Chapter 6: Love and loving relationships (E.Y)

1) Summary

Chapter six focuses on love on multiple levels; it first defines friendship and love, describes models of love that help us understand why we love, some pathological cases love, and differences in perception and practice of love among various cultures.

Love starts with and requires self-love. We start learning to love and to be loved at home from our families. But not all love is equal, it comes in many variations. In addition to self-love and familial love, there are also friendship and love for our mate. Friendship encompasses eight qualities: enjoyment, acceptance, trust, mutual respect, mutual support, confiding, understanding, and honesty. The love we feel for our intimate partners however, has three additional qualities: sexual desire, altruism, prioritization over other relationships. This latter type of love is the focus of this chapter.

Love is multidimentional, moreover it also involves caring, intimacy and commitment. In additional to all the characteristics mentioned, love is very demanding and it relies on mutual respect. Not being able to cope with demands of a relationship or not respecting each other may lead to a break-up. Love is not only a fun feeling but also provides us with higher self-esteem, thus improving the quality of our lives. In addition, feeling loved and loving is essential for the human survival. In some cases, love can be experienced by same-sex partners. It also varies among cultures, e.g. Romantic love is common in the Western world for a ground for marriage, however for cultures where arranged-love and marriage is common it is perceived as weird, as theirs is perceived weird in the West.

The chapter also clarifies certain myths about love. For example love at first sight is not likely, rather it is a process that grows (or goes awry) over time. It also tends to change over time, either by style or intensity. Another example is that women are not more romantic than men. Also, it is not fate but work of bunch of cultural filters that brings people together.

There are many theories that try to explain why we love, including: Biochemical, attachment, Reiss' wheel, Sternberg's triangular, Lee's styles of loving, and exchange theories. All these theories seem to do a good job describing a certain aspect but have some shortcomings.

However, there are also many obstacles to love. These include, effects of mass media, increased individualism, personality and family characteristics and double standard against women. In addition, there are multiple scenarios where love can go wrong. The first of these is narcissist relationships. In this case, one partner cares an respects only him/herself. There are also relationships where one partner is controlling; these can be relationships with jealousy, guilt trips, emotional or physical abuse, and unrequited love. All these types of relationships can be very heart-breaking or even dangerous.

2) Interesting/novel aspects

In general, I found the chapter to be very informative about descriptions, requirements and theories of love and how it can go wrong.

I enjoyed learning about Lee's styles of loving; although it resembled popular magazine quiz results (and thus seemed the cheesiest among all theories), it was the one that categorized love in different styles.

3)Criticism and questions:

Please don't get me wrong, I am not obsessed with biological descriptions of things or anything, but this author's perception and interpretation of biological data and publications simply disturbs me. I don't agree that biochemical aspect of love is a separate, stand-alone theory. Our brain is a biological unit and all feelings, behaviors, decisions, movements are represented, calculated, initiated, or felt in our brains. Everything we see, everybody we meet, every feeling we experience is encoded and represented in respective circuitries in the brain. With enough samples and carefully-designed experiments we can understand the biological mechanisms (such as brain circuitry, neurochemicals, genetic variability, synaptic plasticity mechanisms) that differ among the loving styles of Lee, we can understand what makes some people more caring and others possessive and controlling, or decision-making processes in mate selection.

My other criticism is that the author does not mention the hormone oxytocin at all. Sorry, but most research papers on this topic and almost all review articles (including the one she cites: Young, 2009) put a big emphasis on the role of oxytocin in love. You can get an idea of what this hormone does at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin .

Here is what the author wrote on page 141: "Second, chemicals (such as dopamine) that apparently trigger intense romantic love are also found in gamblers, cocaine users, and even people playing computer games (Young, 2009). Thus it is not clear how hormones "cause" love."

First of all, dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is found in brains of everybody and all mammals and many other animals, not just lovers, gamblers, junkies. You can learn what dopamine is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine . Dopamine is normally released from dopaminergic neurons at a certain level. The changes in dopamine signaling codes for a reward- prediction error signal, meaning an increase in dopamine is related to feeling good (and rewarded) and a decrease is related to feeling disappointed/down (see Bayer and Glimcher, 2005 Neuron (47) 129-141). For example, if you predict to get an 80 on an exam and you got 80, your dopamine secretion will remain the same. If you get a 100, you would feel extremely happy and will likely experience a high due to increased dopamine secretion; in this case you predicted a reward (80) but received a higher reward(100). In the opposite case, if you end up getting a 30, you will feel upset; you predicted a reward (80) but got something way lower (30) and your dopamine secretion fell below normal/basal level. Most addictive substances hijack brain's dopamine circuitry, artificially increasing the dopamine levels secreted. Also, behaviors such as obsessive video gaming, gambling, overeating, obsessive shopping create a positive feedback mechanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback ) in dopamine circuitry, causing more dopamine secretion with more of the same behavior (a.k.a. addiction; see http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-addiction/201006/obesity-drug-addiction-and-dopamine , alsohttp://www.mindfully.org/Health/2005/Shopping-Dopamine-Junkie6dec05.htm ). Therefore having dopamine is neither obscure or absurd in feeling love, the brain is trying to bond you to the other person by feeling good when interacting with them, so that you keep seeing the person. Taken together with oxytocin, which assures someone to feel comfortable and trusting with the other person, dopamine system may explain what happens in your brain when you are dealing with romantic love. For later phases, such as long term love, oxytocin probably takes more charge, after the novelty of the relationship is all gone.

And again, I don't appreciate it that the author comments on something that he/she has limited information and cites articles without reading them.

And last here is the Young 2009 citation (as an image file below) that she cited in the text above that I took from page 141, it is fun to read!

Similar to another comment posted by another student (Mari-Kathryn Arnold); using this book, I wonder how we would characterize the love between spouses such as they don't have much sexual attraction left for each other (assume they both got older, balder, fatter etc, and find each other not attractive anymore) or prioritize the love for their kids over what they feel for each other, are they now just friends? Or take a single mom, it is very likely that the love and altruism for her kids will be above anyone else, does it mean she doesn't really love her fiance?

Eser Y.