Valentine's Day: A Disquisition on Love

Those of us of a certain age have enough world-wariness to see through the veil of commercialized "holidays" like Valentine's Day, yet still feel the obligation to participate, lest we be seen as misanthropic and unloving if we don't. So off we trot to the candy shop, the florist or the jeweler for a bon-bon, a bouquet or a bauble to express what's lies deepest and inexpressible in our bounteous hearts.

I myself am capable of loving feelings like any other nearly-sane individual, yet being the hard-headed materialist that I am, I also wonder what such a euphonious word like "love" actually means. Call me curious, and yellow!

It is easily the most abused and carelessly used syllable in the language — people sign off of cellphone calls routinely with "ok, love you, bye," as if they were saying gesundheit after a sneeze. We use the word indiscriminately at best — that is, until Valentine's Day rolls around, when we're required to express our deepest feelings of ardor and attachment with eloquence and candor. Oh yes, and dark chocolate.

So what is love? Well, folks, in my estimation, it's a gift from Mother Nature that appeared around the same time that mammals started to take hold of the dry areas of our miraculous planet. We of that selfsame order inherited our capacity to bond with mothers and others by virtue of a new area of the brain — the limbic system, by name — wherefrom issues empathy, feelings of relatedness and cooperation. The cold-blooded creatures that preceded us — snakes, reptiles and the wiggly like — have no such area in their brains, and thus can walk away from their young immediately after parturition — that is if they don't eat them outright! Nice table manners.

Of course, there's a vital difference between filial attachment and sexual attraction, but it may just be at the molecular level. According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, "love" is best  understood as a surge in the level of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that both parties experience simultaneously in the incipient stages of romance. In other words, infatuation is a drug-high akin to the way that cocaine or amphetamines affect our brains. When new lovers report to their friends that "we were up all night talking and making out," they don't realize that they were operating on the brain's chemical capacity to feel stimulated or, more technically speaking, to be hypomanic.

Fisher reports that new lovers keep experiencing such a dopamine high for a year or so, at which point one becomes inured to the effect that the beloved has on one's psyche. But wait — just when the mania/excitement chemical subsides, the bonding molecules kick in. Endorphin (whose cognates are endogenous and morphine, or the brain's home painkiller kit) starts to surge, and one's former feelings of stimulation and excitement turn to a brand of feel-no-pain numbness. That's stage two of love — going from the Indy 500 to a lovely Sunday drive in the country. The two lovers may not want to kiss and such, but they do like holding hands and hugging.

And now the bad news, which always comes in Act Three of a well-made tragedy. After demon dopamine and endorphin have done their respective dirty-work, there our lovers stand, out of neuro-chemical surges and usually left to tend the product of such a roller-coaster ride: children. There our two spent lovers are, toiling in the name of a higher good — the perpetuation of the species — and devoid of the critical alkaloids that made romance and attachment possible in the first place. Ms. Fisher claims that this is when the fabled and dreaded seven-year itch kicks in (though she says it's really only four years or so).

Happily, the attachment neurohormone, oxytocin, has facilitated a bond between mother and child, while dad does his utmost to make funny faces and voices to get a little up-close-and-personal time with Junior. As for the once amorous couple, well, white-hot passion has long given way to a kind of cuddly bonding, which now yields to boredom and the contemptuous familiarity that Aesop spoke of in days of yore. What to do? Get thee to a See's candy, dummy, and buy your beloved the biggest box of chocolates you can find, arm yourself with roses and earrings and remind your significant other that love is not all dopamine and endorphin, it's the feeling of wonder and gratitude that anyone would put up with your sorry butt for more than a week, much less a lifetime!

My, um, love to you all! Don't OD on the See's Scotchmallows.....