The Love Equation

Love is a complicated thing and finding someone who you can love and who will love you back is the first step down that desirable but complicated path. Making a romantic match is like matching two puzzle pieces when each piece is a puzzle itself. We have to consider all the complexities of each person and then only once we have a good picture of the individuals can we consider how well they would fit as a couple. But what actually determines fit? Both old wisdom and new science tell us a lot about what makes a good fit and the list is pretty long. It includes similar social and economic class, similar intelligence and physical attractiveness, similar political and religious views, difference in dominant vs. submissive, etc. These factors are a jumble, though, they all seem to help but none of them appear necessary or sufficient. Dating services work by shoving all of these factors together and then rating partners on how well they match up. This works because that’s the best service they can offer since they have a limited pool. They match you with your first, second, third, etc. best match until enough of the unmeasured factors also match up. What dating services can’t do is identify that threshold point between success and failure. To do that we need a unified framework that considers all of the factors together. This is where ecology steps in [1].

Many fish in the sea: what biodiversity theory tells us about finding love

How do we find love?

It may feel like I am jumping the gun a bit, coming back after two years and jumping straight to such a big question, but those two years have been spent doing the experiments for my PhD thesis on the evolution and ecology of species coexistence. While I generally consider my thesis work and my emotions work as two separate bodies, this series of posts on romantic love is the most natural launching point as it represents the overlap of the two. It is a great transition from my pure science to thinking about more applied questions.

And anyways, people don’t really want to know what love is. What they really want is to know how to find it! People’s drive to find love (I will focus on romantic love as that is the most complete case) is a huge industry. Actually, multiple industries, fueling match-making websites and consulting services, countless books and talk shows, therapists, speed-dating events, and billions of man-hours of gossip and conversation.

2c.ii. – Justifying love

Rationalizing emotions is not particularly socially acceptable and trying to rationalize an emotion as strong and socially important as love is potentially a dangerous endeavour.  I very much doubt I could get away with simply stating that love is the highest form of trust, acting to increase the propagation of our genes, but I do have supporting evidence.  The best arguments at my disposal are considering who we love, showing that my evolutionary model accounts for these choices, and showing how our responses to those we love correspond to what we would expect for targets of high trust in my general model of emotions. 

2c.i. A crazy little thing called Love

                What is love?  It’s a damn good question, one for which the internet simultaneously provides hundreds of answers and no answer at all.  The question is a matter of philosophy and religion, grazed by psychologists and all but abandoned by hard science.  Love is the emotion of the heart, of the soul.  It is what makes us act selflessly and often irrationally, even absurdly.  It is a gift from God or an odd by-product of culture, beautiful and all-important but beyond our explanation.  To get to the heart of it all: Love is what differentiates us from the beasts.

Well… wait, does it?  What is love really?  Can we discern its function?  And can we really say that only humans really love while everything else (e.g. I feel that my dog loves me) is simply personification?  This is the question I will attempt to answer here: what is love and why does it seem so extraordinary? So irrational? So… human?