Feeling in Love
The psychology of emotions such as happiness and loneliness sheds light on the formation and dissolution of ties in social networks. In fact, human sensibilities such as anger, sadness, grief, and love all operate in the service of social ties. One can be angry at nature or saddened by a forest fire or love a pet, but these emotions have their origin and find their fullest expression in the anger, sadness, or love one feels in the setting of interpersonal relationships.
People the world over have different ideas, beliefs, and opinions—different thoughts—but they have very similar, if not identical, feelings. And they have similar responses to feelings in others, preferring happy friends to depressed ones, kind friends to mean ones, and loving friends to violent ones. A whole range of emotions can spread, from anger and hatred to anxiety and fear to happiness and loneliness. But there is one emotion central to human experience that we have not yet considered and that is key to understanding social connection: love.
The psychology of love and affection is obviously crucial to an understanding of the formation of social ties between people. As anthropologist Helen Fisher has argued, the sensibility of being in love may be broken down into lust, love, and attachment, all of which likely served evolutionary purposes.34 The feeling of lust has the obvious goal of driving reproduction—with almost any partner. The feeling of romantic love is something different, of course, and tends to be focused on a particular partner, or at least one partner at a time. From an evolutionary perspective, this allows the individual to conserve precious resources and not waste them in the pursuit of several objects of affection. The feeling of attachment, and the secure tie to another person that it represents, may have evolved to allow parents to jointly care for their young, which also has evolutionary advantages.
In chapter 7, we will discuss the role of natural selection in human social networks in more detail, but before we get there it is important to think about the implications of our deepest connections. Aside from the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages, feelings of lust, love, and attachment carry enormous implications for the way we connect to others. The object of one’s affection becomes the “center of one’s universe,” around which all else revolves. People experience intrusive thoughts about their beloved, aggrandize their beloved, are energized by their beloved, and are obviously deeply connected to their beloved. We usually experience such romantic love with just one person at a time. So romantic love does not determine the general organization of social networks. After all, we do not love everyone we know. And the love we have for our parents, children, siblings, and other relations is a different kind of feeling. Yet, as we will see in the next chapter, being in love is a key mechanism by which certain important social ties are formed, and it is therefore highly relevant to the origin—and function—of social networks.
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