It is time to investigate the biology of this bittersweet experience we call love. High divorce and remarriage rates are seen in many other cultures, as well. Currently, some 80 percent of divorced men and 72 percent of divorced women remarry but 54 percent and 61 percent, respectively, divorce again. But the divorce rate in the United States is expected to reach 67 percent in the next decade. Love is a powerful force the vast majority of Americans marry. Men and women in societies everywhere can experience clinical depression when a love relationship fails and psychologists say that a significant percentage of those who commit suicide do so because they have been rejected by a beloved. Husbands, although to a lesser degree, are physically abused by wives. In fact, male sexual jealousy is the foremost cause of wife battering in cultures worldwide. Each year, some one million American women are followed and harassed by rejected lovers 370,000 men are stalked by former partners and approximately 1.8 million wives in the United States are beaten by their husbands. At least 25 percent of homicides in the United States involve spouses, sexual partners, or sexual rivals. Certainly such love can be a joyous state, but it is also capable of producing deeply disturbing, even dangerous results. Neglecting the biology of the emotions that direct mating and reproduction, emotions that in our species are sometimes called “love,” has had tragic consequences. While scientists regard other complex emotional states such as depression, anxiety, or fear as complex, but not unfathomable, love is relegated to the poets and songsters. Perhaps at some level scientists share the poet’s conceit that love is ineffable, a human fifth dimension beyond reason’s ken. Thousands of answers have been offered-but surprisingly few by biologists, including brain scientists.
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