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Relationships
Are We Hard-Wired for Love?
Attachments are essential but love may not be.
Posted February 9, 2023 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- Attachments are necessary for survival.
- Love is a form of attachment, but perhaps not one for which we are hard-wired.
- Love takes many forms but it can also go wrong. We must love wisely.
You must eat. How else can you survive? You must sleep. It’s necessary, although science isn’t exactly sure why. What about love? Is love necessary for survival or is it one of life’s bonuses, like a nutritious diet or a good night’s sleep?
University of Chicago professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience Stephanie Cacioppo thinks that love is a requirement. “Love is a biological necessity, just like water or exercise or food,” she says. Cacioppo claims that “the need for love might be less immediate than the need to avoid danger, but it is by no means a luxury.”
Cacioppo, in her book Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, compares brain images of those who felt passionate love, friendship, maternal love, and unconditional love. fMRI results indicated that all forms of love involve the brain’s dopaminergic reward-related system, although each involves different brain networks.
Another book, by Stan Tatkin, is similarly entitled. Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship is more practical, as would be expected from a therapist. His theoretical framework is attachment and social contract theories.
Tatkin states, “Attachment, in the biological sense, has to do with the natural drive of the human primate and that is that we need to have another person upon whom we can depend for our lives in order to relax. The existentialists were right. We’re all gonna die, we don’t know why we’re here, we never will, we don’t know the meaning of life and we’re alone. But we can hold hands and that is an adaptive way to deal with existential concerns and that is relationship.”
Cacioppo and Tatkin are right in their basic premise: people need other people in order to survive. Even survivalists don’t start from nothing; they learned their skills from someone else. However, to claim that love is essential for survival is a step too far. Relationships are as essential as food, but love is more like having a healthy diet. People can live a relatively good life with bad eating habits; generally speaking, though, a balanced diet leads to a healthier life.
Neuroimaging confirms what we’ve always known: relationships are essential for human survival, and good relationships—maternal, fraternal, passionate, and even fandom and having pets—are positives. The issue isn’t whether we are hard-wired to feel good about positive attachments (of course we are), but what exactly positive relations are. From Aristotle to religious figures, from Buddha and Confucius, philosophers and religious guides have addressed this question.
fMRIs can tell us what makes us feel good. But just as a lie detector may well tell us whether a person is untruthful, it can’t tell us whether the lie was a bad thing or not—for example, protecting an innocent life. Scientific instruments can tell us the state of emotions, but it is equally important, if not more important, to know whether the emotions are appropriate or good. We may be loving the wrong thing. A person may be full of love for his country and engage in sadistic behavior towards its perceived enemies. fMRIs also cannot distinguish between love that is exploitative and one that is mutually enhancing.
I am reminded of this parable: Two drunkards stumbled from the inn and fell to the ground. One of them embraced the other and told him how much he loved him. He clutched him even harder and drew him to his breast. “I love you,” he said. “I really do!”
The second drunkard said, “You liar. You don’t love me. I don’t believe you.” “No, it’s true, I love you.” And with that hugged him even harder. “On my mother’s honor, I love you.” He swore by everything he could think of.
The second drunk pried the first one loose, stood up, and said, “I’ll tell you why you don’t love me. You only say so. If you loved me, you would stop squeezing me so hard. You have hurt my shoulder and arms and yet you continue to hug me. This isn’t love but hurting.”
Ethical considerations lay behind scientific inquiry. What does love mean, and what are its components? Are all types of love equally important for human flourishing? Clearly, something like paternal love is. What about passionate love? Is it superior to the love of friends? Is loving a pet better than loving to dance? No machine can answer these types of questions.
We are hard-wired for attachments. Since love is a form of attachment, then it is possible to say that we are hard-wired for love. But this is misleading. Love is built on top of attachments and there are many forms that the love can take, from ecstatic to toxic. Like food, we can eat the wrong kind and risk poor health or choose wisely and lead a healthier life.
