Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

In the initial attention-getting phase, women walk with arched back and swaying hips, amplifying the extent to which their bodies take on that platonic form of beauty—the hourglass figure. Women resort to the well-known universal—the hair flip—which dominates the field of vision of the male of interest, who is nonchalantly sipping his third Bud. Women (and men) smile coyly, lips puckered, head turned away, but eyes dropping in to make eye contact for a millisecond or two.

Men counter with behaviors that amplify their physical size and assumed resource-holding potential. They rock back and forth on their heels and roll their shoulders. They raise their arms with exaggerated gestures, in ordering a round of drinks or stretching out, to show off their well-developed arms, the broad expanse of their shoulders, or expensive watches or prep-school pinkie rings. These brief signals honor time-honored principles in the game of sexual selection. The woman is drawing attention to her curves, fine skin, and full lips—signs of her sexual readiness and reproductive potential. The man is signaling that he has stature, resources, and good genes, appealing to the woman whose desire is conditioned by an awareness of the enormous costs of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, which would be offset by a man of means and justified by a man with good genes.

Like courtship, momentary flirtation progresses toward more intimate phases. In the recognition phase, women and men gaze intently at each other; they express interest with raised eyebrows, singsong voice, melodious, voiced laughter, and subtle lip puckers. They turn to the exquisite language of touch, and all those receptors under the surface of the skin, to explore their interest in each other with provocative brushes of the arm, pats on the shoulder, or not-so-accidental bumps against one another that safely occur in the aftermath of a joke or in a pleasant, joshing-around tease. A slight touch to the shoulder that is ever so slightly firmer and more enduring than a polite pat reveals a desire beyond the typical exchange between friends or new acquaintances.

If all of this proceeds well, the potential partners move to the keeping-time phase. They begin to mirror each other’s glances, laughter, gaze, gesture, and posture, as they share jokes, order drinks, disclose embarrassing snippets of the past, and search for commonalities. This kind of behavioral synchrony creates a sense of similarity, trust, and merging of self and other. In Plato’s view, the two souls, having separated at birth but now reunited, are forming the perfect union with one another.

In many species, courtship behaviors stimulate the biology of reproduction. For the tree-dwelling African dove, flirtatious coos and head bows trigger the release of estrogen and luteinizing hormone in the female, and eventually ovulation. A stag’s roar stimulates females to go into heat faster. The lowly snail shoots darts into potential sexual partners, which activates the snail’s sexual organs (I dare not describe them). In humans this language of passion stimulates the experience of desire. In the throes of this kind of love, people experience an entirely different sense of time and a disarming loss of personal control and agency. A metaphorical switch in the mind is turned on (and the voice of cost-benefit, conventional rationality is turned off). People feel blown away, swept off their feet, knocked out, ill, feverish, and mad. They may eat and bathe less, stop seeing friends, neglect their homework and bills. The old definitions of the self are turned off, to make way for the establishment of an entirely new identity, one that emerges in the early delirium and upheaval of pair-bonding relationship and which will rearrange their lives.

This language of desire carries the couple toward a different kind of consummation than that observed in other species. The couple will likely make love face-to-face, unusual in the primate world. They will have sex in private. And alongside desire, our research finds, they will feel a deep sense of anxiety. The woman will wonder whether her new partner resembles the male caricatured all too readily in scientific research, the male eager to pursue short-term sexual strategies (one-night stands) to dispense with his daily production of 200 million sperm (in one study, 75 percent of college males were willing to go home with a female experimenter they had just met while walking on campus, and who had asked whether they were interested in a quickie). The man will feel his own anxiety, perhaps sensing that he is unlike any other primate in the degree to which he will be expected to sacrifice, to forgo other reproductive opportunities, and devote resources to his offspring, whom he will, again unlike any other primate, recognize as his own. They await the warm surround of romantic love to shut down these anxieties.

OPEN ARMS AND MOLECULES OF MONOGAMY