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Twenty years ago, with a brand-new Ph.D. in social psychology, I began research into romantic love with all the naïve enthusiasm of a guy on a third date. Alas, I soon discovered that the pretty subject of my attentions was a bore. Few subjects of human experience had so inspired the creative imagination, and few had been treated so uninspiringly by science. Research had hardly advanced beyond the obvious. For example, it was discovered that couples who said they were in love spent more time gazing into each other's eyes than pairs who said they were just friends. Did we really need a federally-supported research program to tell us that, I wondered?
Even after two more decades of research, psychological theories on love remain ad hoc and unsatisfying. Most scholars continue to study romantic love in isolation from other attachments, and there is much squabbling among neo-, anti-, post-, and paleo-Freudians. Also, most theories of attachment presume that love is little more than a mechanism to encourage child-rearing, and have an unreasonable amount of trouble dealing with such concepts as, “I love my dog, and she loves me.” When my 60 lb. son wrestles on the floor with our 85 lb. Labrador, it is absurd to regard the dog as merely a poor substitute for a human. Isn't it more sensible to see their relationship as a healthy social interaction?
Meanwhile, with the origins of more and more behavior being located in neurophysiology, it was inevitable that physiologists would take their turn at explaining love, as exemplified in a 1998 special issue of Psychoneuroen-docrinology entitled “Is there a neurobiology of love?” Even regular readers of that journal, however, may not have seen A General Theory of Love coming. In this book, Drs. Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, all formerly of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, have proposed