Why We Love (6 page)

These demands of courtship were no problem for Throatpouch, a wild orangutan living in the Tanjung Putting Reserve, in Borneo. Here primatologist Birute Galdikas came to study these wild orange beasts in the 1970s. TP, as she called Throatpouch, was middle-aged, grouchy, irascible, beady-eyed, and huge. “By orangutan standards, however,” Galdikas writes, “TP probably was a decidedly handsome fellow.” Galdikas goes on to explain: “The object of TP’s adoration was Priscilla. When I saw Priscilla with Throatpouch, she was even dowdier than I remembered. I thought that TP would have chosen a more comely female. But from the way Throatpouch pursued her, Priscilla had sexual charm to spare. TP was smitten with her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He didn’t even bother to eat, so enthralled was he by her balding charms.”
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Even when Throatpouch did have time to eat, Galdikas reports, he took the gentlemanly attitude: ladies first.

The courting male lion even gives what little food he can acquire to his beloved. George Schaller wrote a charming description of this. Apparently a wooing male noticed a gazelle at a nearby waterhole. So he interrupted his courtship to fell this prize. Then he carried this luscious gift to the female and sat nearby to watch as she ate it all, “a touching and striking token considering the fact that he was hungry.”
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I suspect the brain chemistry of attraction had overcome this male’s need to eat.

Persistence

Animals are also tenacious. Most have only a few chances in their lives to triumph over rivals, court available mates, and breed. So they persevere.

A male giraffe follows a female for hours until she submits to his overtures. The lioness purrs at the male, rolls suggestively on the ground before him, swats at him coyly, then flounces off, rejecting his touch. Only patient courters eventually mount this huge pussycat. The male tiger is equally persistent. He never takes his eyes off his mate; “even the slightest flicker of her tail receives his attention.”
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Perhaps the most amusing looking suitor is the male shrew. He pursues an estrous female relentlessly, scampering behind her with his nose pressed over her rump.
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Darwin even noted this focussed determination among butterflies. “Their courtship appears to be a prolonged affair,” he wrote, “for I have frequently watched one or more males pirouetting round a female until I was tired, without seeing the end of the courtship.”
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This persistence, seen in so many creatures—from butterflies to rhinos—is a hallmark of human romantic love.

Affection

Most courting animals also show signs of tenderness, the most charming aspect of human romance.

Writing of a pair of courting beavers, biologist Lars Wilsson said, “They sleep curled up close together during the daytime and at night they seek each other out at regular intervals to groom one another or just simply to sit close side by side and ‘talk’ for a little while in special contact sounds, the tones and nuances of which seem to a human expressive of nothing but intimacy and affection.”
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The male grizzly bear nuzzles the female’s flanks and snuffles in her ear, whimpering for acceptance. A male giraffe rubs his head along a female’s neck and trunk. The tigress nips at her mate, biting him gently on the neck and face as she rubs her body against his. A mating pair of harbor porpoises swim together, sometimes over or under one another, but always in tandem as they stroke, rub, “kiss,” or mouth each other. Chimpanzees hug, pat, and kiss each other’s thighs and belly. They even kiss with the deep “French kiss,” inserting their tongue gently into the mouth of a mating partner. Bats stroke each other with their velvety wing membranes. Even the lowly male cockroach strokes his partner’s antennae with his own.

Puppy Love

In her groundbreaking book,
The Hidden Life of Dogs,
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas maintained that dogs show deep romantic passion for one another. She arrived at this conclusion moments after she introduced Misha, a handsome Siberian husky, to her daughter’s young and beautiful dog of the same breed, Maria. Thomas had agreed to house Misha while his owners were on an extended trip to Europe.

The day arrived. Misha’s owners delivered this vibrant male to the Thomas home. Misha pranced into the living room to look about, settling his gaze immediately on the gorgeous Maria. In an instant he bounded to her feet and skidded to a stop. At once, Thomas writes, Maria “dropped to her elbows in an invitation to play.
Chase me,
her gesture said. And he did. Quickly, lightly, the two delighted creatures spun around the room. Misha and Maria were so taken with each other that they noticed nothing. Misha didn’t even notice when his owners left.”
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These two joyous dogs were immediately inseparable. Together they ate and slept and roamed; together they bore four hearty pups; together they reared them—until the dark day when Misha’s owners gave him away to people in the countryside. For weeks Maria sat in the window seat of the Thomas home in the very spot where she had watched her beloved Misha being forced into a car. Here she pined. Eventually she gave up waiting for him to return. But “Maria never recovered from her loss,” Thomas writes. “She lost her radiance … and showed no interest in forming a permanent bond with another male, even though, over the years, several eligible males joined our household.”
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Animals Are Choosy

Excessive energy; focussed attention on a particular individual; motivation to pursue this “special” partner; loss of appetite; persistence; tender stroking, kissing, licking, snuggling, and coquettish playing: all are striking traits of human romantic love. Call it what you will, many creatures seem to have an attraction to one another.

But animals are choosy.

Of all the characteristics of human romantic love that other creatures display, perhaps none is more revealing than this choosiness. Just as you or I are unwilling to hop into bed with anyone who winks at us, no other creature on this planet will expend precious time and energy mating indiscriminately. They rebuff some; they choose others.

Such is the female African hammerhead bat. During the dry season, males regularly congregate at a “lekking ground,” a specific mating area along the forested banks of the Ivindo River in Gabon, Africa. The males arrive at dusk to set up temporary evening positions. Once settled, they sing with a loud, metallic, throaty honk as they flap their half-opened wings double-time to their singing beat. The point: to draw attention to themselves. Soon the females arrive and cruise among them, hovering to inspect one, then another. As a female examines a particular male he intensifies his display, flapping wildly as he steps up his singing to sound a staccato buzz. Amid the cacophony, each female eventually makes her selection, lands near a particular male, and copulates.
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Among the “common” chimpanzees that primatologist Jane Goodall has studied for more than forty years in Tanzania, Flo was the most popular. When she came into estrus in 1983, Flo was followed everywhere she went by as many as fourteen adult males, many of whom were even willing to go directly into Goodall’s campsite to be near this preferred mating partner. Fifi, Flo’s daughter, was also sought after—much more so than her girlfriend, Pom. Chimps have favorites.

One is inclined to think these animal attractions are due merely to hormonal cycling; that the physiology of estrus draws males to choose one female rather than another. But Goodall, a famed scientist, would not agree. She writes that “partner preferences, independent of hormonal influences, are clearly of major significance for chimpanzees.”
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In fact, she believes that males of many primate species “show clear-cut preferences for particular females, which may be independent of cycle stage.”
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Animal behaviorist Frank Beach made this same observation in 1976, writing: “The occurrence or non-occurrence of copulation depends as much on individual affinities and aversions as upon the presence or absence of sex hormones in the female.”
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As males prefer certain females regardless of their sexual condition, females are drawn to particular males despite their lower rank and status, as Darwin noted over a hundred years ago. He wrote in
The Descent of Man
that even in exceedingly aggressive species, females are not necessarily drawn to the strongest, most courageous, or even the most victorious males at mating time. Instead, “it is more probable that the females are excited, either before or after the conflict, by certain males, and thus unconsciously prefer them.”
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Lions, baboons, wolves, bats, probably even butterflies distinguish between suitors, assiduously avoiding mating with some and doggedly focussing their courtship energy on others.

Animals of different species are drawn to different types of partners, of course. Females of many species (including women) are often attracted to males of high rank. Some prefer those residing on the best piece of property.
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Some want a male who will defend them or help them rear their young instead. Some like the male with the most symmetrical tail feathers or the reddest face. Moreover, males are often sensitive to the age of the female, as well as her health, size, and shape. But as Goodall writes of primates, “personality” is also highly significant.
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All
animals are choosy. In fact, this favoritism is so common in nature that the animal literature regularly uses several terms to describe it, including “mate preference,” “selective proceptivity,” “individual preference,” “favoritism,” “sexual choice,” and “mate choice.”

Choosy though they are, most animals express their preferences fast.

Love at First Sight

“From the moment she set eyes on him, she adored him. Wanting only to be near him, to lavish her affection on him, she followed everywhere he went. The sound of his voice made her bark.”
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Violet, the panicky little pug who lived with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was in love with Bingo, their other pug.

Violet showed all the symptoms of love at first sight.

And her behavior is common in nature—for an important reason: most female creatures have a breeding season or other specific cyclic period when they are physiologically ripe. They have only a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks to breed, conceive, and spread their genes. They cannot afford to spend months reviewing each suitor’s résumé. Moreover, wooing can be dangerous. Coitus puts one in a compromising position: predators or competitors can pounce. Equally important, mating consumes valuable time and energy. So instant attraction enables males and females of many species to focus their precious courtship energy on particular individuals and begin the breeding process swiftly.

Perhaps we humans inherited this phenomenon—because love at first sight is common to men and women. In a recent survey of one hundred American couples, 11 percent of these men and women had fallen in love the moment they set their eyes on their partner; and in a survey of 679 men and women done in the 1960s, some 30 percent of respondents reported they had fallen in love at an initial glance.
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This instant attraction also happened to the American president Thomas Jefferson. Historian Fawn Brodie writes, “What Jefferson was told in advance about Maria Cosway is irrelevant, for if ever a man fell in love in a single afternoon it was he.”
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A similar experience occurred to a contemporary woman living in Caruaru, a town in northeast Brazil. To an anthropologist, she confided, “I had never seen this man. And when we saw each other, I don’t know what it was that happened, if it was love at first sight or what it was. After one week I eloped with him.”
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A woman on the South Seas island of Mangaia expressed the same feeling. “When I saw this man, I wished that he would be my husband, and this feeling was a surprise because I had never seen him before.”
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She married him. Years later she reflected on the experience, saying the meeting had been “nature’s work.”

Love at first sight is nature’s work.

Love at First Smell?

People have asked me whether the smell of someone can trigger this instant attraction. Certainly many animals are immediately attracted to the odors of particular mating partners. But I doubt that love at first smell happens regularly to people—for an evolutionary reason.

Our primate ancestors lived high in the trees for at least 30 million years. To avoid falling to the ground as well as to select ripe fruit, they needed acute vision—rather than a keen sense of smell. As a result, monkeys and apes have a comparatively reduced sense of smell and large regions of the brain devoted to the perception of visual stimuli. We humans inherited these faculties. And these vision networks are superbly connected to the other senses and to our thoughts and feelings. In fact, as primates we gather over 80 percent of our knowledge of the world around us with our eyes. This is undoubtedly why so many Internet romances end when partners actually meet face-to-face. Visual stimuli are important to romance.

So I doubt that many humans fall in love when they catch a whiff of a suitor at a party. But I do think that once a partner becomes familiar—and cherished—his or her smell can become a kind of aphrodisiac. I have known several women who liked to sleep in the T-shirt of a sweetheart because they liked its perfume, for example. And Western literature is full of male characters who are stimulated by the fragrance of a beloved’s handkerchief or glove.

But no matter what triggers attraction, this magnetism can be instant. When human beings and other creatures are psychologically and physically ready and a relatively suitable partner appears before them, the simplest exchange can fire up attraction.