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.
The early Christian church took an immediate dislike to communal dance—it generated subversive passions and could quickly sow the seeds of dissent and protest. Not surprisingly, the powers that be in the church (I suspect they had little rhythm) set in place extreme restrictions upon this human universal. But that proved to be, and will always be, a losing endeavor. The instinct to dance reemerged outside church walls in the form of carnivals, which persist to this day. Dance will emerge in any context, in church, at the game, at scholarly conferences, in strangers waiting in line for a bus, in two-year-olds bouncing to the beat of big bands at formal weddings. People need to sway their hips, shimmy their shoulders, and clap their hands together.
Our conceptual mistake, Ehrenreich observes, and it is a common one, is to assume that dance is sexual. Certainly our early, memorable experiences of dance—the intense slow-dance clutches to Stairway to Heaven of my eighth-grade youth—felt sexual. (Of course, anything in eighth grade is sexual—algebra, spelling bees, fire drills, corn dogs served at lunch.) But to generalize from these experiences to a broad statement about dance is misguided.
Instead, dance creates a love for fellow group members; it coordinates evolved patterns of touch, chant, smiling, laughing, and head shakes to spread collective joy in the sweat and delirium of collective movement. Dance is the most reliable and quickest route to a mysterious feeling that has gone by many names over the generations: sympathy, agape, ecstasy, jen; here I’ll call it trust. To dance is to trust.
If neuroeconomist Paul Zak could study the neural correlates of that particular kind of love—of fellow group members—that rises after a great bout of dancing, he would likely find oxytocin levels shooting through the roof. Zak proposes that oxytocin is the biological underpinning of trust—a thesis he has supported in his groundbreaking work with the trust game. In the trust game, one participant, known as the “investor,” makes contributions to another individual, known as the “trustee.” The value of the money given to the trustee then triples, and the trustee then gives some amount back to the investor—as much or as little as he or she desires. As in so many realms of life, cooperation amplifies the potential gains to be had by all, but it requires a leap of faith, a core conviction, a sense of trust, that the trustee will give back some of the funds generously given.
In studies Zak has conducted in Germany and Switzerland (where it is not illegal to study oxytocin experimentally) Zak has given a blast of oxytocin, or a neutral solution, to the investor via a nasal spray. Our “investor,” grooving on oxytocin, was more than twice as likely to give away maximum amounts of money to the stranger than the “investor” given a neutral solution in the control condition.
My former student Belinda Campos calls this cocktail of love toward non-kin, enhanced by oxytocin and founded in the sense of trust, the love of humanity. Her research shows that this feeling, and not other kinds of love, amplifies the conviction in the goodness of other humans. It is accompanied by the urge to give, to trust, and to sacrifice. In one study we examined college students’ transitions to their new community—their residence hall—during their first year of college. Students who reported feeling a great deal of the love of humanity prior to coming to college more quickly trusted their new hallmates, and folded more quickly into dense webs of friendships. It is the feeling that led Gandhi to say that “all men are brothers” and Jesus to say “Whoever love all brothers has obeyed the whole law” (Romans 13:8–10). It is the love of humanity that weaves together Walt Whitman’s declarations in Song of Myself.