I’m talking about fierce love, love that can cross boundaries of difference, love that can allow for empathy through our own and others’ suffering. We are biologically designed to need such love just like we need oxygen or food. And not just on occasion, but often; and by often I mean daily. With it, we thrive; without it, we suffer (even a great deal).
To be sure, we are not talking about just any kind of love. The love we need like oxygen is the kind activist-scholars such as Dr. Martin Luther Kind, bell hooks, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams have so beautifully and powerfully written about.
While evolution doesn’t primarily care about well-being, but rather survival,
it turns out that survival and well-being converge in our ability to love. Lucky us!
We might be tempted to believe that the instinct to dominate one another is inevitable, or that we are self-made and so others should “pull themselves up from their bootstraps”, or that “one upping” each other is the way to success. Instead, those are becoming our fastest roads to extinction.
But the love we are speaking about is hard work. So what urges us towards it? The good news is that we are designed to find loving and being loved supremely meaningful, energizing, and enjoyable, read: the ultimate road to happiness (that would do it!).
Just in case this is beginning to sound sappy or wishful thinking, let me explain how our need for love is anything but Pollyannaish or lofty (let’s thank modern neuroscience for saving us from ourselves!).
First, the distinction between body and mind, from a neurological perspective, is nonsensical (speaking about the two as separate is starting to sound as accurate as old medical theories based on “humours”). This means that our physical and mental experiences are inextricably intertwined (feeling love/d is a deeply embodied experience).
Second, we are profoundly, biologically interconnected to each other, down to the very functioning of our cells and the very expression of our genes.
Your emotional health and physical well-being are mine, literally, and mine are yours.
This means that we are responsible and dependent on each other for creating the best in each other.
The fact that over the last few thousands of years (the equivalent of a fraction of a second, in “evolutionary” time!) we have become increasingly politically, economically, and environmentally interconnected is not making our need for loving one another any more or less biologically true. Our geopolitical interconnectedness is, however, making loving broadly enough to thrive (individually and as a species) exponentially more urgent and also more challenging (more about that in Part II of this post).
How can love play that much of a role in our health and well-being?
While we are endowed with a threat detection system no matter the context in which we are born, we have to learn who is safe and to what extent (as we cannot survive on our own) before we proceed to develop loving relationships. So the potential (and need) to bond with our fellow human beings is just that, a potential (and indeed a need), but not a guarantee.
The capacity to love is learned in concert with others, through moments of caring connection.
Genuine and caring connections not only teach us how to cooperate successfully with, and take care of, each other (both essential for survival), but also initiate the release of hormones that control all aspects of our mental/health.
Once the learning is initiated, it gains its own biological momentum (in large part thanks to domapine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins): the more we connect to each other, the greater health and enjoyment we derive from it, the easier we find and want to connect to each other, and therefore the more we are able to connect…and round and round it goes.
Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Lack of moments of loving connection (read: stress) is a toxic proposition. Over the long run, over-exposure to cortisol reduces our health, our creativity (by shutting down our ability to think broadly and contextually), as well as our ability to connect. Each of these, in turn, further reduces our health, creativity, and ability to connect…and round and round it goes.
While this second evolutionary strategy might help us survive short-term in a hostile environment—in the hope that we can wait it out long enough to find more fertile ground to thrive in—it’s not a winning strategy for long-term survival (and certainly not for well-being of any kind).
So the prescription is simple: love liberally! Your health and happiness depend on it.
But simple doesn’t mean easy. In Part II of this post I’ll share why we find it challenging and how we might widen our capacity to love.