On Love

 What is love? It is something that has powerful biological roots in the rise of mammals. Mothers giving birth and loving and caring for their children is a mammalian thing.  Love comes from motherly love.  The hormones that facilitate motherly love are triggered by physical touch, and, since touch is often reciprocal, males can also feel love because they inherit the same hormones. 

 

Why is love so special for humans? At some point in our evolution we lost a lot of body hair which, since that change would facilitate skin-to-skin contact, might have led to  pair-bonding in humans. Pair-bonding, the sexual relations and prolonged mutual attraction between two adults, is actually rare in other mammals.  Most mammals  that live in groups live under polygyny, which is where one male monopolizes all the females and drives all the other adult males away.  There, love exists only between mother and offspring.  

We humans associate love as an emotion that lasts over a prolonged period of time, unlike most other emotions. The reason may be that human infants and children are helpless for a very long time, much longer than  any other animal. They need to be cared for for years, and it helps a lot if motherly and fatherly love lasts at least that long, so that the new generation gets a healthy start on their life’s journey. It helps the offspring if their parents stay together for a long time, and for their bonds to their own parents to  last as well, because grandparents can make a difference in their grandchildren’s survival and thriving.

The transcendence thing comes from the ecstatic nature of loving.  When, as adults, we fall in love with another, we may find ourselves consumed with our lover’s existence.  We can forget our own needs and devote ourselves to our lover’s needs instead.  This experience can be so powerful that it presents itself as a life-changing revelation, one that forms the basis of much poetry, literature, and religious thought.  Hence Plato’s famous dialogue on love: “The Symposium” and the Hebrew Bible’s “Great Commandment”: “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your might” a prayer called the “Shema” by Jews, which I believe was promoted by the prophet Jeremiah after the Babylonian exodus and the destruction of Solomon’s temple.  Because the exiled Jews were no longer able to make sacrifices in the Temple this little prayer was an internal act of love between each individual Jew and God, one that could be practised in any location, making the continued survival of Judaism outside of the Holy land possible, just as a mother’s love makes the prolonged survival of her offspring possible. And then there is Christianity’s fascination with the image of the Madonna which brings us back again to where it all began - a mother’s love for her child.