Love and Skepticism

I’m a member of a certain dating web site (because I am a sad and desperate man), and I’ve always been horribly offended that the web site rates my personality as being highly unromantic.  Several women I’ve dated have told me the same.  Of course, I don’t think I am not romantic; I think of myself as a realistic romancer.  The modern conception of romance is so twisted and unrealistic that it has become a joke.  The problem, I’ve come to realize, is my skepticism of romance.

For most people skepticism isn’t conducive to romance.  I don’t believe in love at first sight; I believe in dopamine.  I believe we’ve evolved behavior like serial monogamy to accord with the lengthy immature period of human offspring.  But why should such realism be so devastating to romance?  Why should romantic feelings necessarily be treated as mystical and mysterious, so fraught with idealism and the unrealistic?

The connection of romance with the mystical is so prevalent that it is even used as a sort of rejoinder to atheistic arguments.  “Why would you disbelieve in God?  Love is also mysterious.  Love isn’t material.  Love can’t be measured in a lab.  Do you disbelieve in love, too?”  Of course, even the most ardent philosophical naturalist and reductionist can believe in love.  To them, love is not mysterious in any mystical sense—it is simply a matter of working out how the various neurochemicals interact to produce such feelings.  Likewise, love can even be measured and assessed by science.  As with any emotion, we can judge its effects on behavior and other physical manifestations.  We can note increased pulse rates during sexual arousal.  We can examine brain scans to determine which areas are involved in feelings of love and companionship.  And we can watch for behavior like wistful staring, hand-holding, sex, the whispering of sweet nothings, and so on, as indicators of love.  Simply because skeptics deny that immaterial entities like ghosts, spirits, and gods exist doesn’t entail that we disbelieve in love.  Nor does it imply that we can’t be romantic and loving.

Imagine if believers in the mystical element of emotions tried this argument with the emotion of anger.  Would they argue that because skeptics disbelieve in God and ghosts and spirits, we would therefore never be capable of being angry?  Anyone who doubts that skeptics feel anger need only observe my behavior while I’m reading creationist literature.  Unless they view my actions of ripping the book to shreds, pissing on it, screaming in rage at it, and setting it on fire as merely the random mechanical acts of an automaton devoid of thoughts and feelings and understanding, such a reaction is quite difficult to explain.

Skeptics need to reclaim the emotions from the believers.  Romance is associated with trivial acts like purchasing flowers or chocolates, with talk of souls and undying, infinite passion, but these are false associations.  My love won’t last forever because I won’t last forever.  You are not my soulmate because neither of us has a soul.  And flowers are so cliched and silly that I will not even consider giving them to someone I love.  (The symbolism of flowers is also rather nutty; in effect you are giving your lover the severed genitals of plants, only to watch them slowly decay.)

But love for skeptics doesn’t end there.  It isn’t only denials of the nonsensical claims for romance.  For me, love makes life worth living.  Love for family and friends gives meaning and purpose to my life.  When I find myself loving someone, I understand that it is the result of neurochemistry, but this doesn’t detract from the powerful, driving sensation of love.

I suppose if we define romanticism as the cliched purchasing of a small subset of gifts or as some undying mystical nonsense, then in that case skeptics are not romantic.  Instead of buying flowers and chocolates and jewelry, I prefer to give gifts of science textbooks, video games, and crude pornographic drawings.  Instead of whispering sweet nothings about an immortal, transcendant love, I whisper softly to my lover, “When photons reflect off of you and into my pupils, and the inverted image projected onto my retina is righted by my brain, dopamine and oxytocin surge through me, causing blood to rush to my engorged genitals.”  But none of this changes how I actually feel on a subjective, phenomonological level.  I feel the same emotions as the most starry-eyed, idealistic spiritualist.  The only difference is that I recognize their true origin.  Perhaps the only other difference is that I mention my engorged genitals a lot more.

The universe is a vast, cold, empty, heartless place, and we are but insignificant specks.  To the universe, we are nothing.  But to me, the love I feel is everything.  And though my romantic love may only last for a mere five or six years, after which the neurochemistry of love begins to decline for evolutionary reasons, causing me to seek out a new partner in the traditional pattern of serial monogamy common to most humans, this should not be seen as a perversion or detraction from the emotion of love.  Love need not be eternal, or even longer than six years, to be meaningful.  Life itself only spans a mere eight decades, and it is the most meaningful thing in the world.  We must accept that romantic love is real and powerful…and short-lived.  In that sense, I am a romantic, because I accept love for what it truly is, and I don’t pretend it is something else.  It is still a beautiful, meaningful emotion, and it is still important to us all, even given the less than ideal truth.