A dozen lessons in love: Part 7
It must be love
This song was originally recorded by Labi Siffre in 1971 and reached No.14 in the UK charts. The cover by Madness was released in November 1981 when I was 13 years old and is the version that people know best. It reached No.4 in the UK charts and No.33 on the US Billboard. The song is a very upbeat celebration of love: “nothing more, nothing less, love is the best”.
Previous posts have discussed how love is not always the best. Even its first flushes can be source of considerable anxiety. Nothing in life is categorically good or bad, especially not in large doses and over time. But when most people think about the word “love”, they will initially think of it in a positive way, and typically in the context of an intimate relationship. So, let me reflect, for the most part at least, on that positivity here. My focus will be on passionate love (simply love from now on unless explicitly otherwise).
Love is associated with many changes in cognition, emotion and behaviour. For the most part, these changes are consistent with the disruption of existing activities, routines and social networks to orient the individual’s attention and goal-directed behaviour towards a new partner. If the love is reciprocated, then there’s something to be said for the disruption it causes. Experiences of love have been linked to personal growth and to motivation. Those butterflies in your stomach get you out of bed, encourage you to go to new places and to try new things.
There is a burgeoning literature on the neurobiology of love, and I have touched on this in previous posts. In the early stages of love, serotonin levels drop, which can contribute towards obsessive thoughts, and cortisol goes up mostly due to the uncertainties of a new love. Dopamine initially spikes, reflecting the pleasure from a new love, and then settles down once the oxytocin associated with connection kicks in. We are all drawn to these feelings, and a strong desire to love and to be loved – some more than others of course.
Spencer Ackermann, a student on my Executive Masters in Behavioural Science, chose the value of love as his dissertation topic in 2019. Amongst other things, he asked 1000 people online what they would be willing to pay for various scenarios relating to experiences of love. What percentage of your income each month would you be willing to pay to be in a relationship where you are both in love, but which eventually ends amicably? What if it ended acrimoniously? And what about being in a relationship where neither of you are in love but where the relationship never ends?
Unsurprisingly perhaps, people are willing to pay a great deal for a loving relationship that comes to an amicable end – on average, about a quarter of their monthly income. But what about an acrimonious split where love was present, to an endless relationship where love is absent? Well, about 9% of monthly income in the former case and 6% in the latter. At the same time, people were willing to sacrifice almost a fifth of their income as a one-off payment “for a potion to forget the entire relationship preceding your worst breakup, including the breakup itself”.
So, it would seem from these data that to have loved and lost is worth about 50% more than to have never loved at all. Better still, would be the possibility of erasing the relationship with the worst breakup. What do you make of these results? How do they compare with your own valuations? Amongst other things, it would be interesting to compare willingness to pay values for love to what the same people would be willing to pay for other key determinants of happiness, such as health.
Put simply, but in terms that are not a million miles away from the scenarios presented to people to elicit monetary values for health, would you prefer to be rich and unhealthy or poor and healthy? Similarly, would you prefer to be rich and not in love or poor and in love? I suspect that health will have a more consistent value over the life course, whereas love will matter more at some ages and stages than at others.
One thing is for sure, we think of health and love very differently when it comes to public policy. Most people agree that there should be some considerable of degree of government involvement in the financing of healthcare, but there is no appetite for a national love service. I’m not suggesting there should be one (and the term itself is a little creepy), but it’s interesting to consider why health and love are viewed so very differently despite both being fundamental concerns. There are incentives to marry of course, but love and marriage don’t always go together like a horse and carriage.
A healthy life is more likely to be a happy life, but can we be truly happy without ever experiencing love? I’ll leave you to ponder that one as I start thinking about lessons in love, part 8.