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Is love real? The question sounds absurd until you try to answer it. World literature has never doubted it. In Homer, an entire army camps outside Troy for ten years because Paris has abducted Helen. Medieval physicians listed “amor heroes,” lovesickness, as a disease in its own right, with fever, sleeplessness and physical decline; they prescribed bloodletting, baths, wine and travel. Goethe’s Werther is destroyed by a woman who has married someone else, and he shoots himself. And since 1990 cardiology has known takotsubo syndrome, first described by Japanese doctors: after a severe emotional blow, such as the death of a partner, the heart’s left ventricle can temporarily lose its ability to pump effectively, even though no blood vessel is blocked. The broken heart is a medical diagnosis.
Something that starts wars, has occupied physicians for centuries and can paralyze the heart muscle is real. But this is only where the puzzle begins. Love arises in a single, mortal brain, out of hormones, a pounding heart and sleepless nights, and it disappears with that brain. Yet every culture celebrates it as immortal. How can a state of physical upheaval be older than all religions and have survived them all so far? This is the question I want to pursue: in history, in the religions, in psychology and, finally, in the brain itself.
From Sumer to the mountains of Kurdistan
The oldest surviving love poems in human history come from Mesopotamia. Around 2000 BC, Sumerian hymns praised the goddess Inanna, whom the Babylonians called Ishtar, in language that speaks with astonishing openness about desire and the body. Several texts describe a “sacred marriage” in which the king was symbolically united with the goddess. The fertility of the land and the legitimacy of his rule were believed to depend on this union. How often, and in what form, this ritual was actually performed is disputed among scholars of the ancient Near East. What is certain is that the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose oldest versions were written roughly a thousand years before Homer, also knows Ishtar: as a suitor whose proposal the hero rejects because he knows what became of her earlier lovers.
This overturns a popular theory. Romantic love, it is often said, was invented by the troubadours of southern France in the 12th century. They gave it a new literary form, but they did not invent it. In 1992 the anthropologists William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer analyzed ethnographic reports from 166 cultures and found clear evidence of romantic love in 147 of them, or 88.5 percent. Where it seemed to be absent, the evidence was more likely missing than the feeling itself. Societies differ less in whether people fall in love than in how much room they give this experience alongside family, property and social background.
Religions cannot let go of it either, however many of them preach abstinence. The biblical Song of Songs celebrates the desire of two lovers so openly that God is not explicitly mentioned in it even once. In Sufism, among poets such as Rumi, the longing for the beloved becomes an image of the longing for God. In Hindu bhakti devotion, the love of the cowherd girl Radha for Krishna stands for the soul’s surrender to the divine. The Greeks had several words for what we call by a single name: eros, philia, storge, agape. Buddhism, for its part, soberly distinguishes between tanha, clinging desire, and metta, selfless kindness. In Buddhism, romantic love is seen rather as a particularly subtle form of attachment.
One of the great love stories of the Middle East comes from Kurdish literature. Ehmedê Xanî
completed his verse epic “Mem û Zîn” in 1692. Mem, a young man from a modest family, and Zîn, the sister of the Emir of Botan, fall in love at a spring festival. The courtier Beko undermines the prince’s trust through his intrigues. Mem dies in prison; Zîn collapses at his grave and dies as well. The two are buried side by side. When Beko is killed and laid to rest between them, a thornbush grows from his grave and keeps the lovers apart even in death.
Khani, whom many Kurds revere as an early pioneer of their national consciousness, also turned the story of two lovers into a political lament for a divided people. In this respect, his work stands alongside “Layla and Majnun” and “Romeo and Juliet.” For centuries such stories were kept alive by the dengbêj, Kurdish singers, women and men, who passed down their laments of love, the kilam, orally. In times when the Kurdish language was banned, they were often the memory of an entire culture.
The chemistry in our heads
Poetic as all this sounds, over the past thirty years neuroscience has studied love with measuring instruments, and what it found is hardly less astonishing. The American anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studied people newly in love using MRI scanners, distinguished three systems in the brain: sexual desire, driven by testosterone and estrogen; romantic attraction, the fixation on a single person, sustained by dopamine and norepinephrine; and attachment, the calmer, lasting bond, in which oxytocin and vasopressin are involved. The three systems work largely independently of one another. That is why a person can feel deeply connected to a longtime partner and at the same time be fascinated by someone else. Things become difficult when the systems pull in different directions.
In Fisher’s scans, people newly in love showed activity in the same reward areas that become active during a cocaine high, above all the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus. In neurobiological terms, being in love resembles an addiction more than gentle affection, with euphoria, craving and withdrawal. In 1999 the Italian psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti added another finding. She examined serotonin transporters in the blood of people who had recently fallen in love and of people with obsessive compulsive disorder. In both groups the levels were similarly low and clearly below those of healthy control subjects. Anyone who can think of nothing but one person has more in common with someone checking for the tenth time whether the stove is off than they might like to admit. When Marazziti examined some of those in love again twelve to eighteen months later, their levels were back to normal.
According to most studies, this state of upheaval rarely lasts longer than eighteen months to three years. If the couple stays together, other chemical messengers take over. The role of oxytocin and vasopressin in this process was studied by Sue Carter, Thomas Insel and Larry Young in prairie voles. These animals are monogamous; their close relatives, the montane voles, are not. The difference lies in the receptors: prairie voles have far more binding sites for the two hormones in the reward centers of their brains. When these receptors are blocked, no stable pair bond forms. In these animals, fidelity is also a matter of wiring.
Another finding comes remarkably close to popular wisdom. The London neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki found that when people in love look at a photo of their beloved, activity decreases in precisely those brain regions that are involved in the critical judgment of others and in negative emotions. Love, quite literally, makes us partly blind. Fisher also studied what happens when love ends. In people who had just been left by a partner, regions became active that are linked to physical pain and to the craving for a drug. Heartbreak is more than a metaphor.
When the psyche plays its part
In 1986, the American psychologist Robert Sternberg described love as a triangle of intimacy, passion and commitment. When all three are present, he calls it “consummate love.” Intimacy and passion without commitment he calls romantic love; intimacy and commitment without passion, companionate love. The model explains why relationships change over the years without necessarily losing something essential. What shifts is the mix.
For the stormy beginning, the psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term “limerence” in 1979: the intrusive, barely controllable thoughts that revolve around a single person. Stendhal had already found an image for it in 1822, “crystallization.” A bare branch thrown into a salt mine becomes covered with glittering crystals after a few months. In the same way, the lover attributes to the beloved virtues that he or she often does not possess at all. The social psychologist Sandra Murray has studied these “positive illusions” empirically and found something surprising: couples who idealize each other a little are often more satisfied in the long run.
To understand where our patterns of love come from, we must look back to early childhood. From the 1950s onward, the British psychiatrist John Bowlby described how children form an attachment to their earliest caregivers. The psychologist Mary Ainsworth later distinguished secure, anxious and avoidant attachment patterns. In 1987, Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver applied this model to adult love and found the same patterns again. Those who learned as children that their need for closeness is reliably met usually love more calmly as adults. Those who experienced unpredictability early on sometimes seek it out for the rest of their lives without noticing. In my work with traumatized people, I see how deeply these early experiences shape people, but also that their effects can be changed.
At the extreme end, psychiatry recognizes a diagnosis of its own: erotomania, also known as Clerambault syndrome, after the French psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault. Those affected are delusionally convinced that they are loved by someone who is usually out of reach, often a famous person. Delusional love does exist, although it is rare.
Love in society
As private as falling in love feels, it is shaped by society to the same degree. In Europe, love only began to emerge as the main reason for marriage in the late 18th century. That required the free choice of a partner, a certain economic independence and, not least, the novel, which showed readers how to love. Before that, property, rank and family were what counted, and in many societies that is still true today. In “The Normal Chaos of Love” (1990), Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim described how, in individualized societies, partnership is expected to provide what the extended family, the church and social class once provided: meaning and stability. Love becomes an earthly religion. This places a burden on it under which it easily collapses.
In 1992, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens called the modern ideal the “pure relationship.” It is no longer held together primarily by external constraints and lasts only as long as both partners find it fulfilling. That is a gain in freedom, and it explains why separation has become commonplace today. The sociologist Eva Illouz has shown how closely romantic choice is intertwined with the logic of markets and consumption. Zygmunt Bauman spoke of “liquid love.” Online dating sites and apps promise an almost unlimited choice, and that is precisely what makes commitment harder. Anyone who always imagines a better option elsewhere is reluctant to commit.
In many societies of the Middle East, and in Kurdish families as well, the tension between free choice and family ties can still be observed today. There, a marriage based on love and a union negotiated by families are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Often these negotiations continue until a compromise is found between personal wishes and belonging to the community. I also witness these negotiations here in Germany, in families with roots in Turkey, Iraq or Syria, and they are by no means always peaceful. Western theories of individualization often overlook such intermediate forms. There is no single modern path to love.
The same storm, again and again
What remains of all this? There is hardly another human phenomenon about which myth, neuroscience, psychology and sociology reach such similar conclusions, although they speak entirely different languages. The Sumerians saw it as the work of a goddess. Xanî saw a force stronger than enmity and death. Attachment research recognizes a pattern from childhood, sociology and overloaded expectation, neuroscience dopamine. All of them describe the same state. It throws us off course and, if things go well, binds us to another person more firmly than reason ever could.
This also answers the question raised at the beginning. Love is not immortal because a feeling has survived the millennia like an object in a museum. It is immortal because the same storm breaks out anew in every generation. It struck the poets of Uruk, it struck Mem and Zîn, it struck the young Werther, and each time it struck a new, mortal body. Even the thornbush on the grave in Cizre has not changed that. The story goes on being told, every night, somewhere in the world, and it goes on being lived. No one loves forever. But there has never been a generation that did not love.
Dr. Jan Ilhan Kizilhan is a psychologist, author and publisher, an expert in psychotraumatology, trauma, terror and war, transcultural psychiatry, psychotherapy and migration.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
