddenly feels the searing sense of separateness.

As though the relationship were obeying hidden rules of attraction and repulsion, closeness and alienation, owning and losing. In the autobiographical words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Male and female are contradictions that constantly yearn to unite, but the more they unite, the sharper grow their longings and caprices.”

Freudian goats

The images themselves converse with the erotic fashion of the time, and are nourished by private preferences of body and emotion and from one’s life experience. Past relations, for example, are a highly significant source in the search for a new love object − what Vladimir Nabokov called heralded, enchanting and fateful memories. Such a memory might be a lost youthful love, though usually the most important connection is the first love we experienced − with father, and more so with mother. Try as we may, we will not succeed in escaping entirely from Freud’s famous statement in this regard: “The finding of an object [of love] is in fact a refinding of it.” In other words, the early patterns of our relations with our parents exert an influence of some kind on the attraction we feel to possible partners.

This hypothesis was difficult to examine during Freud’s lifetime, but creative contemporary studies offer grounds for its substantiation. The British neuroscientist Prof. Keith Kendrick used original research methods to examine the subject. He took newborn goats and gave them for coerced adoption to ewes, and gave newborn lambs to goat mothers for rearing. Apart from this cross-fostering, the sheep were allowed to mingle with their own kind for most of the day, in order not to deprive them of a regular socialization process. Afterward, as sexually mature adults, the adopted male goats and rams refused to copulate with females from their own species. Instead, they sought sexual proximity with females of the other species − the goats with ewes and the rams with goats.

Astonishingly, the goats were attracted to ewes whose facial structure resembled that of their adoptive mothers. This behavior did not cease even after three years in which the adult goats and rams were made to live among their own species exclusively. Among the females, the situation was slightly different. Those who had been reared by mothers of the other species were less affected by the adoption process. Half of them chose adults of their own species as lovers, half chose members of the species of their adoptive mother.

The phenomenon of the Freudian goats − termed “sexual imprinting” − is a salient example of the way in which childhood memory influences the form taken by the erotic attraction of the adult animal.

The fact that a significant aspect of the connection to, and image of, the other is imagined has never stopped any lover from getting to his or her beloved. Everything that is imagined in this sense is real, just as everything that is real is imagined fantasy. Indeed, it is possible that the connection draws its primary strength from hallucinations about the other, from the yearning to find and get to know him, and from the promise embodied in the possibility of the contact, not necessarily in its realization.

In this sense, love − as Erich Fromm wrote in his book “The Art of Love” − is an attitude or orientation which determines one’s need of the world. Love of this kind is an emotional and mental wanderer; it is not dependent on a person who is found to be worthy of love, and does not end after the person is found.

This need reaches the summit of its strength in adolescence. Relationships in this period might look immature and sometimes illogical, but they are experienced very powerfully and leave their imprint for the rest of one’s life. It was not by chance that Shakespeare implanted the great love story he wrote in the thrilled hearts of two protagonists in their teens. Falling in love transforms the world in a twinkling. The loved girl never stops thinking about the object of her love; in his presence her knees tremble, her heart races, she shows signs of light anxiety. She prays to see him by chance: In a mall? At a party? In a hotel on a family vacation? Each event has a chance to occur if we leave rationality aside. The boy is similarly affected. The very mention of the one’s name tenses him. He plans what he can do to make her notice him, tries to catch her glance. If he happens to overhear her being maligned, he flies into a rage, is ready to do battle, to do everything for her.

Tracks of the brain

The biological anthropologist Helen Fisher collected people who were “madly in love,” as they described it, and put them through a brain scan via an fMRI machine. Some of them had fallen in love recently, some were in the midst of long, loving relationships, and the others had experienced rejection but still felt love. Fisher let her subjects view a photograph of their beloved for 30 seconds. During that short period of time, all the participants, without exception, displayed heightened activity of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is related to motivation, focus and feelings. The activity occurred primarily in the region of the brain’s reward system. When this region − which lies beneath the cerebral cortex − is flooded with dopamine, there is an uplift of spirit, an inner surge, a sense of intensive meaning and willpower.

That sense of power is the longing for the other, a potent impulse that emanates from ancient parts of the nervous system. Its aim: to be in contact. As these regions activate reward systems, researchers maintain that romantic love is a motivational system related to the primeval desire to multiply and survive.

The paths of romantic contact are not the same ones that activate sexual attraction. According to Fisher, there are three separate brain systems for forming ties. One system activates the romantic impulse, which leads us to focus our partnering energy on one person. A second system arouses the sexual impulse, making us feel attraction for different people. And the third and last system works on feelings of attachment, which makes it possible for us to remain in a relationship long enough to raise offspring.

Each system is associated with different chemicals and separate tracks in the brain, though in the end all of them impel us to forge ties in order to ensure the continuity of the species and to live as social beings.

These systems do not always operate harmoniously and cooperatively, a situation that nourishes a broad range of human feelings and behaviors: from anxiety and fears of abandonment, through jealousy and betrayal, to violence and death. Alternatively, the oppositions between the systems also paved the way to polygamy and polyamory, though their grip is weaker in the socioeconomic structure of Western culture. In any event, from the perspective of the brain’s steering box, one can simultaneously be in a close romantic relationship with one person, be wildly attracted to another person, and still not forget a mythic ex-lover.

In contrast to what intuition might assume, the sexual system is not the strongest in the struggle that takes place among the systems for control and management. Generally, when an impulse arises, we try to satisfy it. Thirst and sleep are not amenable to reduction; we do all we can to satisfy them when we are bothered by them − if not, we will pay a high price.

In contrast, a sexual urge for a particular object can definitely be maneuvered and redirected. Unfulfilled sexual lust may stir disappointment or frustration, but there is nothing to prevent us from directing it at someone else. The romantic impulse, though, is expressed by falling in love in a way that can barely be tamed. The person I have fallen in love with is the person I love, even if he does not want me, even if she is in a relationship with someone else, even if he or she does not even know me.

The Greeks thus termed love “the madness of the gods,” believing that desire is a product of the gods’ will that has been forced on man. The lover is helpless, and once struck by Cupid’s arrow is subject to forces that are beyond his control. Furthermore, people might become depressed and collapse because of unrequited love, and in severe cases harm themselves or others. It is rarer for sexual frustration to lead to extreme results. In the battle of impulses, romanticism trumps sexuality.

When the contact is made and feelings are kindled, love often becomes compulsive about its object. Lovers obsess about their beloveds. They think about them constantly, want to talk about them at every opportunity; they write poetry to them and send them text messages, feel affection for the city or the street corner at which they live, and of course want to be with them all the time, regardless of the price. “Can I go forward when my heart is here?” Romeo says, and returns to the house of Juliet’s father, which is so dangerous for him. The cerebral basis for Romeo’s behavior was recently uncovered in a study.

The Italian psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti examined the serotonin levels of 24 people who had fallen in love in the six months that preceded the study, and who were occupied with the love object at least four hours a day. She compared their serotonin levels with those of a group of patients who had been clinically diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and with another group who were neither in love nor suffered from the disorder.

The results were fascinating. The serotonin levels in both groups were about 40 percent lower than those in the control group. In other words, as logical − and absurd − as it sounds, from a cerebral perspective, falling in love resembled a mental disorder.

It is important to bear in mind that the testimonies about the cerebral activity of a person in love is not, as many mistakenly think, the answer to the question, What is love? On the contrary, the fact that the brain is so immersed in love raises more questions than it answers. In addition, people live in parallel fashion in at least two complex worlds: a biological world of nerve cells and hormones, and a semiotic world of signs and language.

Many of the strands in the web of a relationship are woven on the semiotic rather than the biological side. Every neurologist, psychiatrist and other person who does not see this, condemns himself to a narrow, banal and unscientific perception of reality.

Penetration and abandonment

A final element completes the building of love. Beyond the images that are projected onto the beloved, and the basic desire to be in contact, there exists the presence of the other. At fleeting moments during the relationship, the other tears away the network of images that has been cast on him − by means of actions he takes, words he speaks and feelings he reveals. His presence endangers the relationship, for the reality of his existence turns the lover into an emotional hostage dependent on someone other than himself. Even if the interpretation of the other’s actions is in part imagined, it is nevertheless an influential event that takes place in the world.

The two most significant actions of the other within a relationship are penetration and abandonment, and both exert a dramatic effect on the lovers. Penetration, which is understood here to be nonviolent and not dependent on the person’s sex, implies that one person found a way to enter into another’s psychic interiority and merge with it. In the act of penetration, the curtain of images created by the sides is torn; their oppositeness is blatant, and they challenge their fundamental separateness. This is the basis for the change that contact foments in the lovers’ minds. The penetration is liable to have an undermining, as much as beneficial, effect, but in any event the lovers can no longer continue as they were beforehand. Abandonment, on the other hand, implies symbolic death.

In terms of the brain, it has been proved that every experience of parting activates neural circles of physical pain in the brain. Even a computerized simulated game, in which the person being tested believes that other participants − whom he neither sees nor knows − have stopped transferring a virtual ball to him generates intracerebral circles of pain.

The effect is incomparably more severe in a relationship: When it is threatened or ends, or when the lover experiences true rejection or loss, a whole mental construct collapses. The beloved is no more, and lost with him is a broad swath of existence, which existed in relation to him and through the relationship with him. The suffering that is felt in this case is the pain of depression, which resembles the pain of the bereaved for the deceased, who has gone and will never return. The more the relationship deepens, the greater the apprehension that it will end like this. The result is an increase in the risk of being committed to a relationship. And with that, stress, defensiveness and paranoia multiply in both sides. This is the place at which the lovers need courage in order to preserve their love.

In recent years, a discourse has been underway in various places about the supposed dying or death of love. Nothing could be further from the truth. Albert Camus’ statement − “There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving” ‏(translation: Justin O’Brien‏) − remains valid. True, love takes on a different character in our time, and the nature of relationships has changed, just as the innate being of people and of their mind has changed.

The frequently evoked defense mechanisms of the contemporary era − indifference and emotional distance, cynicism and irony, pharmacological and technological anesthesia − lend a different thrust to relationships. Romeo’s enthusiasm will generate ridicule today; Young Werther’s sorrows will be treated with antidepressants; the errant lovers of the Song of Songs will sign up on a singles site. Nevertheless, relationships − romantic, sexual and attachment-oriented − continue to be the glue that binds people to one another.

Leonard Cohen terms love a “dangerous arena.” In an interview, he had the following to say on the subject: “[In the arena of love] the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there’s no fixed lesson that one can learn, because the heart is always opening and closing, it’s always softening and hardening. We’re always experiencing joy or sadness. There’s no jackpot in the whole enterprise. You’re either going to have the courage or not, because after a certain amount of time, the accumulation of defeats in this realm is going to be significant.

“The fortunate people are those who, in spite of the defeat, in spite of the impossibility of establishing reasonable contacts with the other, are able to continue to do that.” ‏(The full interview with Cohen, slightly edited here, can be viewed here‏).

In a certain sense, Cohen is here conversing with the lovers in the Song of Songs, who testified to love’s unstable nature, to the fact that it is never safe and final, and is elusive by definition. The beloved penetrates the curtain of images only for a glittering, meteoric moment, and then disappears again. But this is an important, precious moment, as it signifies the possibility of an intertwining of minds. This is when one must call to the lover and seek him out anew, endeavor to rediscover him, without looking back in disappointment at the number of missed opportunities and at the sorrows that have accumulated. Love that will be capable of accepting and living with this type of tricky logic will be capable of sustaining and renewing itself. Great floods cannot quench it, nor rivers wash it away.

Gabriel Bukobza