Where Do We Fall When We Fall in Love?

In recent years, evolutionary psychologists have been counting the ways in which people love one another. With their new techniques for revealing our biochemical and neurophysiological selves, a group of the contemporary Darwinians have had no trouble taking the mystery out of romantic love. They tell us that when we fall in love we are falling into a stream of naturally occurring amphetamines running through the emotional centers of our very own brains. That is why we feel exhilarated, manic, powerful, creative, suddenly grown up if we are young and suddenly rejuvenated if we are older. The ecstasy of love is located in our nerves; we get high; we speed. Eventually, our nerves being what they are, their endings become amphetamine immune or exhausted, and the delirium of our free fall abates. We come down to earth.

The very same evolutionists who have explained passion as an amphetamine rush have seen in the fall to the quotidian of love the appearance of endorphins, those natural morphine-like agents of calm. After periods of wildness, we human beings settle into attachment—if we do not crash or break up on the way down. The fall after the fall is into daily routine, child-rearing, going to work in the morning, participating in community life—all the attachment actions that you cannot do if you are tripping on amphetamines. The endorphins are our attachment regulators. But, these evolutionists go on to claim, receptor sites in the brain can become desensitized to endorphins as well. Even the calm of love's earthbound maturity phase—love's depressive position—must come to an end, and people, then, are ready once more for passion: they separate, divorce, commit adultery, cruise, add another concubine to their collection, go in for serial monogamy, or in some way move along to another amphetamine high. To one degree or another, everyone is, if I may use a fashionable phrase, a love addict, an alleged neurophysiological fact that would be perf