The Mystery of Love

Excerpt from The Washington Post, February 14, 2012

"Love Remains the Mystery of Life" by Joel Achenbach

The Greeks had a nice vocabulary of love, starting with agape, the unconditional love, and eros, the passion that may involve a flaring in the groinal region, and philia, the friendship love, and more. Modern writers find all kinds of words to describe the shadings of love.

“According to Sternberg (1988), for example, types of love are determined by various combinations of passion, intimacy, and commitment. Possible combinations result in romantic love, infatuation, companionate love, liking, fatuous love, empty love, and consummate love.”

Couples neurologically regulate each other through their eye contact. At first, early in the relationship, the eyes are key to the flirting, the fun, the connection. Then if you get married, you get caught up in all the management part of life, and people stop having fun and stop having eye contact.

It's never entirely clear where sex fits into a discussion of love. You can have love without sex, and sex without love. The experts tell us that women fall in love and then want to have sex, and men want to have sex and then fall in love. In the long run, somehow, supposedly, it all works out, collectively, for the species. We all get along, because, through divergent evolutionary needs, we all wind up co-signatories on a mortgage.

But there are outliers, exceptions, mutations, perversions, distractions, digressions, transgressions. If it weren’t for transgressions, we’d have no literature. Anna Karenina; Hester Prynne; Madame Bovary; every John Updike character.

[Leave it to literature to create the mutations. Hurrah for my academic discipline!]