Reuters reports a study by Italian scientists that says
falling madly in love is a process linked to a molecule called
nerve growth factor (NGF). According to their findings, published
in a journal with the reader-unfriendly name
Psychoneuroendocrinology, the levels of NGF in the blood
decline after about a year, and this helps explain why the
roses-and-moonbeams phenomenon only lasts about that long.
The report caught my eye because it fit my experience rather
strikingly. I’ve been truly, crazily smitten only once in my life,
and as I recall, it started to fade after just about exactly a
year. I remember, too, the sadness of realizing that the madness
was slipping away, that earth couldn’t be heaven after all. Before
that, merely to see each other was to go into ecstasy; while a
separation of a few hours was cause for mourning.
But fade it did — and less than another year after that, the
whole thing was kaput.
Trying to understand later what went wrong, I didn’t invoke any
molecules, but the heavenly period began to seem less and less real
in retrospect. The reason was simple: both of us were human beings,
and neither of us was genuinely so great as to justify flights of
rapture at the mere sight of us. From this high — molecules or not
— an eventual crash was inevitable, or so it seems now. In this
case, the new, more mundane reality didn’t survive the crash.
That real, lasting love, even of a “romantic” hue, can exist
between people is not in doubt. But that kind of love almost always
entails acceptance of things one doesn’t like — acceptance, that
is, of human nature, of reality. Love of this sort is almost
always, in part, an achievement, linked to sobriety and wisdom —
even, perhaps, a little denial and discipline. Judging by the high
rate of divorces and breakups in society, this is the kind of love
that people now have trouble sustaining.
Part of the reason may be a social overvaluing of the first,
loonier kind of love. Growing up, you see it portrayed thousands of
times in TV and movies — people of flawless outer and inner beauty
finding lasting redemption in each other. Secularization is
probably also involved: for many people, emotions that once were
channeled into the religious sphere now seek sublimity and
perfection in the love domain. Some people, frustrated, feel that
they don’t find it; others feel that they do, but when it crashes,
what’s left seems plain and a letdown.
Considering that women now initiate about two-thirds of the
divorces in society, their enhanced freedom apparently also plays a
role. Tending to be more invested in interpersonal relations, more
attuned to their nuances, than men, both their expectations and
their disappointments tend to be more intense. Many men will settle
for a marriage or relationship they feel to be “good enough”; many
women will not.
None of this is to say that the walking-on-air, swooning kind of
love is bad and we should try to banish it. If the Italian study is
right, it’s in part biochemically determined. Even if it’s not
right, the human record suggests the event is universal enough to
be called “natural.” It may have a function of getting people
hooked in the first place, so as to launch the procreative process;
it may involve psychological projections that emerge inevitably at
some point in a life. “Madly in love” is something that has always
been, and will continue to be.
Still, a rational individual or society probably wouldn’t put
excessive stock in it. They wouldn’t see it as a necessary lead-in
to lasting love, or, if experienced, as something that need go on
indefinitely. There is a place — in religion, or in appreciation
of great art — for the rapturous contemplation of perfection. In
the human sphere, there’s always room for sobriety.
