Why We Love by Helen Fisher

Author:Helen Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

7

Lost Love: Rejection, Despair, and Rage

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;

My silent heart, lie still and break:

Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed

For a dream’s sake.

Christina Rossetti

“Mirage”1

“Walking inland, inland, inland, / I am walking inland. / Nobody loves me, she least of all, so I walk inland.”2 An anonymous Inuit of the Arctic recited this sad poem in the 1890s.

Almost everyone in the world feels the agony of romantic rejection at some point in their lives. I have met only three people who claimed never to have been “dumped” by someone they adored. Two were men, one a woman. Both men were handsome, healthy, rich, and exceedingly successful in business. The woman was a young television star. These people are rare. Among college students at Case Western Reserve, 93 percent of both sexes reported that they had been spurned by someone they passionately loved. Ninety-five percent also said they had rejected someone who was deeply in love with them.3 Almost no one in the world escapes the feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, fear, and fury that rejection can create.4 “Parting is,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “all we need to know of hell.”

Because my brain scanning colleagues and I wanted to understand the full range of romantic feelings, we embarked on a second project: scanning the brains of people who had recently been rejected by romantic partners. We found many volunteers; all were in excruciating psychological pain. In spite of their sorrow, perhaps because of it, they were willing to undergo fMRI testing. This experiment is in progress as I write, but the participants have already told me a great deal about this agony and the stages of despair the rejected lover must endure.

Poet Donald Yates once wrote, “People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.”5 As you will see, few of us are sensible when it comes to rejected romantic passion. We aren’t built for it.

Rejected Lovers

“Have you just been rejected in love? But can’t let go?” My colleagues and I hung a flyer on the psychology bulletin board on the State University of New York at Stony Brook campus that began with these words. We were determined to scan the brains of men and women who had just been scorned in love. We sought only those who were really suffering.

Rejected sweethearts were quick to respond. As with our earlier experiment, we winnowed out those who were left-handed, had metal in their heads (such as braces on their teeth), were taking antidepressant medications, and/or were claustrophobic. Then I called the applicants and spoke to each at length, discussing the details of their unhappy love affairs and carefully explaining what would happen to them while in the brain scanner.

The procedure I described was the same as the one we used with our subjects who were happily in love. Each participant would alternately look at a photograph of his or her rejecting beloved and a neutral photo that generated no positive or negative feelings; between these tasks

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.