Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

In contrast, romantic love tends to be signaled with a warm, eye-glistening smile, a head tilt, and open-handed gestures. It is surprising that Darwin missed the open-handed gesture as a signal of love, for it is so readily explained by his principle of antithesis: We signal anger with clenched fists, tightened shoulders, flexed arms—the upper-body posture of the readiness to attack. Love, by implication, should be conveyed by the opposite—relaxed shoulders, head tilt, and open-handed gestures. It is no wonder that around the world greeting rituals between strangers employ open-handed gestures—signs of trust and cooperation. Our primate relatives, the chimps, resort to open-handed gestures to short-circuit aggressive tendencies, and to stimulate close proximity, grooming, and affiliation.

In our first study, we had young romantic partners come to the lab and talk about experiences of love and desire. These young partners, in love for an eternity—eighteen months—talked for a few minutes about when they fell in love. There were stories of meeting in a chemistry lab at 3:00 AM, of bumping into each other when skateboarding, of being charmed by the other’s Facebook entries. And there in plain sight via intensive, frame-by-frame analysis, were four-to five-second bursts of the displays—flurries of lip licks, puckers and lip wipes, a smooth unfolding of smiles, head tilts and open palms. Our question was whether these brief behaviors, just a few seconds long, would map onto distinct experiences of sexual desire and romantic love.

That indeed is what we found, and so much more. The brief displays of love increased as the partners, males and females alike, reported feeling more love at the end of the two-minute conversation. These microdisplays of love were unrelated to reports of desire. The brief displays of sexual desire, in contrast, correlated with the young lovers’ reports of sexual desire, but not with love. Partners attributed more love, and not desire, to their partner when their beloved displayed more smiles, head tilts, and open-handed gestures; and they attributed greater desire when they saw their partner show those lip licks and lip puckers. In two-minute conversations, by carefully measuring half-second-long lip puckers and head-tilting smiles, we could pull apart these two great passions—romantic love and desire.

With further exploration, we uncovered other findings that may just change how you look at that partner across the dinner table from you. The couples who showed more intense nonverbal displays of love reported higher levels of trust and devotion and were more likely to have done something unusual for twenty-year-olds—to have talked about getting married. The couples who were swept away in desire were less likely to have talked about a future together (it gets in the way of desire) and reported less long-term commitment to one another. With this knowledge, I am ready for the stormy adolescences of my daughters. When their first dates come over or declare their romantic intentions, I am armed with the precise knowledge that I need. If I see a few too many lip licks and lip puckers as plans for the evening are discussed, it’s a firm hand on the neck and a polite escorting out of our house.

We next turned to a query of our chemical quarry, oxytocin. Gian, Rebecca Turner, and I had women, who on average have seven times the rate of oxytocin in the bloodstream as men (oh, well), talk about an experience involving intense feelings of warmth for another person. As they recounted these experiences, blood was drawn and oxytocin was assayed some fifteen minutes later. From videotapes of these remembrances, we coded head-tilting smiles and open-handed gestures, as well as lip licks, puckers, and tongue protrusions. Only the warm smiles, head tilts, and open-handed gestures increased with oxytocin release. The cues of sexual desire had nothing to do with the release of this neuropeptide of devotion and long-term commitment. The fulcrum on which marriage tips may be nothing more than these molecules of monogamy.

TRUST

 

In her cultural history Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich details humans’ irrepressible tendency to dance, to move in rhythm toward collective joy and a love of one another. Paintings of dance are found on the earliest human pottery. Dance is part of many great myths, most notably the Maenads’ celebration of Dionysus. It was a regular, ritualized occurrence of hunter-gatherer life. Dance may be the one uniformity, outside of eating, to collective gatherings—sporting events, political rallies, family reunions, religious meetings.