Essays on Love 1

I have in my life loved a few people. I have wanted to have sex with a whole lot more.

I like to think everyone has lived this dilemma.

I am a big fan of evolutionary psychology, which if you are reading this on my blog pages you can just read the last entry to learn more about it.

Evolutionary psychology basically teaches us that if human beings are animals with instincts and that these instincts overwhelmingly work toward making more human beings.

Inside your infinitely complex mind, you tic toc in an ancient genetic rhythm to make more humans with your DNA.

Even if you are gay, the evolutionary psychologists tell us. There is no escape. They theorize that a certain percentage of gay people in a pack of humans will benefit the spread of the DNA of the gay people. Even if they don't make babies themselves, they would have found themselves strengthening the reproductive potential of their siblings and other genetic relatives.

In the end we are all slaves to our genes. At least within a certain range.

And never forget that we are all the children of savage animals.

Ancient humans hunted by chasing their prey until they collapsed from exhaustion. Then they would descend upon the animals when they were too tired to run anymore and ate them.

We come from this.

In fact humans are the animal who can run the longest without collapse to this present day. This is a byproduct of our evolutionary history as terrifying hunters who would run you to death.

From this ancestry emerges love.

What is love?

I have come up with a basic definition of love. This definition is up for grabs, I am still working on it. My main inspiration is personal experience.

I believe love is the hyperactivity of the nucleus accumbens deep in the limbic system of your brain. This is the same part of the brain employed by heroin, and other delightful addictions.

What I propose this feels like is a great joy and fascination with the other person.

The immediate critique this meets is that I am not describing love but infatuation.

I believe, as a die hard naturalist, this is a false dichotomy.

What people call infatuation is love unsustained.

I believe that the great challenge we all face is to make this last. To remember.

The great secret to love everlasting- Or at least lasting as long as you want it to- is memory.

Understand memory as the neuroscientist. Memory is when the brain repeats something it has done before.

Daunting in its very simplicity.

Remember what it felt like when that person knocked your socks of, feel it rise within you again, and make a new memory.

So precious.

Each memory becomes like a tiny ember with which you ignite a great torch.

Life assaults us constantly with the depletion of resources, the drama of one's family, the turmoil of the mundane.

One cannot be in a perpetual dream state, thinking constantly of their partner. No we must all allocate our neural resources to dealing with the bullshit that we must each wade through every day of our lives.

Then when we meet our partner the bruises we have endured from the day, or the week, or whatever, can make us forget what initially made us chose them in the first place. We begin to notice, and indeed, look for problems.

We become like a self mutilator who feels power by destroying themselves.

Now I am not talking about relationships which have genuine problems. Things like violence, infidelity (for those who are monogamous), deceit, theft, and emotional abuse are red flags that we must all commit to having no tolerance for.

In order to have a snowball's chance in hell you must already have a decent foundation of ethical treatment. You cannot be partners with someone who is trying to hurt you or themselves.

S&M is a different category, just for a disclaimer. I believe that people who enjoy S&M are not hurting each other.

But even relationships between those who are responsible and kind sadly collapse. They fall as the two people cannot find the long lost yearning they once felt for each other. They search their dendritic forest inside their head and can find nothing that lights the torch.

Think of the beacon torches in the Tolkien story where Aragorn must scale the mountain to announce the assembly of a mighty army.

The great beacon torch is the state of being in love with the other person.

It assembles all the wonderful ecstasy you have known with this person who you have at one time enjoyed so much that they aroused all of your greatest instincts from antiquity. Your very genes sang their name inside your body.

This assembly is greater than any army in any war. It is the only thing we could dare wane mystical about. The secret code written inside our cells which tells us to act like the long dead of eons which we come from.

Genetics is no mere science, it is a symphony.

To make love last with a precious being who beckons you you must understand that the fuel for great intimacy in joy is a stored within your memories.

Memories posses the mind when properly aroused.

They are stored in some way linked to the emotional systems of the brain. We call this the limbic system, which contains the hippocampus (the machinery of memory storage).

The memories must awaken emotion to do this, and emotion awakens the whole body.

Selah.