The Science of Love and Betrayal

Abstract

This chapter tackles how science can explain why we fall in love. It disposes of the idea that romantic love is a modern Western invention. As the chapter emphasizes, there is strong evidence it is a human universal, crossing historical and cultural boundaries. The chapter also accounts for romantic love in terms of the body's chemistry. It notes that oxytocin does not seem helpful in explaining why we prefer a particular person to all others, which is the essence of romantic love. The chapter then drifts away from the currently unanswerable question of falling in love to the more general issue of why human beings became monogamous in the first place. It argues that when we fall in love, it is with a fiction we have ourselves invented. The chapter then considers social networking sites such as Facebook, and questions the author's most famous theory, which is that we are not capable of more than about 150 friendships — the average size of ancient hunter-gatherer communities.