Love as a Product of our Innate Biology

In the article, “After all, Maybe it’s … Biology,” Helen Fisher proposes a view of human companionship that is completely biological.  In this view, humans basically interact with other humans on entirely reproductive and genetic circumstances.  Essentially, males have relationships with females simply to pass on their genes, and females have relationships with males so they can be provided with economic and material security.  Love is a product of all of these underlying motives. 

If this view were to be implemented in our society, courtship and flirting would not happen as often.  Just like in the animal world, females would turn males down much quicker because they would immediately be thinking about security and gene proliferation.  There would not be a second to “give a guy a chance” and relationships would be based completely off of first impressions.  Fisher refers to the characteristics that you find necessary in a lover as “love maps,” (Fisher 304).  This can be described as a neural network for an outline that “determines what arouses you sexually, what drives you to fall in love with one person rather than another,” (Fisher 304).  If all of society believed in a completely genetic purpose for relationships and love, love maps would be relied upon more heavily and flirting and courtship would become more animalistic.  The cultural tradition of marriage may not even exist because a relationship with someone may not be as big of a commitment.  People would go into relationships with low expectations, unlike most people today who have high hopes for love and happiness.  Ultimately, I think that life would seem much less meaningful.  We would simply be going through the complete Darwinian motions of natural selection and would not be using the trait that sets us apart from all other animals, our consciousness and our remarkable ability to be completely unpredictable.