What Love Is: And What It Could Be by Carrie Jenkins

Author:Carrie Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group (Perseus)
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

5

Under Construction:

Love’s Changing Role

For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Which Kind of Stupid Are We?

Once we have a grasp of love’s dual nature, we can rethink the whole idea that biological and social theories of love are in competition with each other.

Where did that sense of rivalry come from? Perhaps it’s just that people love to sort themselves into binary categories: “Liberal” or “conservative”? “Male” or “female”? “Gay” or “straight”? We do it even when the binaries obviously don’t make much sense: “cat person” or “dog person”? This phenomenon has recently manifested in the form of coffee shop tip jars that come in pairs, offering customers a quick hit of binary choice: “Sun” or “rain”? “Chocolate” or “vanilla”? The mechanisms that prompt us to do this in all areas of life have probably also helped inculcate the idea that we have to choose “Love is biology” or “Love is society.”1

The thing is, anytime we make such a choice—especially about something important—it’s easy to begin to feel like part of an in-group, with those who make the other choice forming an out-group. This encumbers us with a temptation to demonstrate, to ourselves and everyone else, that our in-group is superior and the out-group is inferior. In fact, we can quickly become unreasonably resistant to any evidence to the contrary.2

I have no objection to leveraging this element of our psychology to secure tips for baristas, but I do worry when it seems to be hampering our efforts to understand a complex world. The appearance of competition between biological and social understandings of love weakens both enterprises. In efforts to prove the out-group is inferior, social theorists of love can be dismissed as “unscientific” and “uninformed,” while biological theorists can be labeled “unsophisticated” or “uncritical.” Instead of learning from the insights of whichever group isn’t our own, we simply write each other off as one or another kind of stupid.

We must resist this temptation. We stand to learn far more about love if we do, especially when it comes to understanding how and why love changes over time. Appreciating that process of change requires appreciating how love’s biological nature and its social role fit together and what happens when they pull apart.

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