A Natural History of Love Read Free

well-to-do than about the love lives of common people, who had little leisure, and lived in caves or small rooms, sharing their beds with many people; their romantic lives would have been distinctly different from those blessed with spare time and privacy. The most remarkable time for the poor might have been that newlywed period, perhaps only nine months long, when they were alone. Happily, love is a peasant emotion and thrives as well in stables as in palaces.
    It’s tempting to think of love as a progression, from ignorance toward the refined light of reason, but that would be a mistake. The history of love is not a ladder we climb rung by rung leaving previous rungs below. Human history is not a journey across a landscape, in the course of which we leave one town behind as we approach another. Nomads constantly on the move, we carry everything with us, all we possess. We carry the seeds and nails and remembered hardships of everywhere we have lived, the beliefs and hurts and bones of every ancestor. Our baggage is heavy. We can’t bear to part with anything that ever made us human. The way we love in the twentieth century is as much an accumulation of past sentiments as a response to modern life.
    When I began researching this book, I scouted libraries for reputable studies of love and discovered how little serious research had been done. For example, the microfiche Human Relations Area File, an anthropological database representing over 300 cultures around the world, includes entries on everything from divorce to nose ornaments. It has no separate main category or code for love. Why has there been so little research into love? Surely it’s not just that love seems a subjective field with unprovable assumptions, too emotional for social scientists to take seriously (and receive funding for). After all, there are countless studies on war, hate, crime, prejudice, and so on. Social scientists prefer to study negative behaviors and emotions. Perhaps, they don’t feel as comfortable studying love per se. I add that “per se” because they are studying love—often they’re studying what happens when love is deficient, thwarted, warped, or absent.
    Why did love evolve? How does it make sense in evolutionary terms? What is the psychology of love? Are erotic and nonerotic love essentially the same? Who is naturally more loving, a man or a woman? What is mother love? How does love affect our health? Do men and women have different sexual agendas? What is the relationship between lack of love and crime? What is the chemistry of love? Are we monogamous by nature, or were we born to cheat? How has the idea of love changed through the ages? Do aphrodisiacs really exist? Do animals feel love? What are some of love’s customs and extravagances?
    We have the great fortune to live on a planet abounding with humans, plants, and animals; and I often marvel at the strange tasks evolution sets them. Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite.

EGYPT

    HISTORY’S PARAMOUR, THE SERPENT QUEEN
    Cleopatra . Her name conjures up an Orient of mystery and romance. Thousands of years after her death, she still rules men’s fantasies and sparks women’s envy. We may sigh over Helen of Troy as the incarnation of feminine beauty, but we envy Cleopatra for an allure so elemental that she could sail into any man’s life and steal his heart. We picture her as a human aphrodisiac, a woman redolent with sensuality. That part of us still a child, which secretly trusts in magic, wants to believe that her wand-like power could bewitch one Caesar after another. Her legend tells us more about our own fantasies and yearnings than about the woman herself.
    Cleopatra was born in Egypt in 69 B.C ., the daughter of King Ptolemy XII, who was descended from a Macedonian general. Although her mother isn’t known, royal marriages between brother and sister were usual, and that would make Cleopatra