Why do we fall in love?

Scientists have been trying to answer that question with logic and reason. But how exactly do you answer the question of love, which by its nature defies logic and reason?

By WES ALLISON, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 14, 2002

[Times photo: Douglas Clifford] Photos of Bill and Minnie Hansen show them sharing a kiss on their wedding day, and today. They have been married since Christmas Day, 1951.

At least one of them, it seems, would know why. They raised three wonderful daughters. Built an enviable marriage on a foundation of humor, respect and independence. Marked their 50th anniversary on Christmas Day.

It's a love affair that Clearwater residents Bill and Minnie Hansen, both 70, trace to the halls of Bloom Township High School in the suburbs of Chicago. Mr. Hansen says there was just something about her, a certain attraction he can't quite identify. She felt it, too.

"It was probably because he was cute, at first. Physical attraction. And then the personality," Mrs. Hansen said. "He was just a sweet, kind person."

"I guess she was a girl that I said I want to take out, and that's when we started," he added. "We got along ever since, most of the time."

Why did they, or anyone, choose each other? Why did this love, or any love, take hold? Science would love to know. With photographs and personality profiles, hamster noses and boxes of sweaty T-shirts, biologists and anthropologists the world over are trying to pin love down.

Is it mere availability? Scent? Our own personal "love map?" Some primal pull?

One of the biggest barriers to explaining love, of course, is the incongruity of the question: Love snubs intellect, and emotion so often ruins reason -- the very pillar of sound science. Our most famous love story tells of star-crossed lovers who choose death over being apart.

On the other hand, the essential function of romantic love is so unromantic. So base. Our species depends not on the moonlit pinings and poetry of silly lovers in an orchard, a la Romeo and Juliet. It depends on getting the job done.

At that level, we're no different than the multiplying colony of fruit flies you nursed in ninth-grade biology class.

Earth's 6-billion squirming residents attest to that.

"We spend our lives secretly sizing up our alternatives, and making Darwinianly appropriate decisions," said Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and one of the leading researchers of love and society.

"We're pretty stupid in love, but we're built to make all kinds of decisions that are good for our survival. Or we'd die off."

What's that smell?

Let's start with the basics. Fisher, author of The Anatomy of Love, sorts love into three categories: First is lust. It pushes us onto the dance floor, so to speak.

The second is romantic love, the euphoria that comes with a new relationship and urges us to make it work. In some couples, like the Hansens, this may last years. In others, just weeks. Or days.

Fisher believes romantic love evolved to trick us into focusing our "mating energy" on one person at a time.

The third, if we're lucky, is the sense of calm and security that comes with a long-term partner. This is the love that survives the storms and, one hopes, occasionally catches a westerly breeze for an exhilarating dash through a tropical sea. Or at least keeps us talking when Jeopardy isn't on.

Fisher calls this love "attachment." And she finds its purpose not so pure.

"Attachment," she said, "evolved to (let us) be able to tolerate this individual at least long enough to raise a child together."

As to what starts the dance, and makes lust happen? There's no shortage of products that claim to make you irresistible to the opposite sex. And it's no coincidence most are scents.

Over the years, as scientists sought to unravel the mystery of how people choose their mates, they keep returning to the nose.

One enticing theory is the function of the vomeronasal organ, or VNO, a pea-sized gland at the base of the nose. You can find it in dogs, cats and cows, as well as snakes. Smell is strongly associated with mating among animals, and the VNO's job is to detect odorless pheromones from the opposite sex.

In fact, if you remove the VNO from a virgin male hamster, he can hardly mate, explained Dr. Michael Meredith, professor of biological sciences and neuroscience at Florida State University.

But when the organ is removed from a male hamster after he has had sex at least once, he can easily play Casanova again. The VNO loses its importance.

"Our assumption is that in his (sexual) experience, he learns that there are other signals coming from the female that tell him it's a female," Meredith said. Instead of pheromones, the hamster relies on sound, sight and touch.

While the vomeronasal organ exists in humans, it does not appear connected to the brain, neurologists say. One theory suggests we once needed it to find a mate, but the organ's importance waned as we evolved. Now it's a useless relic from our caveman days, like the appendix, or a fraternity paddle.

But, Meredith noted, the VNO is active in the human fetus: As the baby develops, the organ produces cells that migrate to the brain. So maybe it does have a function.

Erox Corp. is betting on it. The company peddles a popular line of synthetic pheromones, called Natural Attraction, designed to make you more attractive. The company's founder, Dr. David Berliner, a former professor of anatomy at the University of Utah, says the product stimulates the VNO, which his research clearly shows is connected to the hypothalamus -- the brain's toolshed of urge and emotion.

"WARNING," Erox literature says. "Use of these products may cause spontaneous feelings of excitement and attractiveness."

Even if the VNO is useless, scent may still help us choose our mates, or at least winnow them down. The olfactory system clearly picks up pheromones and other scents we may not even realize we're smelling.

Years ago, Dr. Martha McClintock, director of the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago, published a study showing that groups of women who live together often drift toward the same menstrual cycle, a response triggered by each others' pheromones. (The same phenomenon occurs among cohabitating female rats.)

This month, in the latest issue of the journal Nature Genetics, scent theorists got another boost from McClintock, when her team reported on a new twist to the old sweaty T-shirt experiment.

Researchers asked six men to wear a T-shirt for two days. The shirts were put in boxes. Forty-nine single women were told to them smell them, then asked which scent they would prefer if they had to live with it for, like, forever.

They were not told what they were smelling, and none knew the scent was human.

Versions of this experiment have been conducted for years, all over the world, with varied results. This time, however, the researchers used sophisticated tests to sample immune system genes, called HLA genes, from the women and the men.

They discovered that the scent each woman preferred came from the man whose HLA genes were most like the HLA genes she inherited from her father.

Their least-favorite was the scent of men whose genes were the most different.

McClintock, who has been studying the role of scent in human relations for a quarter-century, was stunned.

The notion that the human sense of smell -- which isn't considered very keen -- "could tell the difference of a single gene is just mind-boggling," McClintock said.

It also suggests the common conception that humans, unlike other animals, don't need scent to find a mate may be wrong.

"Being a scientist, I'm cautious. But I would certainly say that it might be one component," McClintock said. "It might be a source of why, for not any verbalizable reason, some people are more pleasant and feel more natural to be around than others."

'Love map'

Fisher, the Rutgers anthropologist, believes our attraction is based on something she calls a "love map," which leads us to a mate.

We start working on it subconsciously during childhood and tweak it as we go, adding lanes and signposts and avenues that lead to the traits our mates should or shouldn't have.

Sure, it includes the easy stuff -- tall, dark and handsome, or short, stocky and blond. Education, sense of humor, fear of children. But Fisher suspects the strongest directions on our love maps are more subtle, and sometimes darker, based on our childhoods and other experiences in love.

Dependable or dependent? Mysterious or an open book? Strong and silent? Mousey or raucous? And our maps can change over time, just as we change.

A boy who grows up with an alcoholic mother may vow never to marry anyone like her. But his love map may direct him to a woman who offers some of the flamboyant unpredictability -- the late hours, the noisy drama, the hushed mornings -- of his boyhood.

At some level, Fisher explained, that's what he's comfortable with.

"People tend to go for someone who accentuates their own characteristics or tend to mask some of their own characteristics," Fisher said. "That's why you'll see a mathematician with a blond bombshell.

"Or you'll see an actress with a sensitive, intelligent poet, because she wants people to think she's smarter."

Last month, a study by psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found that women born to parents over 30 were less impressed by youth, and less concerned with wrinkles in a potential mate, than women who were raised by younger parents. Men born to older parents were more likely to settle down with older women, the study found.

McClintock, the scent researcher in Chicago, said another study by the St. Andrews group supports her T-shirt study. Researchers there photographed several women, then secretly doctored the photos to look like men. They asked the women which "man" they'd most like to meet.

Overwhelming, each woman picked herself.

"Most people talk about choosing differences -- that opposites attract," McClintock said, but these studies suggest we really respond to similarities.

The pull of subtle attractions may explain why you're attracted to a plain Jane and not a glamorous fashion model. Or why a blind date your friend swears is just your type -- smart, cute, digs the same music, the same movies, the same twisted sense of humor -- leaves you flat.

Here's one more mystery Fisher thinks may be solved by her love map theory: "It's one of the reasons we consistently make the same mistake over and over again."

Do we ever. While science may be puzzled about what draws us together, there's plenty of evidence about what drives us apart.

Sometimes, somehow, we just pick the wrong person. But often, the experts say, the villain is emotional immaturity, or an inability to deal with key issues, or neglect.

(Recently nuptialed and still a-goo-goo? Don't be so smug. Studies show the happy chemicals that bathe our brain during young relationships, the ones that provide the wondrous sense of infatuation, disappear after 18 to 36 months.)

Dr. Sharon Miller responds to the disasters, or tries to avoid them. As director of family psychiatry at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa, she typically works with couples long after the pheromones or their shared love of sushi have become irrelevant. When those sweaty T-shirts he leaves on the bathroom floor no longer smell so sweet.

Middle-aged clients who have raised their children complain they have nothing in common anymore. But usually that's because they neglected their relationship during the busy years, she said.

"It's not a just a function of they now like different things," she said. "If they had enough connectedness, they could be each be doing their own thing and still be coming together in a very passionate way."

Miller cited the work of Dr. John Gottman, the grandfather of marital counseling, who found that it takes five positive episodes to counteract every significant negative one. She tells clients their relationship is like a bank account: Each negative interaction is a $1,000 withdrawal. Every positive one is a $200 deposit.

The withdrawals add up pretty quickly. And someone may start looking for a second income.

Making it work

Bill and Minnie Hansen both retired from the Honeywell plant off U.S. 19 in Largo. He worked as an engineer. She was in production. They haven't spent much time analyzing why they picked each to marry on Christmas Day, 1951, during Mr. Hansen's first furlow after Army basic training.

Once together, their focus became making it work.

While their secrets to a long, happy marriage aren't revolutionary, they do bear remembering. Don't take yourself or your partner too seriously. Have fun. Don't smother. Stay committed.

"We agreed when the kids were quite young that we would give each other a divorce anytime they asked for it," Mrs. Hansen deadpanned. "The only stipulation was they had to take the kids."

This cracks them up.

"Seriously though," Mr. Hansen said when he finished chuckling, "I didn't go looking for the prettiest or the most beautiful or the most popular. It has to be a combination of things. She had all of those.

"She laughed at my jokes and I laughed at hers."

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