Eric's at Romancing the Blog today. He's been in conversation with a literary critic I’ve been trying to lure into studying popular romance. He’s a scholar of what he calls “literary erotic romance,” a genre that seems able to include poetry, fiction, and film [...] as long as it concerns what he calls “the impossibility of gratifying our desire.” We want too much, and are overwhelmed; we want the wrong things, and they destroy us; we want what we can’t have, and are left hungry; when we get what we want we don’t desire it anymore, or it leaves us behind. This, says he, is “the truth about love,” or at least the truth about eros.Eric, however, sees things differently: "romance fiction also tells a 'truth about love': one that may not have the intellectual pedigree that his does, or the rhetorical grandeur, or the cachet, but that deserves a hearing nonetheless." And Eric's heartened by some recent scientific findings about love from Stony Brook University. Here's a description of them from one of the sources Eric read:
A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.
Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.
The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls “intensive companionship and sexual liveliness”.
The researchers nicknamed the couples “swans” because they have similar mental “love maps” to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes. (from The Times)1
1 I wrote a post last year in which I mentioned this line of research into the science of love and I've also got a bit more there about the love lives of voles.
The photo is of a "Pair of black swans with their cygnets on the lake of the University of York, England," it was taken by RobertG, and came from Wikimedia Commons. Eric prefers the foxes to the swans, but I couldn't find a photo of two foxes. However, I did find a nice photo of just one grey fox, which looks like it's tracking down something (albeit probably not the truth about love).
Goodness, Laura! You were so far ahead of me I'd forgotten about your post by the time I wrote mine. Ah, well--it never hurts to make the point again, although perhaps the voles aren't the best point of comparison.
ReplyDeleteThe real issue, to me, is how to get some conversation going between the longstanding philosophical discourse about love (which turns into the psychoanalytic theorizing so popular 20 and more years ago) and this more recent research into love, happiness, and so forth.
Thanks for the links!
You were so far ahead of me I'd forgotten about your post by the time I wrote mine. Ah, well--it never hurts to make the point again, although perhaps the voles aren't the best point of comparison.
ReplyDeleteThe truth about the voles was indeed very, very disappointing to me ;-)
I couldn't work out if these new articles about the Stony Brook research were based on a new press release, and if so, whether there had been any new developments, so I thought I'd mention the older articles, just in case.
The real issue, to me, is how to get some conversation going between the longstanding philosophical discourse about love [...] and this more recent research into love, happiness, and so forth
Sternberg, who came up with the theory of love as a story has also come up with the "triangular theory of love":
Love, according to Sternberg's Triangular Theory, consists of three components: intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Intimacy is the feeling of closeness that exists between two people, passion the drive that produces romance, physical attraction, and intercourse, and decision/commitment is the decision and commitment to further a loving relationship. With this theory, the type and strength of a couple's love is determined by both the individual strength of the three components and the interaction between the three components. (from here)
There's a lot more detail about the theory at Wikipedia, and I found the diagram there very helpful. I think this triangular theory might be useful as a way of thinking about both the depictions of love in romance novels and the "longstanding philosophical discourse about love."
For example, I read the following, from your Say Something Wonderful blog:
"Simetha's love," says Paz, "is made of persistent desire, despair, anger, helplessness. [...] Between what we desire and what we value there is a gap: we love what we do not value and we desire to be forever with a person who makes us unhappy. In love, evil makes its appearance: it is a pernicious seduction that attracts us and overcomes us" (59). [...]
Catullus's lyrics record the stormy relationship between himself and Lesbia; again, we find this "union of opposites--desire and contempt, sensuality and hatred, paradise glimpsed and hell endured" in which "our flesh covets what our reason condemns" (62).
My impression (as I have still to read the articles and book by Sternberg that I've got at home - bad me!) was that the kind(s) of love(s) being discussed by Paz would probably be described by Sternberg as having a high percentage of passion, but an extremely low percentage of intimacy.
There are lots of different possible combinations (see the Wikipedia article for a list, and then there's room for a little bit of variability even within those, I think) but when I'm reading a romance I want to feel that the central couple feel "consummate love" for each other:
Consummate love is the complete form of love, representing an ideal relationship toward which people strive. Of the seven varieties of love, consummate love is theorized to be that love associated with the “perfect couple”. According to Sternberg, such couples will continue to have great sex fifteen years or more into the relationship, they can not imagine themselves happy over the long-term with anyone else, they overcome their few difficulties gracefully, and each delight in the relationship with one other. (from the Wikipedia article)
It includes passion, commitment and intimacy, and judging by that description, it sounds rather similar to the relationships the Stony Brook researchers were looking at.
I've just found your blog. What an interesting post especially since I'm almost at year twenty. 19 and counting. Hmm... a swan or a fox?
ReplyDeleteWelcome, Kwana! Personally, I wanted to choose the vole option, but then I discovered that the monogamous ones weren't really as monogamous as had originally been thought. If I had to choose between a swan and a fox, I'd probably go with the fox, because thinking about spending lots of time on water makes me feel cold, whereas a nice warm burrow sounds very cozy.
ReplyDelete