When Dr Love met Dr Lonely (clue: fireworks)
‘LOVE’, says Stephanie Cacioppo ‘is a biological necessity. We cannot realise our full potential as human beings without it.’
A senior neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, she has spent her entire career exploring how romantic love affects the human brain. Decades of studying what sparks our neurons led her to conclude that love makes us think faster, heal quicker and perform tasks more creatively.
But despite being nicknamed Dr Love by her colleagues, and lecturing on the brain-boosting power of socialising, Cacioppo was herself a loner.
As a young woman, she threw all her passion into science, fighting the snooty professors who told her that love was too ‘lightweight’ a topic for serious study. (She cleverly substituted the word ‘love’ for ‘pair bonding’ to get her funding.)
By the age of 37 she had never been in love and ‘assumed I would never experience romance outside the laboratory’, she says. ‘I told myself that being unattached made me a more objective researcher.’
But in Wired For Love she tells the story of the love affair that allowed her to experience the lifechanging elation she had expected only to observe in others.
Cupid struck at a conference in 2011, when Cacioppo found herself seated next to a 60-year-old male scientist who specialised in the study of loneliness. Like Dr Love, Dr Loneliness didn’t practise what he preached; twice divorced, John Cacioppo had realised his devotion to science had left him unable to give a partner the attention they deserved.
But everything changed once he got talking to Dr Love, who was so busy gazing deeply into his hazel eyes that her inner neurologist only just registered ‘the dopamine flooding my brain’s reward circuitry, my elevated heart rate, adrenaline expanding the capillaries in my cheeks causing me to blush . . .’
She compares the experience to being a rocket scientist who, after decades of study, suddenly finds themselves in space. ‘You have a deeper appreciation because you know how it works!’
The couple married spontane
ously in Paris, then she moved into his home in Chicago. They shopped together, ran together, travelled together, their ‘mirror neurons’ in a constant feedback loop of mutual delight. ‘We were living proof of our science,’ she says. ‘We did everything together and we were doing things better . . . It was a life lesson for me.’
But in 2015, John was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. The news changed them both, but they knew that people are more likely to find happiness by adapting to change. And that they had the required neuroplasticity to manage that change. So they made the most of every moment they had together before John died in 2018.
Although Cacioppo knew the science of grief, she wasn’t prepared for the emotional fall-out from the night her husband died in her arms. But it was his work on loneliness that gave her a road map to rebuilding her life without him. She had lost John, but she had not lost their love. It could continue to surround, delight and inspire her.
I must admit that I sometimes found Cacioppo’s conclusions were a little head over heels. I do wonder if — after the first rush of hormones — other forms of love (for friends, children, work, hobbies) don’t offer the same benefits for many, especially over the long term.
She refers to a study which showed that widowers were more likely to die after the death of their wives, but doesn’t mention the 2019 LSE study suggesting that — while married men are more likely to be happy and live longer — unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population, and more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers.
But I still felt uplifted by Cacioppo’s story. And anyone looking for love would be well advised to read her expert tips on how to spark romance and make it last. Don’t offer anyone your heart. Offer them your brain and enjoy the fireworks.