Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Each year 2.3 million couples wed in the United States. The average cost of a wedding is $20,000, which exceeds the average life savings of any American you might pick off the street. Guests lists are negotiated, dresses fitted, invitations embossed and mailed, appetizers and music selected. What follows is a surreal day of rapturous emotion, fathers crying, mothers spilling their glasses of wine, ex-lovers smoldering, recalled verse, besotted smooches, best friends in arms, and dancing children.

The wedding ceremony could rightfully be thought of as the most elaborate, expensive ritual in human history to fail. Approximately 47 percent of those individuals who stand at the altar, suffused with lofty emotions, uttering vows in hallowed words of devotion, will divorce, and they’ll often go down in flames of hatred and litigation. Very often they’ll divorce within a year or two of the ceremony, giving each other the finger, as did the divorcing parents of a friend of my parents’, in the county courthouse’s courtyard, or uttering “Tu es mort” as they sign the papers.

Or, you could think of the wedding ceremony as an astonishing success. Half of marriages make it. In spite of frequent surges of youthful desires and the mundane complexities of marriage, estimates of adultery suggest that only 11 to 20 percent of married partners have extramarital affairs. Compare that success rate in taming nonmonogamous sexual impulses with recent studies of abstinence programs provided to middle-and high-school students. These expensive, sophisticated products engineered by well-meaning social scientists fail abominably, and often lead teenagers to be more inclined to have sex or unsafe sex after such indoctrination.

In terms of its outcome, the wedding ceremony can be seen as a glass half empty or a glass half full, an interpretation that no doubt is shaped by our own experiences with the person we enjoyed that day with. In terms of its function, there is no doubt about the interpretation of why we go to such lengths in the wedding ceremony: It is a ritualized solution to the commitment problem. The wedding ceremony is our attempt as a culture to get two young partners to remain faithful to one another (and devoted to their offspring) in the face of so many compelling alternatives; to sacrifice their pursuit of sexual desire to the interests of their bond and their offspring. Culture’s answer is to empty the bank account, bring every person you cherish into a sublimely beautiful locale, make public avowals, give expensive rings to one another, photograph every instant of the day in the event that memory fades, and head off into the sunset. Evolution’s answer to the commitment problem is that emotion most favored by poets and rock stars alike: romantic love.

Romantic love enables the human mind to countervail self-interest. In the depths of romantic love, we idealize our partners; they take on unique, mythic qualities; we turn to deistic metaphors to describe our beloved. When Sandra Murray and her colleagues asked romantic partners to rate themselves and their partners in terms of different virtues (understanding, patient), positive traits (humorous, playful) and faults (plaintive, distant), they found that happier couples idealized their partners; they overestimated their partners’ virtues (compared to the partners’ self-descriptions) and underestimated their faults. In other studies, Murray and colleagues asked people to write about their partners’ greatest fault—the source of endless vitriol in therapy sessions and divorce proceedings. Happier romantic partners were more likely to see virtues in faults and more likely to offer “yes, but” refutations of faults. A happier married wife would look at her lethargic husband on the couch, snoozing with the remote pressed into his cheek, and think, “yeah, but at least he is around more in the home and not cavorting at the sports bar or at the golf course all day Saturday.”

Studies point to a neurological basis for romantic love’s rose-colored glasses. Not too surprisingly, long-term committed romantic love is associated with activation in reward centers in the brain—the ventral anterior cingulate, the medial insula, the caudate and the putamen. More dramatically, romantic love deactivates threat detection regions of the brain—the right prefrontal cortical regions and the amygdala. The person in the throes of romantic love may be physiologically incapable of seeing all that is worrisome, problematic, or worthy of a skeptical second look.