Julia Shaw on Bisexuality

 



There have been suspicions that bisexuality is probably just a trend for almost fifty years. Newsweek has even declared this boldly twice. In 1974 it published an article titled “Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes.” Two decades later, in 1995, it ran a cover story with the headline “Bisexuality. Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges.” New again?
 
These two articles have been widely mocked in bisexual forums. This is particularly true of the 1995 cover, which includes bright white lettering atop a photo of a woman with short hair wearing an oversized black suit and with her arms crossed. She has a guarded expression on her face and is positioned in front of two men in casual gray T-shirts who stare with emotionless expressions into the camera. The photo is so weird, and so over-the-top nineties that it seems almost satirical.
 
The article itself proclaims things like “bisexuality is the hidden wild card of our erotic culture,” suggests there is “an independent bisexual movement,” and allows a fifteen-year-old to debunk the myth of the hypersexual bisexual while simultaneously reinforcing it with the bizarre quote, “A bisexual… doesn’t have any more sex than the captain of the football team.”
 
Given that a key benefit of being the captain of the (American) football team is having lots of sex, I guess this kid is trying to make it clear that he is promiscuous, but not sexually excessive. The article also in various ways conflates polyamory, promiscuity, and gender fluidity with bisexuality. And it taps into the idea that bisexuality is on the rise with the sentence “Many college students, particularly women, talk about a new sexual ‘fluidity’ on campus,” and quotes a bisexual person saying, “It’s not us-versus-them anymore. There’s just more and more of us.”
 
What I find astonishing is that this article could have been written today, with the exact same misconceptions, uneasy feeling of change, and echoes of optimism. Particularly, this idea that there are just more and more bisexual people is still popular today. But is it true? Before I try to answer that, I need to define what bisexuality is. To do that we are going to head back in time to see where the term came from, and three men with alliterative names who were fundamental in establishing bisexuality as an academic and popular concept: Krafft-Ebing, Kinsey, and Klein.
 
It may surprise you that the use of the term bisexual to refer to human sexuality is almost as old as the term heterosexual. In his book The Invention of Heterosexuality, gay history pioneer and activist Jonathan Ned Katz argues that “the idea of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating to the late nineteenth century.” The first recorded use of the term was in an anonymous pamphlet in 1869, of which it was later established that Karl-Maria Kertbeny was the author.
 
Kertbeny lived a colorful life. He spent time in many major European cities, where he hung out with celebrities like George Sand and the Grimm brothers, hid from authorities by living in a botanic garden in Leipzig, was briefly a police spy, and was in and out of debtors’ prisons because of a series of failed attempts at being a journalist. In his letters, pamphlets, and books he wrote extensively about his view that sodomy laws violated human rights, and that such consensual sexual acts in private should not be subject to criminal law.
 
While writing, Kertbeny, who was probably gay himself, found the need to label and define the sexual norm so that he could explain how same-sex desires and sexual behaviors contrasted with it. This is why he came up with the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” This means that a gay rights activist coined the word heterosexual as a by-product of creating the word homosexual.
 
In the etymology of Kertbeny’s “heterosexual,” “hetero” comes from the Greek heteros which means another, while homos means same, and both are melded with the Latin word sexus. Not long after this, bi, or two, started to be used to refer to people who had both homosexual and heterosexual desires. A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other.

 
Before being adopted to describe human sexuality, the term bisexual was typically used to refer to creatures and plants which are hermaphroditic, so have both male and female reproductive parts. Even today, in the worlds of botany, entomology, and zoology the term bisexual is often used in this way. Roses are an example of a popular bisexual plant.
 
The first use of the word bisexual in English, in the sense of being sexually attracted to people of multiple genders, was probably in 1892 when American neurologist Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated Psychopathia Sexualis, an influential book by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in which he detailed what he considered to be sexual disorders in male prisoners. The book was intended for clinical-forensic settings, and Krafft-Ebing wrote it in intentionally difficult language and with parts in Latin so that laypeople couldn’t read it. The book played an important and controversial role in the discussion among psychiatrists at the time who were trying to understand why people have homosexual desires.
 
Why didn’t these terms exist earlier? As sexuality historian Hanne Blank has argued, people in English-speaking countries didn’t really think about sexuality as an identity before this. They didn’t consider they should be “differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced.” There were words to describe the kinds of sexual behavior people engaged in, but sex was mostly something that people did, not part of who they were.
 
Once sexuality became a hotly political part of identity, people wanted ways to define these new sexual labels. The problem quickly became that what one person meant when they used a label like bisexual was very different from what someone else meant, which is a problem that continues to pose a major obstacle for researchers today.
 
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How many people do you think identify as bisexual today? Depending on who you ask, and how they spend their time, you will probably get very different answers. I need to regularly remind myself that fewer people are bi than I intuitively guess, because my social media feeds make it easy to forget that bisexuality is not the default. We all live in bubbles, and mine is an adorable bi bubble.
 
It is very difficult to get accurate or regular estimates of LGBT+ populations from most countries, especially from countries where homosexual behavior is criminalized. It’s even harder to get information specifically about bisexuality. Still, there are a few studies we can look at. In a summary of eleven studies conducted between 2004 and 2010, including samples from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Norway, between 0.5 percent and 3.1 percent of participants identified as bisexual. The summary found that among adults who identify as LGBT, bisexual people are the slight majority. It also found that far more people acknowledge at least some same-sex attraction, between 1.8 percent and 11 percent across the studies. This is one of few studies that gives us a sense of international comparison.
 
Other studies can give us some sense as to whether identifying as bi has increased over time. The Office for National Statistics in the UK estimated in 2017 that 2.3 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds identify as bisexual, while a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US in 2016 placed the rate at 5.5 percent of women and 2 percent of men. Both of these surveys reported increases in the rates of people who identified as bisexual, and that in the youngest age groups more people identified as bisexual than gay or lesbian. The findings are also consistent with research which has found that more young women of color are identifying as bisexual today than in the past. However, these studies only capture people who identify as bisexual.
 
Studies have sought to address this shortcoming by asking people in the UK about their sexuality using the Kinsey Scale, and a series of follow-up questions. Using this scale is clever, because if we ask people directly if they are bisexual or homosexual, many say no either because they identify as heterosexual or because they identify outside of these labels (e.g., pansexual, fluid, or unlabeled).
 
According to the researchers of one study published by YouGov in 2015, “with each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18–24-year-olds are particularly striking, as 43 percent place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5… classed as bisexual in varying degrees by Kinsey.” Note that “non-binary” here means not entirely homosexual or heterosexual, rather than people whose gender identity is nonbinary. This change toward more flexible conceptualizations of sexuality is exemplified by a follow-up study of people who identify as bisexual conducted by YouGov in 2019.
 
In a summary of the results the researcher writes: “When we asked 18 to 24 year olds to choose what best described their sexuality in 2015 just one in fifty (2 percent) said they were bisexual. Our latest data . . . shows that one in six (16 percent) now choose this option—an eight-fold increase.” She continues, “More people than ever identify as somewhere between the extremes of the sexuality spectrum.”
 
Replications of the 2015 YouGov survey were conducted in Germany, Israel, and the US. In all three, at least a third of young people identified as neither exclusively homosexual nor exclusively heterosexual, landing them somewhere on the bisexual spectrum. In all three, young people were far more likely than older people to fall on the bi spectrum and to explicitly identify as bisexual. And, in all three, some of the people who placed themselves on a sexual spectrum denied that such a spectrum exists.
 
This I find a particularly fascinating aspect of these studies. In a summary of the 2015 results the researchers wrote, “People of all generations now accept the idea that sexual orientation exists along a continuum rather than a binary choice,” because 60 percent of heterosexuals and 73 percent of homosexuals in their study supported the idea that sexuality is not binary. Although most of their 1,632 participants agreed that “sexuality is a scale—it is possible to be somewhere near the middle,” 12 percent of heterosexuals and 7 percent of homosexuals chose the “don’t know” option. There was also a third option: “There is no middle ground—you are either heterosexual or homosexual.” I know it shouldn’t shock me, but at least a fifth of people in both groups didn’t believe that bisexuality existed—28 percent of heterosexuals and 20 percent of homosexuals indicated that “there is no middle ground” for sexuality.
 
What’s even more amazing to me is that a substantial minority of these individuals were not entirely homosexual or heterosexual themselves: 11 percent of those who identified as a 3 on the Kinsey Scale, and 27 percent of those who identified as a 4 chose this third option. How do you put yourself in the middle of a sexuality scale, and simultaneously deny that people can be in the middle of a sexuality scale?
 
While I cannot tell you why these participants engaged in such dissonance, I can tell you who they were more likely to be. While 32 percent of those over 50 agreed with this statement, this fell to 22 percent of those aged 25 to 35, and 18 percent of those aged 18 to 24. It seems that younger generations are more likely to both identify as bi and to accept bisexuality as a thing.
 
Enjoyably, further supporting the idea that people are becoming more bi-supportive, the 2019 study found that “if the right person came along at the right time,” about 35 percent of those who identified as heterosexual indicated that they could be (i) attracted to a person of the same sex, (ii) have a sexual experience with them, and (iii) have a relationship with them. Many people today in the UK seem to be open to the idea that they could be attracted to people of multiple genders, which is a beautiful thing.
 
While it is unclear whether bisexual behavior is on the rise, more young people than ever are identifying as bisexual, and it seems that many people are open to falling in love with someone regardless of their gender. Bisexuality is not a fad, or “chic,” or “new”; rather this sexuality label appears to be more accessible and empowering today than it has been in the past.
 
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Excerpted from the new book Bi: The Hidden Culture, Science, and History of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw, PhD, Abrams Press,  2022.
 
  
Nope, Not a Trend: On the Modern Origins and Evolution of Bisexual Identity. By Julia Shaw. LitHub, June 29, 2022.

The number of people who identify as queer in the UK Census has increased over the past few years. This trend is in particular driven by the rising number of LGBT+ identities among people aged 16 to 24 years. The most popular sexual identity within this emerging group is bisexual – the romantic and/or sexual attraction to more than one gender. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows an increase from 0.7 per cent in 2015 to 1.1 per cent in 2019. Rather than a sudden new surge of bisexual desires, increased acceptance, legal protection and visibility are likely to be the cause of this increase.
 
But why should we count how many people are bi, or study what their experiences are? Research is young in this field, but we’re already seeing that tossing all queer identities into one research bucket renders the unique struggles of being bisexual invisible. For a start, it’s hard to even get an accurate sense of the exact number of British people who are bisexual. Many people who are attracted to people beyond one gender, shy away from the identity label ‘bisexual’. When it comes to research, this reluctance has led scientists to come up with alternative ways to capture and categorise sexuality.
 
One of the most common tools used is The Kinsey Scale. First published in 1948 by biologist Dr Alfred Kinsey, it is used to place people on a spectrum of sexual attraction between entirely heterosexual and entirely homosexual, using a scale from 0 to 6. It also includes ‘X’ for those who are asexual. It was so successful that it is still the single most popular scale for classifying sexuality. It’s often what people are indirectly referring to when they say, “Aren’t we all a bit bi?”
 
When YouGov surveys conducted in 2019 used questions that mimicked The Kinsey Scale, researchers found at least a third of people aged 18 to 24 say that they are attracted to multiple genders. A startling figure compared to the 1 per cent reporting to the ONS. Only with research can we cut through the reluctance people have to say “I am bisexual”, and find out whether those attracted to multiple genders need more support than those who aren’t.
 
Since social scientists and other researchers have started to analyse the B, we have begun to understand the struggles that uniquely endanger bi people. Research shows us that bi women are hypersexualised, and stereotypes that see bi women as promiscuous sexual playthings feed into people’s existing rape myths.
 
Accordingly, studies have found that bisexual women are significantly more likely to be raped, repeatedly sexually assaulted, and to be the victims of intimate partner abuse than lesbian and heterosexual women. Had this research homogenised all women into one group, we might never have known that the stereotypes affecting bi women specifically place them at far greater risk of sexual victimisation.
 
A different cluster of toxic assumptions awaits bi men. Bisexual men are seen as lying, to themselves and others, because they are thought to be gay. And, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, bi men were also seen as murderers in disguise, catching AIDS when having sex with men and giving it their female partners. This left many bisexual men isolated and alone, failed by educational campaigns that rarely moved beyond gay spaces.
 
We need to acknowledge the unique needs of bi people, including a specific focus on bi men. If we don’t, we fail a huge amount of the population. Armed with bi-specific research, we stand a better chance of winning the fight back against the societal biases and misconceptions that hold bisexual people down.
 
As a young researcher, I didn’t know anyone else who was bisexual in my field, or, for that matter, in any field. It was rarely mentioned, not even in lectures specifically on sex and sexuality. When I graduated with my PhD in 2012, I had no idea how useful my background in criminal psychology would come to be when I turned my gaze to studying bisexuality. For my new book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History And Science Of Bisexuality, I have found and spoken to researchers across the globe and in various disciplines who are all fighting for change.
 
I want the world to be a safer place for people like me. The best way that we can achieve that is to visibly support bi people. Let’s not allow the ‘B’ slip into the shadows of its colourful siblings.
 
 
Why does researching bisexuality matter? By Julia Shaw. Science Focus, May 20, 2022.

Julia Shaw is a psychologist at University College London and part of Queer Politics at Princeton University, a thinktank engaged in the research of LGBTQ+ equality and rights. Her new book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, draws on her experiences of being bisexual and her background in the psychological sciences to explore and celebrate a sexual identity she says remains marginalised and forgotten.
 
What led you to begin researching bisexuality and write this book?
I was writing my second book, Making Evil, which is about criminal psychology and what we associate with the word “evil”. I was writing about the villainisation of LGBTQ+ individuals as evil around the world and how important visibility is. I realised I was still invisible myself, so I came out as bi in that book, because I felt like a hypocrite for telling other people to be out and not being out myself in public.
 
I had so many questions about bisexuality. I figured I’d read a couple of books and I’d be done. But those books with the answers that I wanted didn’t exist, so I decided to write a book instead. I figured if I was struggling to find those answers, other people were as well.
 
Your book discusses one of the first measures of bisexuality, the Kinsey scale, first published in 1948 by the biologist Dr Alfred Kinsey. How did that tool change the field of study?
 
 
The Kinsey scale is a way to see sexuality on a spectrum from 100% heterosexual desires to 100% homosexual desires. Kinsey found that about half of men and about a quarter of women allocated themselves as not 100% heterosexual, which effectively meant that a lot of people were queer. When people talk about sexuality as a spectrum, they’re usually indirectly referencing the Kinsey scale.
 
The book refers to the invisibility of bi people in research on sexuality; why is that?
 
The default is still to ask people their identity, which is a problem for bisexual people. Most people who would fall in the middle of the Kinsey scale aren’t captured by labels – they often refer to themselves as gay or straight. Asking questions about how people behave, and who they find attractive, is going to get you a much more accurate picture than asking people what their labels are most of the time. Research, for some reason, is really reluctant to accept that. Probably because it introduces complexity and complexity is bad for data analysis.
 
 
A fascinating section of the book examines bisexuality in the animal kingdom and the struggle of evolutionary biologists to explain the “Darwinian paradox”: why animals engage in homosexual behaviour if it doesn’t lead to reproduction. You propose the idea that bisexuality is perhaps “the originary state in the evolution of sexuality” – how did you reach this conclusion?
 
 
There’s this assumption that heterosexuality is the norm, because heterosexual sex results in offspring. But looking at the literature on animal behaviour and sexual interactions, I found there are a number of researchers, including in the evolutionary sciences, saying we’ve misinterpreted animal behaviour for a very long time by imposing our sense of decency and our heterosexual bias on to animals, rather than observing and describing what animals actually do.
 
Research has found there’s a lot of sexual behaviour between animals of multiple sexes in the animal kingdom. The explanation for that is: as long as you’re also at least occasionally having sex with the other sex and you’re able to reproduce, then it doesn’t really matter if you also have sex with the same sex. I found it really interesting, because I assumed that I was a deviation, rather than that most animals seem to behave this way.
 
 
You contrast this positive reading of the “original state” of sexuality with Freud’s negative view that everyone starts off bisexual as a child and matures into monosexuality as an adult. Why do associations between bisexuality and immaturity persist?
I get told a lot that Freud thought everyone was bi and I have to correct this so often. Freud did say that, but he didn’t mean it in a good way. He very much saw it as a negative thing to be bisexual as an adult.
 
There are a couple of assumptions that are thrown at you when you say you’re bisexual. One is that you’re greedy; the other is that you want to be the centre of attention, that it’s some sort of performance, especially as a woman, the expectation is that it’s performative for men. Then there’s the idea that it’s a phase. This idea isn’t just held by heterosexual people; it’s also very much held by homosexual and queer people and that is a huge problem. It has led to many bi people feeling excluded or pushed out of queer spaces.
 
We’ve seen people become more comfortable talking about a range of sexual identities in recent years, with the word “queer” gaining particular prominence. You’re saying that due to negative connotations, the term “bisexual” hasn’t been embraced in the same way?
 
 
It hasn’t. People cringe when they say it, or don’t say it, about themselves, because they’re worried about the reaction, including me. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the word “queer” instead of “bi”, because I don’t want the reaction that comes with saying “bi” and “queer” is a bit more vague, frankly. It’s fascinating that because of internalised biphobia in so many people, we shy away from that word. I mean, it’s LGBT and it has been since the 90s. Yet the “B” has been invisible or berated. Lesbian and gay people, I think, need to make space and be more inclusive and conscious of bi people.
 
You discuss how bisexual people are more likely to experience sexual violence, poor mental health and substance abuse than other sexual minorities. What explains this?
 
Bisexual women, compared with lesbian and heterosexual women, are the most likely to be raped and to experience various forms of sexual assault. There’s a layering of stigma that happens with bi women in particular, where there’s the sexualisation of women and the hypersexualisation of bisexuality on top. It makes people take more liberties with how they touch you, how they talk to you, how they sexualise you and whether they’re likely to assault you. This is something we see in research on the treatment of bisexual kids in schools and universities. Until we break down the stereotypes about bisexuality, we are not going to tackle this problem.

 
What can the study of history tell us about the evolution of attitudes towards sexuality?
 
Sexual desires and behaviours have only really been seen as identities since the 1800s. The idea that it’s something you are rather than something you do – that is a relatively new concept. If you look at how historians try to make queer people visible in history, they often jump too far. If there’s any evidence of homosexual attractions, they say: “Look, there’s a gay person.” I can see why that’s something people want to do. But what it does, in effect, is erase bi people. Because most of those people will also have had wives, or husbands, and heterosexual interactions. That makes it really hard, and often inaccurate, to say that they are exclusively homosexual.
 
 
You discuss the relationship between “compulsory heterosexuality” and “compulsory monogamy”. How could more acceptance and understanding of bisexuality help challenge norms around both?
 
One of the most toxic stereotypes is that bisexual people can’t be monogamous and that bisexual people can’t be trusted in relationships. If you think about it for more than 10 seconds, you understand why that’s an absurd thing to say. I wanted to end the book on the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, because it’s something a lot of bisexual people think about a lot and they get asked about often. If heterosexual people and monosexual people ask themselves the questions they often put to bi people – “How can you be monogamous? Why is one person enough for you?” – the world would be a better place. Having that conversation in a way that is more about deconstructing heterosexual norms and expectations is a really useful thing to do.
 
Julia Shaw: ‘I had so many questions about bisexuality’ By  Laurie Clarke. The Guardian June 4, 2022. 

Discover the hidden culture, history, and science of bisexuality.   Dr Julia Shaw and Ben Hunte discuss her new book “Bi” at the British Library.  June 7, 2022.  Dr. Julia Shaw  BiBook

The hidden science of bisexuality with Julia Shaw – podcast
 
Presented and produced by Madeleine Finlay, additional production by Anand Jagatia, sound design by Tony Onuchukwu, the executive producer was Isabelle Roughol
 
Bisexuality is the largest sexual minority in the world – but according to psychologist Dr Julia Shaw, it’s the least well understood. She talks to Madeleine Finlay about her new book, Bi, which challenges us to think more deeply about who we are and how we love. She discusses the history of trying to define and measure bisexuality, sexual behaviour in the animal kingdom, and how we can improve health outcomes for bi people.
 
The Guardian, June 2, 2022.

For over a century, society has struggled to understand who, why, what and how bisexual and pansexual people are what they are. We’ve tried Venn diagrams, adopted animal mascots, developed TV tropes and launched awareness campaigns. But even now, more than a century after the terms “bisexual” and “pansexual” were coined, people are still confused.
 
Through my years running the Bi Pan Library, a U.S.-based private queer literature archive, I’ve read stacks of nonfiction about fluid sexuality from the past century, and it’s no wonder we can’t get out of this cycle of confusion. If you’re looking for dusty old books by psychiatrists who believed bisexual people are not quite right in the head, you’ll be spoiled for choice. But if you’re looking for something positive, a Bisexual 101 perhaps, your options are limited to just a handful of titles that are still in print. There is certainly supportive, world-shifting bisexual and pansexual writing available if you know where to look, but it has not landed on the shelf without a fight.
 
In the introduction to her hotly anticipated upcoming book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, Dr. Julia Shaw shares the story of a publisher rejecting the pitch for her book because “we’ve already had that conversation,” despite that same publishing house never having signed a single book about bisexuality, much less anything like Shaw’s unique spin. While Bi does touch on all three things the title suggests—culture, history and science—at its core what Shaw has created is a whirlwind tour of bisexual research, from Alfred Kinsey’s notorious scale, to the life-or-death legal struggles of queer asylum seekers today. (Disclosure: Shaw has made donations toward the resources of Bi Pan Library, which I founded.)
 
That publisher isn’t completely wrong: we’ve certainly had conversations about bisexual identity. But who was speaking during those conversations? And were they enough?
 
Attraction beyond gender is not new, but the first books to focus on the subject didn’t come around until the 1920s, when psychological texts first cast plural attraction as deviant behaviour in need of curing. In Bi, Shaw (whose previous works include 2019’s Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side and 2017’s The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting and the Science of False Memory), profiles several psychologists and researchers involved in the early evolution of science’s narrative about bisexuality, a problematic cast entirely made up of white men. Physician Havelock Ellis, author of Sexual Inversion, enjoyed an open marriage with his queer wife—and was also an outspoken eugenicist. Sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s work forever changed how the Western world perceives sexuality, but his methods may have blurred ethical lines. Beyond-famous neurologist Sigmund Freud believed children start out with a hazy mingled sexuality—until they grow out of it (and let’s be clear, there’s a long list of other Freudian trash to take out).
 
These white-and-Western ideas trickled down to the English-speaking public through news coverage, and very quickly into pornography (of course). Erotic bisexual novels from the 1960s and ’70s were often thinly veiled as nonfiction case studies of “depraved” sexual fluidity. The back cover of 1966 pulp release Confessions of a Married Man claimed “the secret world of the bisexual has never before been revealed with such stark detail—its deceptions and duplicities, its anguish and its furtive pleasures.” The graphically sexual text presents a “true story” complete with an introduction written by a psychoanalyst. But if you flip to the title page you’ll find a bolded-caps disclaimer: “All of the characters in this book are fictitious …”
 
You can draw a clear line between these early salacious visions of plural attraction in literature and the ugly stereotypes Shaw explores in later chapters of Bi: bisexual people are “slutty,” homewreckers and dangerous, but somehow, at the same time, we don’t exist at all. Although English-speaking bi and pan people in the ’60s were already beginning to gather through the sexual liberation movement and queer organizing, our own perspectives weren’t broadly published or accepted. The story of who we were was still being written by others.
 
Glimmers of hope appeared in the ’70s, with books such as Janet Bode’s View from Another Closet, which allowed queer women to describe their experiences using whatever words they felt comfortable with (including words many people mistakenly think are internet-age inventions, like pansexual and omnisexual). In Bi, Shaw profiles sex researcher Fritz Klein, a bisexual man who in 1978 released his iconic book The Bisexual Option: A Concept of One Hundred Percent Intimacy. If you’ve ever googled “am I bisexual?” you may have come across the Klein Grid, which he presented in The Bisexual Option as a more three-dimensional response to Kinsey’s one-to-six scale. By bringing his personal experiences into his work (much like Shaw has) Klein called for a new generation of scientific research that he hoped would investigate the true challenges and needs of his community without treating us as diseased, or focusing entirely on our sex lives.
 
But speaking of disease—the world’s growing curiosity turned poisonous in the 1980s as HIV/AIDS sunk its teeth in. As Shaw put it, “bi men were seen as a threatening connection between the dirty and the clean … a threat to heterosexuals everywhere.” The literature was nasty. Authors like Ivan Hill profiled bisexual people with straight partners, whipping up fear of inevitable illicit affairs or “unhealthy” open relationships. Hill frames his interviews in The Bisexual Spouse with a nationwide survey measuring psychiatrists’ opinions on sexual orientation; the study asked questions like “can homosexuality be modified toward heterosexuality, and if so, what therapy do you most often prescribe?” It’s nauseating stuff, but when I read my own yellowing copy of The Bisexual Spouse, I was struck by how sadly relatable the stories of his interviewees felt. These were queer people born between the 1920s and 1940s who didn’t have words for themselves, who were afraid they wouldn’t be believed, who faced prejudice in straight and gay communities alike, who felt there were very few resources to help them build a happy, balanced life.
 
It was amidst the fear and judgment of the ’80s that bisexual and pansexual people fighting for control over our own narrative developed a new strategy. The Off Pink Collective in the U.K. independently published Bisexual Lives, a slim book of essays and personal accounts written by and for bisexual people. As far as I know, Bisexual Lives marked the first time a group of bisexual people were able to tell their own stories in a book without being filtered through the lens of psychiatric analysis or pop-nonfiction appeal. Personal essay collections have since become a grand bisexual tradition in resistance to the idea that there is only one way to be bisexual, or even a single definition or word we all agree on. Instead, these writers described bisexuality as our stories, together.
 
Shaw follows this tradition in Bi, illustrating cold, hard, queer statistics with her personal stories of realization, heartbreak and joy. In Chapter five, titled “Invisi-bi-lity,” she describes how she was worried that looking bi would be problematic for her career as an academic. “I was already so used to being sexualized as a young woman that I was worried that the label bisexual would lead to me being hypersexualized and that no one would take me seriously.” She contextualizes this raw vulnerability with sexuality researcher Julie Hartman’s study of what—if anything—it means to “look bi,” and how bisexual people often combat their invisibility with clothing, hairstyles and body language.
 
As bisexuals were increasingly acknowledged in broader queer activism and pop culture in the 1990s, more critical books also sprung up to address the unease many people felt toward “strict” labels. Feminist psychologist Lisa M. Diamond argued in Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire that sexuality could not be measured or described without acknowledging how self-perception can change across a lifetime, praising Klein’s incorporation of past, present and future self-concept in the development of the Klein grid, even though according to Diamond, it “did not take hold.”
 
Speaking of Klein, our researcher friend kept himself extraordinarily busy in the ’90s. He released two more books, founded the American Institute of Bisexuality and in the early 2000s headed up the Journal of Bisexuality, the first academic journal to specialize in bisexual and fluid issues. Many of the queer researchers Shaw references in Bi first presented their work in the Journal of Bisexuality, climbing through the window Klein had propped open for them. At last, scientific research and literature about bisexuality was being wrestled into our custody.
 
Research and academic writing about plural attraction has become increasingly queer-led and destigmatized ever since. Because of this, we’ve begun to better understand the specific challenges our community experiences. Shaw explores much of this new ground in Bi, walking through very recent research into the harrassment bisexual people face in the workplace, our disturbingly high rates of mental illness and intimate partner violence and how sexually fluid asylum seekers slip through inhumane cracks in the legal system. Thanks to queer researchers, being studied may finally begin to work toward our benefit.
 
The 2010–2020 section of the Bi Pan Library collection glows as a bold and unapologetic era of fluid literature; it gave us Shiri Eisner’s radical modern classic (perhaps the most recognizable bisexual book ever published) Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, a masterful balance of actionable bisexual theory and accessible writing that welcomes people who are new to the ideas. Kate Harrad’s anthology Claiming the B in LGBT: Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative covered vast ground with chapters on race, disability, gender and non-monogomy. Books that enthusiastically embraced the variety of words people use for plural attraction also began cropping up more frequently, like Karen Morgaine’s artful Pansexuality: A Panoply of Co-Constructed Narratives and Faith Beauchemin’s very tiny anthology with a very large name, How Queer! Personal Narratives from Bisexual, Pansexual, Polysexual, Sexually-Fluid, and Other Non-Monosexual Perspectives. The diversity of language Janet Bode first spotlighted in the ’70s blossomed with the ability to connect with like-minded people and to learn about a universe of queer language via the internet.
 
This is an aspect of Shaw’s Bi that may not age well, in the way many books about sexuality, gender and identity naturally fade in relevance over time. Shaw commits to using the term “bisexual” or “behaviorally-bisexual” through the whole book, simplifying the language of plural attraction in the way of a researcher establishing clear vocabulary for a study. But condensing queer language can come at the cost of erasure. In nearly all the books I’ve mentioned so far, people who use words like pansexual, omnisexual, fluid, etc., have had their experiences included in research or storytelling, but their identities painted over, in the end, with the word bisexual. In the future, we might look back on concepts like “the bisexual umbrella” or “bi+” the same way we look back on titles like Bisexuality and Transgenderism, which was the first book about fluid sexuality in the trans community. The phrasing made sense to us at the time, but give it another decade and it would never go to print. Queer language is an ongoing process of building and balancing; rebuilding and rebalancing.
 
We are gearing up for an exciting new decade of sexually fluid literature in the 2020s. Just last year, psychologist Ritch C. Savin-Williams published the first book to focus on bisexual, pansexual and fluid youth, and fellow U.K. author and bisexual activist Lo Shearing released Bi the Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life. At first, Bi the Way looks like it might cover the same ground as Bi, but between the two pink-purple-and-blue covers are very different books. Shaw’s book lays out the story of how fluid sexuality has been perceived scientifically and socially, with a bit of personal storytelling for flair, while Shearing filled Bi the Way with advice about the everyday ins and outs of being bisexual, with a bit of history and social science woven in between. These are complimentary conversations that serve different purposes. Shearing also announced in 2021 they are editing a bisexual anthology with fellow bisexual activist Vaneet Mehta, ensuring the tradition of bisexual storytelling will live on.
 
What the publishers who rejected Bi didn’t understand is that sexuality and gender are ever-shifting, ever-expanding topics. We will never be done talking about being bisexual, or pansexual, or omnisexual, or fluid or whatever brand-new words we embrace in the future. When Bi hits bookstores (June 2 in the U.K., June 28 in the U.S.), it will provide a Bisexual Research 101 course for a fresh audience of international readers (her book is already making publishing history in Germany, where it was published in translation in May) and my library shelves will be one book richer.
 
Julia Shaw’s new book continues the conversation about bisexuality, but is it the one we need right now? By Bren Frederick. Xtra Magazine,  June 2, 2022. 

Abrams Books

Love is Biological Bribery, Anna Machin on Why We Love

 

We can all agree that, on balance, and taking everything into account, love is a wonderful thing. For many, it is the point of life. I have spent more than a decade researching the science behind human love and, rather than becoming immune to its charms, I am increasingly in awe of its complexity and its importance to us. It infiltrates every fibre of our being and every aspect of our daily lives. It is the most important factor in our mental and physical health, our longevity and our life satisfaction. And regardless of who the object of our love is – lover or friend, dog or god – these effects are largely underpinned, in the first instance, by the set of addictive neurochemicals supporting the bonds we create: oxytocin, dopamine, beta-endorphin and serotonin.
 
This suite of chemicals makes us feel euphoric and calm, they draw us towards those we love, and reward us for investing in our relationships, even when the going gets tough. Love feels wonderful but ultimately it is a form of biological bribery, a cunning evolutionary trick to make sure we cooperate and those all-important genes continue down the generations. The joy it brings is wonderful but is merely a side-effect. Its goal is to ensure our survival, and for this reason happiness is not always its end point. Alongside its joys, there exists a dark side.
 
Love is ultimately about control. It’s about using chemical bribery to make sure we stick around, cooperate and invest in each other, and particularly in the survival-critical relationships we have with our lovers, children and close friends. This is an evolutionary control of which we are hardly aware, and it brings many positive benefits.
 
But the addictive nature of these chemicals, and our visceral need for them, means that love also has a dark side. It can be used as a tool of exploitation, manipulation and abuse. Indeed, in part what may separate human love from the love experienced by other animals is that we can use love to manipulate and control others. Our desire to believe in the fairy tale means we rarely acknowledge the undercurrents but, as a scholar of love, I would be negligent if I did not consider it. Arguably our greatest and most intense life experience can be used against us, sometimes leading us to continue relationships with negative consequences in direct opposition to our survival.
 
We are all experts in love. The science I write about is always grounded in the lived experience of my subjects whose thoughts I collect as keenly as their empirical data. It might be the voice of the new father as he describes holding his firstborn, or the Catholic nun explaining how she works to maintain her relationship with God, or the aromantic detailing what it’s like living in a world apparently obsessed with the romantic love that they do not feel. I begin every interview in the same way, by asking what they think love is. Their answers are often surprising, always illuminating and invariably positive, and remind me that not all the answers to what love is can be found on the scanner screen or in the lab. But I will also ask them to consider whether love can ever be negative. The vast majority say no for, if love has a darker side, it is not love, and this is an interesting point to contemplate. But if they do acknowledge the possibility of love having a less sunny side, their go-to example is jealousy.
 
Jealousy is an emotion and, as with all emotions, it evolved to protect us, to alert us to a potential benefit or threat. It works its magic at three levels: the emotional, the cognitive and the behavioural. Physiology also throws its hat into the ring making you feel nauseous, faint or flushed. When we feel jealousy, it is generally urging us to do one of three things: to cut off the rival, to prevent our partner’s defection by redoubling our efforts, or to cut our losses and leave the relationship. All have evolved to make sure we balance the costs and benefits of the relationship. Investing time, energy and reproductive effort in the wrong partner is seriously damaging to your reproductive legacy and chances of survival. But what do we perceive to be a jealousy-inducing threat? The answer very much depends on your gender.
 
Men and women experience jealousy with the same intensity. However, there is a stark difference when it comes to what causes each to be jealous. One of the pioneers of human mating research is the American evolutionary psychologist David Buss and, in his book The Evolution of Desire (1994), he details numerous experiments that have highlighted this gender difference. In one study, in which subjects were asked to read different scenarios detailing incidences of sexual and emotional infidelity, 83 per cent of women found the emotional scenario the most jealousy-inducing, whereas only 40 per cent of men found this to be of concern. In contrast, 60 per cent of men found sexual infidelity difficult to deal with, compared with a significantly smaller percentage of women: 17 per cent.
 
Men also feel a much more extreme physiological response to sexual infidelity than women do. Hooking them up to monitors that measure skin conductance, muscle contraction and heartrate shows that men experience significant increases in heartrate, sweating and frowning when confronted with sexual infidelity, but the monitor readouts hardly flicker if their partner has become emotionally involved with a rival.
 
The reason for this difference sits with the different resources that men and women bring to the mating game. Broadly, men bring their resources and protection; women bring their womb. If a woman is sexually unfaithful and becomes pregnant with another man’s child, she has withdrawn the opportunity from her partner to father a child with her for at least nine months. Hence, he is the most concerned about sexual infidelity. In contrast, women are more concerned about emotional infidelity because this suggests that, if their partner does make a rival pregnant and becomes emotionally involved with her, his partner risks having to share his protection and resources with another, meaning that her children receive less of the pie.
 
Jealousy is an evolved response to threats to our reproductive success and survival – of self, children and genes. In many cases, it is of positive benefit to those who experience it as it shines a light on the threat and enables us to decide what is best. But in some cases, jealousy gets out of hand.
 
Emotional intelligence sits at the core of healthy relationships. To truly deliver the benefits of the relationship to our partner, we must understand and meet their emotional needs as they must understand and meet ours. But, as with love, this skill has a darker side because to understand someone’s emotional needs presents the possibility that you can use that intelligence to control them. While we may all admit to using this skill for the wrong reasons every now and again – perhaps to get that sofa we desire or the holiday destination we prefer – for some, it is their go-to mechanism where relationships are concerned.
 

The most adept proponents of this skill are those who possess the Dark Triad of personality traits: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism. The first relies on using emotional intelligence to manipulate others, the second to toy with other’s feelings, and the third to denigrate others with the aim of glorifying oneself. For these people, characterised by exploitative, manipulative and callous personalities, emotional intelligence is the route to a set of mate-retention behaviours that certainly meet their goals but are less than beneficial to those whom they profess to love. Indeed, research has shown that a relationship with such a person leaves you open to a significantly greater risk that your love will be returned with abuse.

 
In 2018, the psychologist Razieh Chegeni and her team set out to explore whether a link existed between the Dark Triad and relationship abuse. Participants were identified as having the Dark Triad personality by expressing their degree of agreement with statements such as ‘I tend to want others to admire me’ (narcissism), ‘I tend to be unconcerned with the morality of my actions’ (psychopathy) and ‘I tend to exploit others to my own end’ (Machiavellianism). They then had to indicate to what extent they used a range of mate-retention behaviours, including ‘snooped through my partner’s personal belongings’, ‘talked to another man/woman at a party to make my partner jealous’, ‘bought my partner an expensive gift’ and ‘slapped a man who made a pass at my partner’.
 
The results were clear. Having a Dark Triad personality, whether you were a man or a woman, significantly increased the likelihood that ‘cost-inflicting mate-retention behaviours’ were your go-to mechanism when trying to retain your partner. These are behaviours that level an emotional, physical, practical and/or psychological cost on the partner such as physical or emotional abuse, coercive control or controlling access to food or money. Interestingly, however, these individuals did not employ this tactic all the time. There was nuance in their behaviour. Costly behaviours were peppered with rare incidences of gift giving or caretaking, so-called beneficial mate-retention behaviours. Why? Because the unpredictability of their behaviour caused psychological destabilisation in their partner and enabled them to assert further control through a practice we now identify as gaslighting.
 
The question remains – if these people are so destructive, why does their personality type persist in our population? Because, while their behaviour may harm those who are unfortunate enough to be close to them, they themselves must gain some survival advantage, which means that their traits persist in the population. It is true that no trait can be said to be 100 per cent beneficial, and here is a perfect example of where evolution is truly working at cross purposes.
 
Not all Dark Triad personalities are abusers but the presence of abuse within our closest relationships is a very real phenomenon, the understanding of which continues to evolve and grow. Whereas we might have once imagined an abuser as someone who controlled their partner with their fists, we are now aware that abuse comes in many guises including emotional, psychological, reproductive and financial.
 
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) questioned both men and women in the United States about the incidences of domestic violence they had experienced in their lifetime. Looking at severe physical abuse alone – which means being punched, slammed, kicked, burned, choked, beaten or attacked with a weapon – one in five women and one in seven men reported at least one incidence in their lifetime. If we consider emotional abuse, then the statistics for men and women are closer – more than 43 million women and 38 million men have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
 
It is hard to imagine that, having experienced such a litany of abuse, anyone could believe that love remained within their relationship. But here the power of the lived experience, of allowing everyone to have their ideas about love becomes clearer. Because, while we have many scientific tools to explore love objectively, at the end of the day, there is always an element of our experience of love that is subjective, that another cannot touch. This is no more powerfully evidenced than by the testimony of those who have experienced intimate partner violence. In 2013, three mental health nurses, led by Marilyn Smith in West Virginia, explored what love meant to 19 women who were experiencing, or had experienced, intimate partner violence. For them, this kind of abuse included, but was not limited to, ‘slapping, intimidation, shaming, forced intercourse, isolation, monitoring behaviours, restricting access to healthcare, opposing or interfering with school or employment, and making decisions concerning contraception, pregnancy, and elective abortion’.
 
It was clear from the transcripts that all the women knew what love wasn’t: being hurt and fearful, being controlled and having a lack of trust and a lack of support or concern for their welfare. And it was clear that they all knew what love should be: built on a foundation of respect and understanding, of support and encouragement, of commitment, loyalty and trust. But despite this clear understanding of the stark difference between the ideal and their reality, many of these women still believed that love existed within their relationship. Some hoped the power of their love would change the behaviour of their partner, others said their sense of attachment made them stay. Some feared losing love, however flawed; and, if they left, might they not land in a relationship where their treatment was even worse? A lot of the time, cultural messaging had reinforced strongly held beliefs about the supremacy of the nuclear family, making victims reluctant to leave in case they ultimately harmed their children’s life chances. While it can be hard to understand these arguments – surely a non-nuclear setup is preferable to the harm inflicted on a child by the observation of intimate partner abuse – I strongly believe that this population has as much right to their definition and experience of love as any of us.
 
In fact, the cultural messages we hear about romantic love – from the media, religion, parents and family – not only potentially trap us in ‘ideal’ family units: they may also play a role in our susceptibility to experiencing intimate partner abuse. This view of reproductive love, once confined to Western culture, is now the predominant narrative globally. From a young age, we speak of ‘the one’, we consume stories of young people finding love against all the odds, of sacrifice, of being consumed. It is arguable that these narratives are unhelpful generally as the reality, while wonderful, is considerably more complex, involving light and shade. But research has shown that these stories may have more significant consequences when we consider their role in intimate partner abuse.

 
South Africa has one of the highest rates of partner abuse against women in the world. In their 2017 paper, Shakila Singh and Thembeka Myende explored the role of resilience in female students at risk of abuse, which is prevalent at a high rate on South African university campuses. Their paper ranges widely over the role of resilience in resisting and surviving partner abuse, but what is of interest to me is the 15 women’s ideas about how our cultural ideas of romantic love have a role to play in trapping women in abusive relationships. These women’s arguments are powerful and made me rethink the fairy-tale. Singh and Myende point to the romantic idea that love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs, even when abuse makes these costs life-threateningly high. Or the idea that love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for, even if they turn out to be an abuser. Or that lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end, even if the person who is being protected, usually from the authorities, is violent or coercive. Or the belief that love is blind and we are incapable of seeing our partner’s faults, despite them often being glaringly obvious to anyone outside the relationship.
 
It is these cultural ideas about romantic love, the women argue, that lead to the erosion of a woman’s power to leave or entirely avoid an abusive partner. Add these ideas to the powerful physiological and psychological need we have for love, and you leave an open goal for the abuser.
 
Love is the focus of so much science, philosophy and literary rumination because we struggle to define it, to predict its next move. Thanks to our biology and the reproductive mandate of evolution, love has long controlled us. But what if we could control love?
 
What if a magic potion existed that could induce us, or another, to fall in love or even wipe away the memories of a failed relationship? It is a quest as ancient as the first writings 5,000 years ago and the focus of many literary endeavours, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – who can forget Titania’s love for the ass-headed Bottom – and Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Even in a world where science has largely usurped magic, type ‘love potions’ into Google and the first two questions are: ‘How do you make a love potion?’ and ‘Do love potions actually work?’
 
But today we know enough about the chemistry of love for the elixir to be within our grasp. And we don’t have to look very far for our first candidate: synthetic oxytocin, used right now as an induction drug in labour. We know from extensive research in social neuroscience that artificial oxytocin also increases prosociality, trust and cooperation. Squirt it up the nose of new parents and it increases positive parenting behaviours. Oxytocin, as released by the brain when we are attracted to someone, is vital for the first stages of love because it quiets the fear centre of your brain and lowers your inhibitions to forming new relationships. Would a squirt up the nose do the same before you head out on a Saturday night?

 
The other possibility is MDMA or ecstasy, which mimics the neurochemical of long-term love, beta-endorphin. Recreational users of ecstasy report that it makes them feel boundless love for their fellow clubbers and increases their empathy. Researchers in the US have reported encouraging results when MDMA was used in marriage therapy to increase empathy, allowing participants to gain further insight into each other’s needs and find common ground.
 
Both of these sound like promising candidates but there are still issues to iron out and ethical discussions to have. How effective they are is highly context dependent. Based on their genetics, some people do exactly what is predicted of them. Boundaries are lowered and love sensations abound. But for a significant minority, particularly when it comes to oxytocin, people do exactly the opposite of what we would expect. For some, a dose of oxytocin, while increasing bonds with those they perceive to be in their in-group, increases feelings of ethnocentrism – racism – toward the out-group.
 
MDMA has other issues. For some people, it simply does not work. But the bigger problem is that the effects endure only while usage continues; anecdotal evidence suggests that, if you stop, the feelings of love and empathy disappear. This raises questions of practicality and ethical issues surrounding power imbalance. If you commenced a relationship while taking MDMA, would you have to continue? What if you were in a relationship with someone who had taken MDMA and you didn’t know? What would happen if they stopped? And could someone be induced to take MDMA against their will?
 
The ethical conversation around love drugs is complex. On one side are those who argue that taking a love drug is no more controversial than an antidepressant. Both alter your brain chemistry and, given the strong relationship between love and good mental and physical health, surely it is important that we use all the tools at our disposal to help people succeed? But maybe an anecdote from the book Love Is the Drug (2020) by Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu will give you pause. They describe SSRI prescriptions used to suppress the sexual urges of young male yeshiva students, to ensure that they comply with Jewish orthodox religious law – no sex before marriage, and definitely no homosexuality.
 
Could such drugs gain wider traction in repressive regimes as a weapon against what some perceive to be immoral forms of love? Remember that 71 countries still deem homosexuality to be illegal. It is not a massive leap of imagination to envisage the use of SSRIs to ‘cure’ people of this ‘affliction’. We only have to look at the continued existence of conversion therapy to see that this is a distinct possibility. Love drugs could end up being yet another form of abuse over which the individual has very little control.
 
Evolution saw fit to give us love to ensure we would continue to form and maintain the cooperative relationships that are our route to personal and, most crucially, genetic survival. It can be the source of euphoric happiness, calm contentment and much-needed security, but this is not its point. Love is merely the sweet treat handed to you by your babysitter to make sure the goal is achieved. Combine the ultimate evolutionary aim of love with our visceral need for it and the quick intelligence of our brains, and you have the recipe for a darker side to emerge. Some of this darker side is adaptive but, for those who experience it, it rarely ends well. At the very least there is pain – physical, psychological, financial – and, at the most, there is death, and the grief of those we leave behind.
 
Maybe it is time to rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about love because the danger on the horizon is not the dragon that needs to be slain by the knight to save the beautiful princess but the presence of some who mean to use its powers for their gain and our considerable loss. Like all of us, love is a complex beast: only by embracing it in its entirety do we truly understand it, and ourselves. And this means understanding its evolutionary story, the good and the bad.
 
Tainted love.  Love is both a wonderful thing and a cunning evolutionary trick to control us. A dangerous cocktail in the wrong hands.  By Anna Machin. Aeon, April 29, 2022.

Love
 
 At its most basic level, love is biological bribery. It is a set of neurochemicals which motivate you to, and reward you for,   commencing relationships with those in your life who you need to cooperate with—friends, family, lovers, the wider community—and then work to maintain them. As we will see in the next chapter, the sensations which these chemicals induce in the individual—and which we call the sensation of loving or at least liking—are there to make you feel warm, content, euphoric and encourage you not only to seek out new sources of this sensation but also motivate you to keep investing in your relationships in the long term so that the feeling, and the survival-essential cooperation, never ends.
 
Love: The Route to Health and Happiness
 
Who am I really, in isolation? I am always in relation to other people. So there is something about the people when you are with them. They are bringing out your best self. Your happiest self. The person I most enjoy being. When I am with them there is a sort of lifting of ‘Oh, not only am I feeling this joy of being with you but I am feeling the joy of being allowed to be this version of me.’ There is a self-love that happens when you are with someone else you love that you can only get by being with them. Margaret
 
I am sure we can all imagine how critical we were to each other in the knife-edge environments of our evolutionary past, and there are certainly areas of the world today where having the cooperation of others is still the difference between life and death. But surely here in the west, where our environment is relatively benign, and the service sector has seen fit to try and make everything we need to survive accessible from our sofa, cooperation, and in particular our closest relationships, are less about survival and more just about fun and belonging. We know what the important things for a healthy life are: exercise, a balanced diet, not smoking and maintaining a healthy weight. That’s it. We have survival cracked. But a seminal study carried out by psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues in 2010 would beg to differ.

 Julianne collected the data together from 148 studies which had explored rates of mortality following chronic illness—cancer, cardiovascular disease and renal failure being the most prominent—and aspects of an individual’s social network. For some studies this was the size of their network, their actual or perceived access to social support, their social isolation or loneliness, or the extent to which they were integrated into their network. Having carried out some very complex statistics to ensure she was comparing like with like, she concluded that being within a supportive social network reduced the risk of mortality by 50 percent. That places it on a par with quitting smoking, and of more influence than maintaining a healthy BMI measure.
 
My friends bring a support system that I know I can rely on. There is a dependability with them that I can rely on regardless. If I need cheering up, I know I can go to Bruno. If I need advice, career advice, I’ll go to David. If I need emotional, mental-health conversations, I’ll go to Nick. They provide similar but different attributes that I know I can go to. Surrounding myself with this support system means that whatever trouble or difficulty arises, I have support. Doug
 
Since Julianne’s study, numerous other projects have reinforced this conclusion; that having good-quality social relationships (known as social capital) is the most important factor in your health, happiness and life satisfaction. Indeed, in 2019 a group from Harvard in the US, led by Justin Rodgers, repeated Julianne’s study with the body of social-capital and health research published in the period 2007 to 2018. After reviewing 145 studies (in fact 1608 articles were published in this time but not all made it through the robust selection criteria), the Harvard team concluded that your social capital—be this the size or cohesion of your social network, your level of reciprocity or participation, your levels of trust, belonging or rate of volunteering—had a significant impact on your overall mortality or life expectancy, your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, cancer or diabetes, the likelihood you are obese and your perception of your own health. As I write towards the end of 2020, studies finding a link between social capital and cognitive function in the elderly, adherence to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis in at-risk gay men, reducing the risk of poor mental health following the acquisition of a disability and self-perception of health have been published. The question arises as to why being in good relationships has such a marked impact on our health? The reason is multifaceted, but explanations include the simple fact that having friends and family brings helpful resources such as money, practical care or health knowledge; that they make you feel better psychologically, which reduces the impact of stress on your body and improves your mental and physical health; or, most tantalisingly, that the neurochemicals which are released when you interact with those you love have a direct role in promoting the efficient functioning of your immune system.
 
‘Well, Hello, Beta-endorphin!’
 
I always feel better when I have seen my friends. So I saw one of them yesterday . . . I don’t get funny but I feel ‘Hmmm, I haven’t seen anyone for a couple of days.’ You get to offload . . . I need the balance of all my different friends. So mummy friends but also friends who I talk about books with and where we want to go. It is cathartic and we laugh. Life is busy and if you keep it all in your head it is unhealthy. Joan
 
We will learn in the next chapter that the sensation of love is underpinned by a cocktail of neurochemicals which are released when we interact with our friends and family. One of these neurochemicals—and the one I argue is the key to our ability to love in the long term—is known as beta-endorphin. Some of you may know this as the basis of your body’s natural pain-killing system or the source of the euphoric feeling which follows a bout of vigorous exercise—the phenomenon of the runner’s high—but it also appears to have a key role to play in the operation of our immune system. In 2012 endocrinologist Dipak Sarakar, who is based at Rutgers University in New Jersey, published his findings, based upon research in rats, that the mu-opioid and delta-opioid receptors had a role in the function of the natural killer cells which make up part of the mammalian immune system, ours included. The mu-opioid receptor, in particular, is the receptor in the brain upon which beta-endorphin acts, and as such Dipak’s work allows us to suggest that the release of beta-endorphin during social interaction stimulates the natural killer cells, meaning that unwanted pathogens are dealt with more efficiently than if social interaction has not occurred. This study still needs to be replicated in humans—the knocking out of some relevant genes in the rats makes this a tricky goal to achieve—but Dipak’s work offers the tantalising possibility that social interaction has an integral role to play in the operation of the body’s defence systems.
 
I hope it is clear by now that, whether we like it or not, we need each other and that love is the force which motivates us to overcome the difficulties of group living to cooperate at a level unmatched by any other species. We must cooperate to subsist, to learn, to raise our children, to innovate and create. We build complex and enduring networks encompassing our families, our friends, our co-workers and our lovers, which, regardless of individual differences, all follow the same pattern. Beyond the water, food and shelter that we need just to survive, our relationship with those we love has the largest impact on our health and happiness, our life satisfaction and longevity. Love has been around a long time but it is still as much about survival today as it has always been.
 
Excerpted from Why We Love, by Anna Machin, 2022 by Anna Machin.
 
Book Excerpt from Why We Love.  In Chapter 1, “Survival,” author Anna Machin describes the health benefits of strong human bonds.
 
The Scientist, March 14, 2022.

 

In an episode of the satirical comedy The Great, the reign of the reason-and-science-loving Russian empress Catherine nearly collapses when her husband Peter, the deposed emperor, storms into her private quarters, determined to imprison her. But seeing her tearful and in despair, he forgets his vindictiveness and hugs her. Later, he tells her, “I wanted your happiness more than my own.” “Wow,” she responds. “Indeed,” Peter says. “Love has done a strange thing to me. I wonder if you cut a man who has loved fiercely, you will see a different-shaped heart from a man who has not?”
 
Of course, no literal imprint of fierce love would be found in the heart if scientists went looking. But it’s safe to say that Peter was on to something. Love, scientists have shown, leaves noticeable and widespread traces of its impact on us. “Love is so important,” says evolutionary anthropologist Anna Machin, “that evolution has seen fit to engage every mechanism in your body to make sure you’re as close and bonded as you can be.”
 
Machin, who studies the genetics and neurochemistry of love—and has collaborated with the renowned Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, of “Dunbar’s number”—is the author of a new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships. In a recent interview with Nautilus, she says she tackles the whole spectrum of loving relationships from a variety of scientific perspectives to explain the nature of love. “If you’re a neuroscientist, you give one particular answer. If you’re a psychologist, give another one,” she said. “As an anthropologist—it’s a bit of a magpie profession—I gather all that together.” Machin’s responses to my questions were articulate and energetic, despite how far into the evening it was for her in England.
 
 
Why do you call love a form of bribery?
 
AM : The reason love evolved was to motivate and reward us for taking part in relationships, critical to our survival. That goes for our reproductive partners, children, and extending to our friends. Humans are highly cooperative because we have to be. A species will be solitary unless it absolutely has to cooperate with somebody else. And that’s fine, except it’s incredibly stressful. You have to spend a hell of a lot of time monitoring everybody else’s behavior, making sure you’re spotting those people who are trying to cheat you or steal from you.
 
And the way evolution made sure we cooperate was to come up with chemical bribery. At the basis of love are four neurochemicals. Each has a different role but together they motivate us or to give us confidence to go into social relationships. Ultimately, we get addicted to those chemicals. We get this hit of joy, of euphoria, of reward when we interact with the people important to our survival. It’s biological bribery. It’s like if I give my kids a sweet because they’ve done something good, which is bad parenting, but it works.
 
You also say love is about control. Why’s that?
 
AM : Because the only point of evolution is to pass genes down. This form of bribery is controlling us to make sure we do that. It’s a benign control. For most people, most of the time, the experience is lovely and warming and beneficial in terms of health. Unfortunately, our biology to seek love, crave love, find love, keep love, is a weakness. That visceral need can be exploited, it can be used to make us do things we don’t necessarily want to do. And that’s the cost of love. It can be used to manipulate or abuse or coerce us. That’s what separates us from the animals. Animals don’t use love to manipulate others. We do.
 
You say it’s scary that a baseline level of oxytocin, one of the neurochemicals of love, can predict whether a couple will be together six months later. Why’s that scary?
 
AM : When it comes to a relationship, it’s a little bit scary to know that part of that relationship is written in the stars before you even started. That’s because people with higher levels of oxytocin generally are more open to relationships, they are more committed to wanting to work toward a relationship. In fact, there are many things that go into whether a relationship will last—oxytocin levels, genetics, upbringing, your attachment profile, the support of your family. So it’s the private me talking, saying, “Oh my God, you meet someone, you think they’re wonderful, but the relationship is partly already written.”
 
 
Is love blind?
 
AM : Yes. What happens when you fall in love for the first time is the activation of various areas of the limbic system and the neocortex. But we also see deactivations. These deactivations occur mainly in the brain area linked to “mentalizing.” Mentalizing is the ability to tell someone’s intentions, and you need to be good at mentalizing to spot a liar or a cheat. To be able to tell if somebody is lying, you need to be good at understanding what their motivation is. But what happens when you fall in love for the first time is that bit shuts down. It just decides it’s not going to work anymore. For that reason, your friends can see this person is not necessarily good for you, that maybe they’re going to cheat on you or they’re lying to you, but you cannot see it.
 
Why would being blind in love have evolved?
 
AM : It’s interesting. Why would that have evolved? Why would that be something that was retained? Is it something to do with the same way that oxytocin lowers your inhibitions? Maybe it’s to remove some of the hurdles that you might place in your own way when you’re going to try and start a relationship. If you were constantly paranoid that everybody’s going to cheat on you or steal from you or lie to you, the species wouldn’t get very far. So maybe we have to remove that ability so that we have confidence and enough belief in the person that we fall in love with that we will carry on doing this. We see the same deactivation occurring when people listen to a charismatic religious leader.
 
Why do we fall in love with one person and not another? Or maybe I should ask, Why do we have lust for one person and not another?
 
AM : That’s very much a sensory input. Lust is an unconscious emotion. It takes place entirely in the limbic area of your brain. It happens within the first nanoseconds of you seeing somebody across a room. You’re going to use all your senses. They’re going to tell you things about that person’s health, their ability to protect, to provide, about the strength of their genes, particularly if you’re looking at sort of asymmetry within the face. You’ll listen to the tone of voice and what they say. And what they say is a good indication of cognitive ability or flexibility of intellect, or sense of humor.
 
Initially, you take in this information unconsciously. The algorithm in your head will decide, OK, this is somebody for you or this isn’t somebody for you. We all have a biological market value on our head, which is linked to the likelihood of reproductive success. The more likely you are to be reproductively successful, the more wealthy you are in terms of your biological market value. That classic thing when you see someone across the room and you think either, “Oh my God, they’re completely out of my league.” That’s basically what your brain’s thinking or, “I can do so much better.” That’s part of the calculation. If you get a tick from your algorithm, then oxytocin and dopamine are released and off you go, and you fill that chemical sort of job, that lustful feeling, that chemistry that develops between two people. The conscious brain kicks in pretty quickly after that, but the first moments are completely unconscious.
 
Why do you say the biology of love can sound non-feminist?
 
AM : The reason for that is I often get called out. I do a lot of public speaking and I explain to people the rules of mate choice as biology sees them. But a lot of women, in particular, find it hard to accept that they are still looking for a protector and a provider. I try to explain that even though they are now capable of being independent, financially independent, they’re still looking for that in the man. These mate-choice rules are evolutionarily incredibly ancient. Whenever we see mate choice in any species, this is what we see. One reason why some women are in a position where they’re financially comfortable, and don’t need a man for that, is because they live in a culture where there’s a certain amount of gender equality. That has come about partly from feminism. But feminism hasn’t touched evolution, partly because it’s very recent. Women have only been able to control their contraception, for example, for about the last 70 years. That’s nothing in evolutionary time. Something as deep-seated as mate choice only changes in human behavior when it’s pretty much universal among the species, and there is not equality in a vast number of countries in the world, so it’s not going to touch it.
 
 
What do you mean when you write that “cross-sex cooperation is cognitively the costliest of all cooperation?”
 
AM : This is something that people find difficult to accept. You always get cooperation within a sex before you get cooperation between the sexes. You’re only driven to cooperate with the opposite sex when you’ve exhausted your own. The reason is we’re trading similar currencies in our own sex.
 
When we look at the environment in which we evolved, the biggie was childcare. We have these dependent babies. To be able to function, you need help with those children. And women would turn to their female kin first to do that. Cooperation is all about reciprocity. We want to make sure the balance sheet is even. You don’t want to be the one always doing all the helping and never getting anything back. From a survival point of view, that’s not a good thing to do.
 
With men, you tend to be trading things like alliance, support, help in fights. When you get men and women cooperating, particularly in the human evolutionary line, you are trading those different things. Women still want childcare. I would like you to help me raise our children, but the man is there because he basically wants to have sex and produce some more children with her. You’re trading sex for childcare.
 
So those are two different currencies. Your brain is having to do a currency calculation. And when we look at the way the brain has evolved, we see the development of cognitive architecture that enables you to start doing those more complex calculations. So cross-sex cooperation is so much harder at the fundamental level than cooperating within your sex.
 
You say there’s a difference between how mothers and fathers form attachment to their kids. How so?
 
AM : Attachment is a deep, psychological bond between two people. A mother’s attachment is based purely on nurture. The strength of that attachment will be based upon the sensitive and positive way she nurtures that child. For a father, nurture is important, but there’s an added element that comes from the cortical area of the brain. That’s the bit saying, “OK, I’m going to push your developmental boundaries. I’m going to make you more resilient. I’m going to push you into the world beyond the family.” What joins all fathers around the world is they have this role in scaffolding the child’s entry into the social world. That’s the underpinning of what they’re involved in developmentally.
 
People can sometimes find that difficult because they’re like, “Well, those are just culturally gendered roles.” Yes, you can argue that, but it also has an evolutionary explanation, which is the fact that evolution doesn’t do redundancy. It doesn’t cause two individuals who have input into something to have the same role if that’s not required because that’s just a waste of energy. Bear in mind that human children take a huge amount of emotional, cognitive, and practical input to raise. So it’s important that the parents fit together well and give that developmental environment.

 
What does your research say about parenting in a non-traditional family?
 
AM : What happens is we see changes in the brains of a single parent or a parent in a same-sex couple. The human brain is incredibly plastic. All parents have the ability to nurture, to challenge, to build resilience. We see changes that enable the brain in a single individual to behave in ways like a mom or dad. If we look at say, the Aka people in the Congo, where the fathers spend about 60 percent of their time in physical contact with their children, you will see a different way of parenting. As with everything, some parenting is biological, and some is environmental and contextual. What we found universally with men is they have a role in building resilience in pushing their child into the world, but they do that in a culturally specific way. It depends on the environmental context of what that world is.
 
 
How does our upbringing as kids affect our love lives?
 
AM : Let’s say you had a secure attachment to your parents when you’re a child. That means you had sensitive parenting, they were aware of your emotional and physical needs, and met those needs. You were secure, you did not suffer anxiety, you did not suffer abandonment. That’s bathing your brain in oxytocin and dopamine and beta endorphin, and you’re producing low levels of cortisol, you’re producing this highly efficient brain, you’re not going to see neuronal death, which is what happens with neglect. When you go forward, you’re going to have the biological underpinnings and the psychological underpinnings to be able to build good attachments, to build healthy relationships, and know when a relationship is not healthy for you, in which case you should leave.
 
Unfortunately, the opposite happens. We see brains bathed in a high degree of cortisol. We see active neuronal death, which means you see reductions in gray and white matter in those pro-social areas of the brain. They do not go forward with those abilities to do all that, to do the reciprocity, the trust, the empathy. The behavior they have watched, which is relationship behavior, is not good and that’s something that they will replicate going forward. But they also do not have the powerful biological underpinnings to enable them to be able to have good relationships.
 
You say we underestimate the love that comes from friendships. That might be starting to change. There was a widely read article in The Atlantic recently that touched on this titled, “It’s Your Friends That Break Your Heart: The older we get, the more we need our friends and the harder it is to keep them.” How does that headline strike you?
 
AM : We tend to privilege romantic relationships and maybe parental relationships, but we take our friendships for granted. But they are incredibly important to you. They are the only platonic relationships you get to choose yourself. You don’t get to choose your family but you get to actively choose your friends. In fact, our research shows that you are much more similar to your friends than you are to your lover. If you’re a woman, you are more emotionally intimate with your friends than you are with your lover. If you’re a man, your friends bring this ease of being able to really be you.
 
So our friends provide a lot to us. And we neglect our friendships at our peril because often our friendships outlast our romantic relationships, and they are the ones that are really your stable foundation. You need them in your life for your mental health, your physical health, for your longevity, and your well-being. But I do think we underestimate them. I interview so many people for my research, and particularly when I interview British people, I’ll ask them, “Do you love your friends?” And they’ll go, “Hmmm, I don’t know whether I love them.” And then I’ll say, “Well, do you love your dog?” “Oh God, yeah! I love my dog.” And it’s just this thing that we don’t consider the fact that we could love our friends. And I think that’s maybe a peculiarly British thing that’s quite restrained that we wouldn’t admit that.
 
The philosopher Alain de Botton has argued that romanticism has severely distorted how people think about love and what to expect from it. What do you think of that?
 
AM : I agree with him. The narrative is unhelpful. This idea of the chivalrous prince rescuing his princess from a castle. It sets up an incredibly idealistic view and very gendered view of what romantic love is, which doesn’t reflect the reality for most people. The idea that there is the one—well, we can quite clearly tell from the inputs that go into what attracts people that there’s more than one person in the world for you. Also, from an anthropological and sociological point of view, it’s a narrative that works for society because it’s a controlled narrative: We can have everybody pairing up with one other person and we set in place all these rules. We have these zero-sum ideas of love. But the idea of romantic love doesn’t reflect the reality of people’s existence, particularly with increasing singledom. The idea that romantic love is the most powerful love is unhelpful because it demotes all the other ways that you can love in your life. And none of them are weaker than romantic love, but we seem to think that they’re not as good. They’re not as important.
 
The narrative also doesn’t help people get out of abusive relationships. If you tell a child that love is like a fairy tale, you’ll get swept off your feet, that love lasts against all odds and will help get over any hurdle, that doesn’t help in the context of abuse. It leads to the idea that you have no control over this person that is abusing you. When you do. So it’s a really unhelpful narrative. And it’s a narrative that’s spun mostly today by commerce. You can have the perfect wedding with your soulmate. That’s the be-all-and-end-all of life. I sound cynical, but I completely agree that romantic love is not a helpful narrative.
 
Has becoming scientifically knowledgeable about love affected your personal relationships in any way?
 
AM : It hasn’t affected it in a negative way at all. People say, “Well, it must have been because you spend your life in cold science, analyzing what love is.” I think if that’s all I did, I think it would. I think if you reduced it constantly to a set of neurochemicals or a genetic driver, I think maybe you would. But because I do it from an anthropological perspective, and spend a lot of time talking to people about their love, I just find love an amazing phenomenon. The more I study it, the more in awe I am of its complexity in the human species.

Love Is Biological Bribery.  Evolution uses all its tricks to make sure we procreate. But love in humans is a many-splendored thing. By  Brian Gallagher. Nautilus,  February 14, 2022

I have spent much of the past decade talking to people about love. I make it clear that any type of love is a welcome topic but when I ask what love is, my interviewees often shoot straight to romantic love. This is partly down to the inadequacy of our language: that small word has to do a lot of heavy lifting. But it is also because of the multibillion-pound industry that has convinced us the search for “the one” is the be-all and end-all. Mention love and that’s where we immediately go.

 
But does this obsession with romantic love still reflect the lives we lead? In my new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind our Closest Relationships, I have spoken to people from different backgrounds who have made me rethink our acceptance of romantic love as the dominant narrative. For some it is not a priority, for others it is a restrictive stereotype, while for others it can be a source of risk. As Valentine’s Day comes round again maybe it’s time for a different perspective.
 
Human love is a special thing, unique in its longevity and the sheer number of beings we are capable of loving. We can love our family, our friends, our lovers. We can also love across the species boundary and the spiritual divide. And as AI romps ahead it may be that one day we can find love with an avatar or robot.
 
In part, writing my book was driven by a desire, born of a decade of research, to get us to re-engage with and celebrate the different types of love in our lives. All forms of love carry the same joys and benefits as romantic love. In some cases, such as with our best friends, the love we have for them can be more emotionally intimate and less stress inducing than any we have with a lover.
 
Demographic data shows that the downgrading of romantic love is, to some extent, already happening. Figures from the Office for National Statistics and Relate show that by 2039, one in seven people in the UK will be living alone and today only one in six people believe in “the one”.
 
This change is particularly striking for women. Go back 100 years and your survival was predicated on finding a man who would support you and your inevitable brood of children. But with emancipation and the arrival of contraception women can choose not to partner themselves to anyone else and can remain happily child-free.
 
Instead, they can build loving relationships with other people and beings who are capable of fulfilling all their needs. Relationships, science shows us, are underpinned by the same biological and psychological mechanisms and are as beneficial to health and wellbeing as romantic love. Any hierarchy of importance is a cultural construct.
 
Even when we consider romantic love there is a spectrum of opportunity beyond monogamy which we rarely acknowledge. At one end are the aromantics who do not experience romantic love. It shows how far we have swallowed the romantic love narrative that they are characterised as being cold and unloving. But my aromantic interviewees do not lack love. They have full and loving lives, with family, friends, even queer platonic partners with whom they may have children. Their main issue is navigating a world where every person, every media outlet appears to be obsessed with romantic love.
 
At the other end of the spectrum are the polyamorists. A group who experience romantic and sexual love with more than one partner. Again, the all-pervasive narrative of romantic love has led us to depict those who practise polyamory in a less than favourable light. They are characterised as being promiscuous, immoral, untrustworthy and dissatisfied.

 
But to be successful, polyamorous relationships have to be based on trust, truth and open communication. They are moral because love for another is openly acknowledged rather than hidden in the secret of an affair. And while people can stay in monogamous relationships because of the legal ties that bind them, polyamorists recommit to their relationships every day.
 
The power of the romantic narrative to drive dating behaviour and commerce is clear but it may also have darker consequences. In 2017 the testimony of 15 women regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) was published. It was clear that one of the issues with IPV was the stories these women had heard about what love was. Love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs (even when you’re being abused). Love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for (even if they are violent). Lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end (even against the authorities who are trying to protect you). It is interesting to contemplate the power of our words. We speak without thinking but the stories we tell our children have consequences.
 
Perhaps when ones survival, social standing and acceptance is predicated on coupling up, the obsession with romantic love is understandable. And it will always have a place in the spectrum of love. But we can experience love in so many different ways that we underestimate, even neglect. We are missing out on so much.
 
Maybe it’s time to admit that for a significant number of people romantic love is no longer the ultimate goal, that Valentine’s Day is a commercial invention that has run its course and that we need to embrace all the opportunities for love in our lives to fully experience what it is to be human. It’s time for an inclusive celebration of love rather than an exclusive one. Time for a rebrand.
 
Romantic love isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Here’s why we don’t need it. By Anna Machin. The Guardian, February 13, 2022. 

Friends bring a sense of freedom and relaxation to our lives. This may be in part because we are likely to pick friends who are similar to ourselves—the concept of homophily. So we tend to select friends with whom we share our sex, ethnicity and age, our behavior, personality and degree of altruism. Indeed, my colleague Robin Dunbar, who has spent many decades exploring the dynamics of human relationships, has identified seven pillars of friendship; the more pillars you share, the stronger the friendship and greater the love. These are: language, where you grew up, educational history, hobbies or interests, musical taste, sense of humor and your world-view.

 
It is argued that such homophily has a psychological and evolutionary benefit. In the first instance, choosing friends who are like us reinforces our views and beliefs, making us feel more confident in our identity. But it also allows us to cut down on the precious energy—known as the cognitive load—we devote to trying to predict what they may think or do next because, due to the similarity, they are most likely to do or think exactly what we would do or think in the same circumstances. And for the first time, the idea that friends think alike has some solid evidence from the scanning room.
 
In 2018 psychologists Carolyn Parkinson, Adam Kleinbaum and Thalia Wheatley set out to explore whether the homophily we exhibit with our closest friends was reflected in a similarity in the way we perceive, interpret and respond to the world. Was the ease of relationship we find with our friends partly down to the fact that we just think the same way?
 
They recruited 279 students—the entire cohort from one year of a graduate program. They asked the students to complete a questionnaire listing everyone on the program who they would deem to be a friend. They then set about, with the welcome help of a computer, creating a social network for the class, illustrating every link, or tie, between the students. Their prediction was that the closer two people were to each other in the network, indicating a stronger tie, the more similar their neural response would be.
 
Placing 279 students in an fMRI scanner would have been prohibitively expensive, so a subset of 42 students was used for the scanning study. Once in the scanner, everyone watched the same set of videos in the same order. Videos were chosen to cover a range of topics and to be sufficiently gripping so as not to encourage the mind to wander. And what the researchers saw confirmed their hunch: that homophily extends beyond hobbies, ethnicity, age or sex to include our brains. The signals seen in the brains of friends—both in the unconscious and conscious brain—were more similar than those between people who were more distant in the network. And to test their model they viewed paired sets of neural activity scans, and just by establishing how similar or different these scans were, they could predict how close the two people were in the network. Now that is a concrete finding.
 
The question remains: do we become friends with those who think the way we do, or by being friends do we come to perceive, interpret and respond to the world in a similar way simply by being together? Because this study only allowed us to glimpse a snapshot in time, the answer is unclear. We would have to follow a friendship from its very moment of creation. But, as with all things human, it is probably a bit of both—a degree of homophily and the influence a friendship brings to bear on shaping our behavior and psychology.
 
The Future is Single
 
There is a weird idea that you are supposed to get everything from your romantic relationship but I realize the huge amount of love I have in my life. I do miss having a very specific romantic connection, but I feel the love of my friends. Living in a house share with real friends makes me realize that a lot of what I thought I wanted from a relationship was a close, daily friendship really and I get a lot of that from my house share.
 
–Margaret
 
Why do I argue that neglecting your friends places you at considerable risk? Because for a significant number of people their friends fulfill the role of a romantic partner, a child and even a whole family in their lives. They are your survival-critical relationships. Recent data from the 2015 US census has predicted that six percent of the current adult US population will remain single for their entire life. Now obviously some of these will have children—a particular interest of mine is the rise of the platonic co-parenting relationship—but for the majority this means no lover and no kids. In this case, two groups of people become the key attachment figures who will underscore your health and happiness as an adult. Your siblings—if you have them and get on with them—and your best friend or friends.

 
Research on the power of the attachment between friends is only in its early days, but in her 2017 study looking at the role of best friends and siblings in the lives of female singles, New-York-based psychologist Claudia Brumbaugh found that best friends played a crucial role both because of our close similarity to them and our freedom to choose them. The larger a single person’s friendship network, the less likely they were to exhibit an avoidant attachment style. And it would appear that our friends may know us at least as well as we know ourselves.
 
In their study of the brain activity associated with considering our own personality—self-referential thinking—and the brain activity of a peer considering our personality, the brain activity is strikingly similar. Psychologists Robert Chavez and Dylan Wagner recruited a small but tightly knit network of 11 students, five of whom were female. Having completed the usual battery of questionnaires, each participant was placed in the scanner and directed to think about their own personality and that of each of their ten peers. When scans were compared, the brain pattern seen when an individual—let’s call them A—reflected on their own personality matched that of the pattern seen in the scans for their ten peers when they were also thinking of A’s personality, but not when they thought about the personalities of the other members in the group, say B or C. This study shows us not only that, again, friends show synchronous activity when attending to the same task but that our friends definitely know us at least as well as we know ourselves.
 
 
Friendship, Love and Prosecco
 
Nick is the quintessential best friend. We have known each other since school. We have had many many experiences and memories together and he is someone I can always turn to for a chat… someone to lift me up, to brighten me up. He is one of the people I am my truest self to. The closer the guys get, the more shit they give each other, and with me and him nothing is off the cards, everything is up for debate.
 
–Matt
 
Claudia’s study focused on the friendships amongst female participants, and it is the case that there is a sex difference in both the number and nature of the relationships we build with friends and, maybe, in the love we experience with them. Repeated studies have shown that men’s friendship groups are less tightly bonded and are less emotionally close than those between women. And while it is very likely that a woman can identify a best friend or two, this tends to be anathema to a lot of men. While men like to carry out activities with their friends, women tend to prefer the opportunity to share intimate chats. Why do we see this difference? It might all lie in the impact our neurochemistry has on us.
 
In 2018 a group of Chinese researchers, led by Xiaole Ma, reported in the journal NeuroImage the findings of a study that aimed to explore the different impact the administration of synthetic oxytocin would have upon the experience of emotional sharing in men and women. They recruited 128 pairs of same-sex close friends and, having placed one in an fMRI scanner and another in an adjoining room, showed both a set of images of people, landscapes and animals selected to represent three points on the emotion spectrum: positive, negative and neutral. Some of the pairs had been administered with a nasal spray of oxytocin, while others had been given a placebo. Having completed the task with their friend, they then completed it with a stranger and then alone.
 
What Xiaole and her team found was that where women were sharing the experience of watching the images with a friend, and had been given oxytocin, their experience was significantly more positive than if they had done so with a stranger or alone. This seemed to have been underpinned by a reduction in the activity of the amygdala—the site of our negative emotions, including fear and anxiety—and an increase of activity in the reward centers of the brain, which was, in all likelihood, reflecting the release of dopamine which accompanies any increase in oxytocin. This is the fingerprint of unconscious love.
 
However, the same could not be true of men. In this case, activity in the amygdala increased. It would appear that women gain a considerable benefit from sharing emotional experiences with their female friends—reduced fear and anxiety and an increased positive mood—which might explain why we relish the opportunity to catch up over a glass of prosecco and why our conversations tend to focus on the emotional and intimate, whereas men prefer to avoid these occasions at all costs and head for the football field or meet in a large group of friends instead. Can we say, then, that for women there is such a thing as friendship love but not for men? I think this is very unlikely to be the case, but until we place a man in a scanner and recreate the relationship he has with his team of mates in the lab the jury is still out.
 
Excerpted from Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships by Dr. Anna Machin.
 
How Important Is It to Be Friends with Yourself? Dr. Anna Machin on Platonic Love and Choosing Friends. LitHub, February 11, 2022.

What can the social and life sciences tell us about the most fundamental and unquantifiable human experience—love? Anna Manchin, evolutionary anthropologist at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, England, is interested in the the the most inclusive possible answer, one that, unlike previous books on the subject, considers friendship and family on par with romantic love, as well as polyamory, chosen families, queer love, and touchingly, the love we feel for pets, celebrities, and deities. 

Why We Love: An Afternoon with Dr. Anna Machin and Robin Dunbar. Books & Books, February 10, 2022. 

Weidenfeld and Nicholson 

Love is unpredictable and complex. After spending many years researching its layers, I remain in awe of how it engages every mechanism in our bodies and infiltrates every aspect of our lives. But for a species like ours that craves certainty, this can cause all sorts of problems.
 
The first recorded evidence for an “elixir of love” dates back to 4000 years ago. Ready access to love drugs is at most a decade away. Indeed, they are already being used therapeutically to support couples in the US.
 
The experience of love is underpinned by four neurochemicals: oxytocin, dopamine, beta-endorphin and serotonin. Oxytocin is key at the start of relationships because it lowers our inhibitions to making new bonds, then dopamine motivates and rewards us for carrying out this survival critical behaviour. Serotonin underpins the obsessive elements of love, while beta-endorphin addicts us to love in the long term.
 
Drugs that may be capable of mimicking love are already in use. The first, oxytocin, is utilised to induce labour, but research shows that it can also increase sociability, trust and empathy. The second is recreational drug MDMA or ecstasy, which is capable of inducing euphoria, empathy and love for our fellow humans.
 
Arguably, taking a drug to induce or maintain love is no different to taking an antidepressant, because both supplement neurochemicals that naturally exist in our bodies. Add to this the link between having healthy relationships and good mental and physical well-being, and prescribing these drugs could revolutionise someone’s quality of life. But whether these drugs work is dependent on the individual.
 
For a significant minority of people, recent research has found that oxytocin leads to increased social confidence and trust, meaning that they are more likely to form new relationships. For some, it has the opposite effect and studies have shown that it can cause negative interactions and even racism. Some people feel the impact of MDMA and others don’t.
 
This raises many ethical questions. It might be fine to decide to take a love drug yourself, because that is your risk, but is it fair when it affects someone else’s life? Where there are power imbalances in a relationship, or even abuse, could one party be coerced by the other to take the drug? And what if one of you stops and the other doesn’t?
 
Those who argue for the use of love drugs sometimes say these risks are minimal because use of the drugs would be regulated. But this is an overly utopian view of the world and our behaviour.
 
While being in love is wonderful, losing love can be debilitating. Drugs might be able to help here too. What if we could find a drug that would inhibit our feelings of love or erase painful memories?
 
One possibility is antidepressants known as SSRIs. People who take them for depression report loss of libido and reduced emotional reactions. Could we harness these aspects and, with a bit of tweaking, make a love-inhibiting drug? Maybe. But anecdotal evidence – reported in Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu’s book Love is the Drug – that SSRIs are being prescribed to young men in strict religious communities to repress homosexuality should sound a warning bell. Not everyone will stick to prescribing rules.
 
With all innovations comes the responsibility to explore both the positives and negatives of their impact. Technology has revolutionised how we find love in the past 20 years: tests for genetic compatibility are now commercially available.
 
Love is so central to our lives that it is crucial that we decide what we would accept and what is unconscionable before the juggernaut of science and commerce runs away with us.
 
Love drugs are coming and they bring big ethical problems with them.  Drugs to help people fall in love are increasingly becoming viable, but they could cause harm as well as happiness, says Anna Machin.

New Scientist, February 9, 2022.

 Website Anna Machin