Cross Talk
Analysing love
AMERICAN songwriter Irving Berlin once wrote: "There may be trouble ahead, but while there is moonlight and music and love and romance, let us face the music and dance." If you read science, it throws cold water on that excitement.
Temperature depends on the velocities of molecules. Music and melody are just variations in the pressure of air, and colours or lights are nothing but electro-magnetic waves. When you get to love, the facts are even more threadbare. Lovers are nothing but cocktails of chemicals. Love is chemical reactions triggered by hormones and neurotransmitters.
For example, love at first sight, the greatest dictum of romantic overture, is driven by lust which is a magnetic field created by two hormones, testosterone and estrogen. In the next stage of romantic progression, lovers feel love-struck. These are also wonders of hormones. Increased blood levels of adrenaline and cortisol have the charming effect when lovers bump into each other. Their hands sweat, hearts pound, and mouths go dry.
Then a neurotransmitter named dopamine stimulates desire and pleasure, having the same effect on the brain as cocaine does. Lovers feel increased energy, less need for sleep, focused attention and exquisite delight in each other's company. Finally comes serotonin, which is one of love's most potent potions, an obsessive-compulsive behaviour which keeps lovers popping up in each other's minds. If we think love is blind, the credit goes to this particular neurotransmitter.
In stage three, attachment grows between lovers, which keeps them together. Two major hormones oxytocin and vassopresin are responsible for it, and men and women release these hormones during orgasm and after sex. The theory goes that the more copulation a couple has, the deeper their bond becomes.
According to psychologists, love is a conspiracy of nature. Men and women fall in love, innocent victims as they are, duped by their brains under the influence of oodles of chemical concoctions. And the reason why nature does it is to keep human species interested in reproduction.
So, when Laila committed suicide and a distraught Majnu died at her grave, it was at best a tragic case of hormonal overdose. In a similar overflow of chemicals, Shirin and Farhad took their own lives with a pickaxe, and Romeo took poison before Juliet stabbed herself with a knife. A poor Devdas drank himself to death, muttering Parvati's name until his last breath.
Love analysed is nothing more than a hoax. Song and dance, moonlight, candlelight dinner, amusing stories, tasteful dress-up, fragrance, and ambiance, there is so much to stimulate the hormones, which further stimulate the molecules. Then colours change, music plays and hearts dance. Lovers' exuberance is comparable to a drunken spree under the influence of alcohol.
In many ways, love intoxicates, and lovers live in continuous mood swing under that influence. They are restless, argumentative, paranoid, fluctuating in their emotions, now ecstatic, now melancholic, never too sure if one equally loves the other. Lovers are two parameters chasing an elusive equation.
Love at one stage becomes desperate for union. It aspires for marriage when it runs the risk of liquidating itself like the tree that dies after it fruits. For reasons, which psychologists are yet to determine, if love fails to culminate in union it creates a vacuum, when bad feelings drive good feelings out of circulation.
In Wuthering Heights, the unresolved passion between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw eventually destroys them and many around them. In his unrequited love for Parvati, Devdas seeks refuge in alcohol, abandons his family and reduces himself into a wretched vagabond.
Psychologist John Lee writes in his book, The Color Wheel, that just like there are three primary colours, there are also three primary styles of love. Eros is the first style, which means loving an ideal person. Then comes Ludos, which is love as a game. The third style is Storge, which uses love as friendship.
These three primary styles, in permutation and combination, produce three secondary styles. Mania, or obsessive love, is a combination of Eros and Ludos. Pragma, or realistic love, is a combination of Ludos and Storge, whereas Eros and Storge produce the rare style of selfless love, which is when lovers fall in love with love itself.
History bears out that in 700 million years of human race, men and women coveted and discarded each other only in marriage and divorce. But romantic love didn't exist until 800 years ago, popularised in Europe by the French Troubadours. In that sense, romantic love, as we know it today, is not a natural but an acquired mental state.
An existentialist philosopher named James Park argues that Helen of Troy, which Homer wrote 3000 years ago, was mostly about one royal who sought revenge against another for stealing his wife. It had so much to do with pride of a man, but nothing to do with love for his woman.
So what about all the men and women in history who took their lives for love, plunging from height, drowning in water, taking poison, and by hanging, stabbing and gunshot? Are they freaks of nature, its byproducts, people who live to love compared to most others who love to live? These are men and women who enjoy moonlight and music, love and romance, without a clue of the trouble ahead of them.
Besotted by love, they don't realise that life is too short to indulge in a bubble inside a bubble. Prospero says it more aptly in Shakespeare's The Tempest: "We are such stuff as dreams are made of; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
Love is a wonderful feeling for as long as it feels wonderful. But that feeling doesn't last forever. In the end, lovers run out of love, hatred in separation, habit in union. A young man I knew gave his life under a speeding train after his beloved got married to another man. He didn't live to see that she died of cancer in two years. Love like life is as good as it lasts.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments