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In Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century Divine Comedy, the narrator—in effect, Dante himself—is led through hell, purgatory, and finally to heaven on a journey that illuminates the meaning of life, death, love, and hate. Many religious readers believe that Dante was divinely inspired, a sort of prophet, and that the secrets of heaven and hell in his poem are more truth than fiction.
Dante’s vision was certainly that of a devout Christian. But his inspiration also came from a more earthly source: a woman named Beatrice Portinari, whom he met first when they were both 9 years old, and again some years later. They never had a romantic relationship—each married someone else—and she died at the age of 24. But throughout the years, Dante carried a flame for Portinari that he had for no other woman. Even after her death, she lived on in Dante’s writing, entering as a character in the Paradiso section of Divine Comedy who helped guide him up to heaven.
You may or may not share Dante’s religious convictions, but perhaps you can relate to the notion that romantic love at its best feels like a mystical, even spiritual, experience, and is disappointing and flat when it does not. Understanding why this is so can help you ignite (or reignite) the metaphysical passion you crave.
Romantic love is the ultimate complex problem in that the concept of being in love is fairly easy to understand—I love you, you love me, and we both know how that feels—but achieving that state is an impossible problem to solve in any scientific way. The greatest minds in history have had their hearts broken, have made idiotic decisions while enamored, and had relationships fail without really understanding why.
Scientists have nevertheless developed an understanding of the neurochemical process when we fall in love: Initial feelings of attraction implicate sex hormones; increased norepinephrine and dopamine create a sense of anticipation and euphoria; scholars hypothesize that a drop in serotonin may lead to ruminative thinking about the beloved; and the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin foster a pair bond that can, ideally, last a lifetime. When in love, especially in early stages, you feel addicted to the other person—and, in fact, activity resembling drug addiction is exhibited in the pleasure and pain regions of your brain.
Awareness of these scientific phenomena can be very helpful to avoid costly mistakes in life. As I tell my business-school students, extramarital affairs frequently start among professionals at work because simply the close contact involved in collaboration with colleagues can initiate the neurochemical cascade described above. But that knowledge will get you only so far. However perfect your grasp of the science, managing your romantic life in any predictable way is impossible. Even neuroscientists, fully cognizant of their own brain chemistry, will feel as though they’re in heaven when they fall in love and in hell when they break up. Like the rest of us, they might get involved too fast or with the wrong person, end up regretfully tracking an ex, or find themselves struggling to forget a former amour.
Especially in its early phases, deep romantic love does in fact feel spiritual. According to a 2011 Marist poll, 74 percent of American men and 71 percent of women answered affirmatively the question “Do you believe in the idea of soul mates, that is two people who are destined to be together?” This shared feeling of transcendent connection, of oneness, is no coincidence: Both romantic love and mystical experiences are characterized by intense positive, even ecstatic, emotion, as well as unusual activity in the temporolimbic regions of the brain.
The world’s great religions themselves treat romantic love as a supernatural phenomenon. In Hinduism, the Bhagavata Purana elegizes the earthly loves of Lord Krishna as a symbol of divine adoration. In the Bible, Adam sees Eve and says, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” Indeed, deeply religious couples typically see their marriage as a sort of antenna designed to pick up signals from heaven, the means by which God transmits love to one through the other. According to this theological understanding, to deny your spouse love is to deny them God’s love. Not shockingly, in one study of female nurses, regular religious service attendance is associated with 50 percent lower divorce rates than that population’s average. Romantic love is, for them, divine love.
Whether you are religious or not, to be in love and to be loved tends to evoke a special understanding of the cosmic why of life. People in love feel as if they were made for love; even if precisely what that entails is hard to articulate, they apprehend it as something absolute and sublime. “If you aren’t the love of my life,” they feel, “that means something is wrong with my life, not with our love.”
This may all make sense and accord with your personal experience—or it may not. And if not, you could be wondering why. The answer might well be that you have fallen into one of two modern traps: trying to solve the problem of romantic love or trying to simulate it.
Romantic attraction can’t be reduced to an algorithm: Whether two people will fall in love, and stay in love, cannot be accurately predicted. Yet that is what technology has tried to do, for example, in the form of internet dating, which, for a time, seemed to have permanently supplanted all other ways to meet a romantic partner. Dating sites first emerged in the 1990s, and by 2020, more than 50 percent of heterosexual couples had formed after meeting this way. Sometimes, this led to good results, and people were happily and permanently partnered. Troublingly, though, scholars recently found that, on average, couples who ultimately get married to someone they met online have less stable and satisfying marriages than people who meet offline. Current data also suggest that people are deserting dating apps in favor of other ways of making romantic connections—partly because of dissatisfaction with the potential partners that the algorithm offers them.
Much more problematic than trying to solve for love is trying to simulate it; for example, with pornography, the consumption of which has risen in the past two decades. One recent study found that 81 percent of Australian men ages 15 to 29 consume pornography at least weekly, as well as 28 percent of Australian women in the same age range. Pornography use is strongly correlated with incidence of depressive symptoms and loneliness for certain groups because, I’d suggest, it reduces a complex, spiritual, relational experience into one that is superficial, biological, solitary.
These obstacles to modern romance do, however, imply their own solution. First, add real-life humans back into the process, no matter how daunting or inconvenient that initially seems. This starts with how we go about meeting potential partners. Just as attraction and passion require two fully committed participants, many people believe that old-fashioned matchmaking is best done by humans who know you. Research suggests that you may actually have a poor sense of what you want in a partner, the result being that your misconceptions lead you to curate your online dating profile in a way that attracts the wrong type; people who know you and love you are much less likely to make this mistake.
Second, eschew in love what is dry and ugly. To express the cosmic parts of life, we frequently turn to art, which allows us to reach beyond ordinary vocabulary and engage the soul. Beauty stimulates our brains in ways that help us find meaning. This is not the airy claim of a mere aesthete: In scientific experiments that measure neurological activity, researchers have found that when subjects contemplate aesthetically pleasing works of art, they display a distinctive neural pattern of high connectivity among different brain regions that is characteristic of performing complex cognitive and creative tasks.
No surprise, then, that the people who, throughout history, have best expressed the depth and beauty of love are painters, composers, and poets such as Dante. Consider how this human art of romance compares with the cyborgian lifelessness of a dating algorithm or the depressing unloveliness of pornography.
Finally, take inspiration from Dante and try mingling romantic love with the divine. If you are religiously inclined, you might seek the love of your life among the community at a house of worship or meditation center. Besides increasing your chances of finding someone who shares your beliefs and values, such environments provide an ideal ecosystem that primes your temporolimbic brains for the ecstasy of love, of both the divine and romantic variety.
Whether you are young lovers or lifelong partners, a spiritual journey together might be just what you both seek. For years, my wife and I have celebrated our wedding anniversary with a religious pilgrimage, each in different parts of the world. At these times, I can deeply relate to Dante’s equal passion for Beatrice and for God.
While the everlasting pleasure, that did full
On Beatrice shine, with second view
From her fair countenance my gladden’d soul
Contented; vanquishing me with a beam
Of her soft smile, she spake: “Turn thee, and list.
These eyes are not thy only Paradise.”
The post If You Want a Heavenly Romance, Reach for the Divine appeared first on The Atlantic.
