These early attachment experiences, dozens of human studies show, lay the foundation of the capacity to connect. In the thinking of John Bowlby, these early experiences of love alter our jen ratios or, in Bowlby’s terminology, the individual’s “working model” of intimacy, trust, and the goodness of others, deep, early beliefs that shape our peer relations, work dynamics, ensuing adventures in our own families, and engagement in communities. Individuals who report a secure attachment style feel comfortable with intimacy and desire to be close to others during times of threat and uncertainty. They were likely raised by parents who were responsive to their early needs and emotions. And as adults, these individuals enjoy healthily high jen ratios. People who report a sense of secure attachment perceive their partners to be a steady source of support and love. They look charitably upon their partner’s criticism, tension, and insensitivity, putting a positive spin upon these struggles of intimate life. And as life progresses, securely attached individuals feel greater satisfaction in their current romantic relationships, they are about half as likely to divorce as other individuals, and they consistently report a greater sense of contentment and meaning in life.
Anxiously attached individuals, by contrast, feel a deep sense of uncertainty about their attachment to others; they feel that others do not give enough and are not reliable sources of intimacy and love. Their parents, research shows, were less responsive and warm and more tense, anxious, and distant in their minute-by-minute interactions. A quick study of a morning in such a house would find a more impoverished vocabulary of attachment behaviors—encouraging touch, warm smiles, brief eye contact, and playful vocalizations—and more sighs of exasperation, remote gazes, and painful touch. These more anxiously attached individuals have greater difficulties in their subsequent bonds—greater dissatisfaction, cynicism, distrust, and criticism. These tendencies suffuse every moment of their intimate relations. When Chris Fraley and Phil Shaver surreptitiously observed romantic partners as they said good-bye in airports, anxiously attached individuals expressed great fear and sadness as their partners headed down the walkway, privately suspecting that this would be the last they would see of their beloved. Anxiously attached individuals are more likely to interpret life events in pessimistic, threatening fashion, which increases the chances of depression. They are more likely to suffer from eating disorders, maladaptive drinking, and substance abuse, in part to reduce their distress and anxiety. They are more likely to have intimate relationships that dissolve in bitterness.
The first great love of life begins upon leaving the womb. It lasts, in the words of John Bowlby, “from cradle to grave.” It is laid down in a rich vocabulary of touch, voice, gaze, and facial display, it is evident in the merging of minds, heartbeats, and nervous systems of caretaker and young child. These processes establish deep patterns of neural response in the pro-social nervous system—growth in tactile receptors in the skin, strengthening of the oxytocin system (which is damaged in orphans), the setting of the HPA axis to less stressful levels, lighting up of reward centers in the brain. These early attachment experiences are laid down so early we can’t consciously remember them, for the regions of the brain involved in memory—the hippocampus in particular—aren’t fully functioning until age two or so. But they are felt every moment of life, in the trust of a stranger, in the willingness to speak out and fail, in the devotion to a romantic partner in times of difficulty, in the sense of hope, and in the devotion one feels for one’s own children. If it goes well, that early love is felt as the encouraging, not-so-invisible warm hand on your back as you move through life.
THE ELEMENTS OF DESIRE
A lek (Swedish for “play”) is the singles bar for many bird species. It is a small patch of ground where the males of a species congregate and set up shop to take their shot at seducing their female counterparts. The male bowerbird, for example, will build elaborate bowers of sticks, leaves, bottle caps, and hot commodity items like the bird of paradise’s feathers to show off his resource-acquiring abilities. Like young women arriving at the dance after a trip to the bathroom, female bowerbirds arrive at a set time at the leks, inspect each male, engage in a few courtship head bobs and coos, and then converge on a couple of males who seem most worthy (that is, resource-rich) to mate with.
It does not take a great leap of the imagination to recognize human leks—junior proms and Sadie Hawkins dances, bars, nightclubs, Bible study groups, coffee and copy machines at the office, singles hikers in the Sierras, activist meetings—where desire is negotiated according to our own ancient patterns of courtship. This ancient language of desire catapults us, heads spinning, into reproductive relations. Before cataloguing this language of desire, it is worth considering two underappreciated qualities of human desire that might be taken for granted. The first is that human desire channels us into monogamous bonds. This is not the trajectory of desire in our closest primate relatives. In gorillas, resource-rich alpha males lord over harems, while other males do their best to sneak in surreptitious copulations—like those elephant seal beta males. In chimpanzees, all is quiet on the sexual front until the female goes into estrus. At this time she most typically mates indiscriminately with dozens of males each day, often requiring up to 3,000 copulations prior to pregnancy. And bonobos wage an all-out, polyamorous Haight-Ashbury lovefest, using sex for just about every purpose: to reproduce, to form friendships, to help share food, to play, to pass the time.
Putting aside your bonobo envy, it is important to appreciate that human desire, at least in the moment, is singular. It is oriented toward one person; it pair-bonds. The most obvious reason for this is that our big-brained, ultravulnerable offspring required multiple caretakers, including fathers. Another factor, suggests Matt Ridley in The Red Queen, is our love of meat. Some 1.6 million years ago, our foraging, group-dwelling hominid predecessors started eating meat. The provision of meat is a probabilistic affair, and bound males into dependent trade relations. This focus of early hominid dietary activity prevented any single male from hoarding all the resources—a precondition for harems—and kept early hominids in pair-bonding relations.
If you need further proof of our pair-bonding predilections, just look at a few males’ testicles. In species with polygamous females, males have outsized testicles that produce copious amounts of sperm to win in the game of sperm competition with other males. Thus, in chimps, with their promiscuous females, the male’s testicles on average are two times larger than those of the gorilla, whose females mate in serial and monogamous fashion with one alpha male. In the right whale, whose females are polygamous, the testicles of the male weigh half a ton, or 1 percent of its body weight (two pounds on a 200-pound human). The right whale’s testicles greatly outweigh those of the male in the pair-bonding gray whale. Human testicle size reveals us to be more on the pair-bonding end of the continuum. Sexual desire is the rocket booster that moves us toward that arrangement.