Hey Liz!
Okay, I used to think I was a bit of a joker at love in my twenties, like a chimp, in my thirties a bit of a sentimental chump....but chapter three of your book confirms that I am really a bashful Bonobo...pg 51 what other animals are out there? Want to identify? less

Yes, Liz Langley will be there, but I'm going to be lost without Liz Nume keeping track and welcoming everybody joining in. Everybody just welcome everybody else, okay?

Meanwhile, here's Liz Langley's preface to the book, delivered in two posts. It'll definitely give you a taste of the entertainment to come, and I can guarantee that the mind-blowing information in the book itself will give you a wide-ranging perspective on just how the mind gets blown when it comes to love and sex.


Preface
As long as the world is turning and spinning we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.
—Mel Brooks, in The 2000 Year Old Man

When I was a kid in the ’70s Engelbert Humperdinck had a huge hit with a song called “After the Lovin’.” It was the cheesiest thing you could find outside of an actual cheese shop, the kind of industrial-strength ’70s smarm that would make people deny that the ’70s ever happened until the ’90s, when it was far enough away to feel safe.

In fairness to Engelbert this was also the era that gave us Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” the Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love,” and Morris Albert’s “Feelings.” It was a fabulous decade but when it came to schmaltz we never said when. You want to know why people embraced the Sex Pistols? “Muskrat Love.” That’s why.

At 11 years old I had no idea what Engelbert was talking about. The lovin’ was a pretty blurry concept to me. I was about 10 years away from knowing exactly how romantic love could make you literally crazy and 11 years from understanding the devastation the end of a romance could wreak. After the lovin’—the fights, the therapist, the cynicism.

My mother was a very vocal woman—in fact the only place you’ll see a bigger mouth is on Mount Rushmore— yet she was conspicuously economical on the subjects of sex and relationships. She’d occasionally offer something like “You’re going to have to marry someone who makes you laugh,” or the simpler “Don’t get stuck,” but it wasn’t ever
something she wanted to talk about at length. My parents were married for thousands of years and never managed to make it look appealing. Between this and my natural autonomy it was easy never to get stuck. Even now I rent, I freelance, and I’m agnostic about everything from religion to romance.

This didn’t mean I was immune to love, and when it did pop up, like a brain aneurysm or a winning lotto ticket, I was as unprepared for its consuming power as Carrie White was for her period. If you had told the self-contained 18- year-old me that there would be men in the future who would make me want to sideline my ambitions just to lie in bed with them all day long—who might make me want to get stuck—I’d have checked for your lobotomy scar, but it happened and I had no idea how to handle it.

I think a lot of us judge ourselves terribly harshly when love doesn’t work out. When we’re hurt or confused in love, or love outside convention, we feel like the only person who failed to memorize the script. This is primal, we think. Penguins can do this—how hard can it be? And our culture is no help whatsoever. There are 3,000 cover versions of the Beatles’ Yesterday but only one culturally approved type of relationship: straight, married, monogamous, and forever. Love offers itself to us in a giddy, dizzying burst of variety, as everything in nature does, and we often don’t have the imagination to accept. It’s like making Sálvador Dalí a housepainter and asking him to please stick to beige and oatmeal.
This is starting to change, but the long-standing model of Happy, Hetero, and Monogamously Hitched (all by a certain age or you’re doomed. Doomed! DOOOOMED!) is pretty dug in, despite the fact that it makes an awful lot of people feel weird and wobbly. Living modern lives on antique rules is like shoving oats and hay into your gas tank and being surprised when you don’t get anywhere.

And people judge each other’s romantic lives and allow theirs to be judged pretty casually. I’ve had people I barely knew ask me why I didn’t marry my then boyfriend and offer their opinions about my personal life as though I’d asked. Our love lives are as sacred a thing as there is, yet we allow them to be eyeballed and judged like some garage- sale butter churn on Antiques Roadshow, with way too many people openly doubting that what you feel in your heart is worth anything. You’d never hear anyone say to a religious person, “Maybe God’s just not that into you.”

Love is more mysterious than death. Death you will at least probably understand once you have done it. Not so, love. The more times you do it, the more confused you get. Even Agatha Christie needed more than one try to figure it out.

So if you feel alone in your problems with love, please believe me: you’re not. You are not the only one who is confused, frustrated, nervous, or once traded a cow for magic beans and has no idea why you did it. You can look back on thousand-year-old poems and on this week’s Desperate Housewives and see how problems in love haven’t changed and how normal you are to feel nuts. It’s a power- fully alluring madness. Love is the mental illness we all want to have. It does make us crazy.

[More in the next post.] less

Preface, continued:

Now scientists are showing us how. Psychologists, academics, and analysts of culture continue to offer us better understanding of ourselves in love and other areas, but neurologists and other specialists have taken the game to a higher level. They are holding a new mirror up to us—the brain scan—that shows what chemicals and structures are active when we feel different things, and like Narcissus, we can’t stop staring. I think that neuroscience—the study of the brain, its mechanics, and how its chemistry affects our behavior—is poised to alter, indeed is already altering, the way we think about ourselves as profoundly as Darwinian thinking did. We no longer see depression or addiction simply as character flaws, but as biological and behavioral. What else do we now judge as bad character that will later be found to be the function of wiring or chemistry? How can we judge ourselves for being unable to get over an ex if we know that our brain chemistry is creating an addiction similar to that of a drug user?2 What if we discover that someone we thought was cold and indifferent to us simply has the neurological disorder known as Asperger’s syndrome and just can’t engage socially in certain ways?3 How much of our behavior is really our choice?

This stuff is opening a Pandora’s box the size of a cruise ship, and I’m thrilled. We may have to reassess how much we really should judge ourselves and others, which won’t come easy. Judging is a lot of people’s only hobby and they’re not going to let go of it that quickly. And so, like the study of evolution, neurology may change the way we see ourselves, but only if we let it.

This book isn’t a how-to. It’s more of a “guess-what!” I have included some pearls of wisdom from interview subjects, and I hope this book will be a rich narrative journey and a source of increased perspective on some of the ways your brain might be screwing with your emotional GPS, setting your destination for Crazy Town when you meant to go home and get a good night’s sleep. The brain is so complex, and research on it is so massive, I don’t expect
to be comprehensive just by offering some ideas for why you’re not the only one who’s lost it in love. I interviewed 23 people, some of them specialists in various fields of study who provided depth of understanding in the ways of love and our universal predicaments in it. Others gave me their personal stories about loves they have known or survived. I chose them because their stories were vari- ously amazing, affecting, amusing, or appalling—often a combination. Some stories are pretty dark, but I hope you are able to empathize with all of them at least partially. “Nothing human is alien to me,” Terence said, and while I’m not quite that elastic, it’s an admirable statement. To understand is not necessarily to condone, and to condemn anyone’s actions without attempting to understand their feelings and motives is unfair. We all have a dark side, and we understand more than we let on; pretending that we don’t is like ignoring a bill we don’t want to pay. The problem is just going to get bigger.

Finally, I wanted to write a book a person could read on a cross-country flight without getting bored and picking up the Sky Mall catalog. That’s only happened to me once. The author was mystery writer M.C. Beaton and my grati- tude was immense. If I can get you from, say, Orlando to Vancouver without buying a pair of night-vision goggles or an automatic cat feeder—and in the process make you feel better about the love you’re in, were in, or will be in—then we’ll both be in good shape. That’s enough to wish for today.

Liz Langley less

I might be called away to go pick someone up at the airport, so I want to make sure to post now while I can.

I found the book a very fun read. So many interesting people to read about. I'm not sure that reading it would particularly help me in any way, but I found it very entertaining. less

Took me a second to figure out how to reply so I hope you get this, Tim1724! I said below that I really did want this to be a good read for anyone, even if they weren't having a crazy or troubled love life. I wanted the narrative parts to really be a fun read. less

I was wondering about that, too. The whole book was fascinating, but I especially liked the images from the neuroscience studies, like this part:

"Dr. Fisher wanted to test whether the neurotransmitters dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin were components of romantic love, since they inspire all the behaviors we think of in someone who’s been hit by Cupid, including addiction, anxiety, exhilaration, loss of appetite, and obsession. She was right. When the subjects looked at photos of their beloved, specific parts of their brains lit up like pinball machines. Or better, like an Indian summer evening sky.

“When I first looked at those brain scans, with the active brain regions lit up in bright yellow and deep orange, I felt the way I feel on a summer night when I gaze at the sparkling universe: overwhelming awe,” she writes.

This is beautiful not just because we can empathize with her feelings (with our intact Theory of Mind) but because it shows how alienated people are from their own bodies. Our bodies perform so many functions we never see; we are fascinated by them and want to see them. That’s why museum shows like Bodies: The Exhibition are so popular. We are Narcissus. We want to see ourselves. We want to know. Now fMRI scans are able to show us more about the mystery we carry around in our heads. Awe is the perfect word for it." less