The Science of Love, According to Harvard’s “Happiness Professor” Arthur Brooks
Arthur Brooks, PhD, has spent the last 30 years exploring one of life’s biggest questions: What truly makes us happy? The social scientist, Harvard professor, and bestselling author has studied everything from our daily habits to emotional resilience. But for this week’s episode of The goop Podcast, we were particularly interested in unpacking the science of love.
Known as Harvard’s “professor of happiness,” Brooks teaches a sought-after seminar at the business school, where the most popular topic is: falling in love and staying in love. His students—ambitious, high-achieving MBA candidates—often come to office hours not to talk about money or career success, but about love and relationships as the key to happiness, he says. And the research backs that up: “The happiest people have a really stable romantic relationship or super close friendships. And ideally both,” Brooks tells Gwyneth. “For most people, it's a divine connection of best friendship in the context of romance. That is your best insurance policy.”
In their conversation, Gwyneth asks Brooks to break down what’s really happening in our brains when we fall in love, how modern dating messes with that chemistry, and what it really takes to sustain a relationship long-term.
Read on for a few highlights—and listen to the full episode below.
Gwyneth and Arthur Brooks, PhD
GP: Has man always had a struggle with attaining happiness? Or are we living in a particularly difficult era with, you know, the advent of social media? I know a lot of people who are really struggling to find a baseline of contentment.
AB: The answer is number one, both. Yes, people have always been in the search for happiness, and it's always been elusive—and also it's gotten harder. And there's a reason for this. We tend to think as humans that if there’s something that we want, with enough knowledge and enough genius, we can crack it, that we can solve the problem, kinda like how we can solve the problem for how to get rid of a headache or you know, how to lower your hemoglobin A1C, or find a pizza at 10 p.m. I mean, those are, those are complicated problems, but they're solvable problems.
Happiness is a different species of challenge. The things we really care about are not those complicated problems. The things we care about in life are what we call complex problems. It's a subtle difference, but it's important. Complicated problems are super hard to solve, but once you solve them, it's done. Complex problems are super easy to understand, but you can't solve them. Love is a complex problem. My wife loves me, but I don't know, when I get home today, she might be mad at me. And the reason is because after 34 years, I still haven't solved my marriage.
That’s because your happiness is a complex problem. The meaning of life is the ultimate complex problem. You don't solve 'em, you live them. You don't answer the question. You understand the question. And in understanding the question, then you're fully alive. See, it's the ongoing challenge: We don't get happy. We learn how to be happier with the ups and downs and ordinary suffering of life. And that's the art, not just the science of becoming a happier person.
GP: What about when you reach some kind of pinnacle and you’re supposed to feel happy—but you don’t? That’s happened to me a few times, where I thought that would make me whole, and it actually made things worse.
AB: There's a lot to love about having a great career...but almost everybody who has outsize success has a pathology. And that pathology is called “the success addiction.” And the way that it works typically is when you're a little kid, you get the attention of adults. When you do something extraordinary, you get a little pat on the head and that wires your brain.
When you get these worldly successes, this turns you into a workaholic, into somebody who is self-objectifying—a success machine. And you learn that you get love when you do incredible things. Now the real pathology of this is that you start to try to earn other people's love. This is a real problem in relationships of especially successful people, is that they, they're like, I’m trying to earn my wife's love. It's like, Did I earn it yet? But you can't earn love. Real love can't be earned. Real love is a grace. It's a gift freely given, and the more you try to earn it, the more you devalue it by turning it from an intrinsic thing into an extrinsic thing.
GP: So let's get into the neurochemical processes behind falling in love. I didn’t know about the drop in serotonin, which causes an obsessive fixation.
AB: Yeah, this is a thing. There’s a guy named David Buss, who's an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and his research is mind-blowingly interesting. The first stage [of falling in love] is attraction... The second stage kicks in really quickly and that's the stage of anticipation of reward and euphoria. So it's like, I just got a text from her. You get tons of texts every day, why are you freaking out over text? Because you get two catecholamines, two neurotransmitters and, and really, really heavy succession with each other, which is norepinephrine. It's a stress hormone and that gives you a feeling of euphoria and then the anticipation of reward of something coming as dopamine, meaning any little thing that you're looking forward to has huge significance. Like even a text. And the reason that you're doing this is because you want to ramp up the bonding. This is how we're evolved.
Then, within a couple of weeks, it goes to this interesting third phase, which is that your serotonin levels—that's another neurotransmitter—dips and you're like, What? I'm depressed. Falling in love is like depression. And and the reason is because—and again, neuroscientists disagree on everything, so I'm just sort of taking the predominant view here—there's a thing in your brain called a ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that helps you ruminate on stuff... If you're clinically depressed, you're ruminating on sadness and how dumb you are and regret, that's your same part of your brain. And when you're ruminating on another person, like you're losing your mind and you sent a hundred texts in the last hour like an idiot. You're not an idiot. It's just that your serotonin is in the tank... Now that's the reason that depressive people, they also tend to be romantics and poetic. They tend to be artistic, and that's why when you think of the poet, you think of somebody who's really romantic and depressed. It’s the same part of the brain.
GP: You’ve said that now that we're living in like this hookup culture, people are skipping some of these steps. What do you mean by that?
AB: Because you want to get to the fourth stage [of falling in love], true bonding. I mean, deep love is called companionate love, where you're sleeping with your best friend. It's just the best. And that's the kind of bliss that you get for a long-term pair bond. Pair bond mating—it's how social scientists talk, it's so not romantic...but that’s what you want to get to. And the problem is in hookup culture, you're going [through the phases] 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2—you need to go 1, 2, 3, 4, stop. That's what the greatest happiness comes from, is getting to four and stopping. That's the greatest single source of happiness. If you're going 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, sometimes something's wrong. Sometimes a trauma needs to be dealt with, but it isn't normal and it is a pathology that needs to be deal with.
The real other problem is we've got this weird kind of bifurcated culture among people in their 20s where you've got hookup culture, but then you also have celibate culture. You find that people in their 20s today are about a third less likely to be in love as people were when you and I were in our 20s. They're less likely to get married. They're less likely to cohabit. They're having less sex than people ever have since we've been keeping records. So you’ve got whole groups that are not even initiating the process.
GP: So why is that?
AB: Two big problems are dating apps and pornography. They’re huge, huge things that are interrupting the neurochemical process in a big way. I mean, dating apps are great for some people, but the truth is that they make you curate what you're looking for to something that looks just like you, which is not hot... I mn, we're narcissists, right? It’s like, I want somebody who votes like I do, and you know, likes Austin and listens to the same kind of music as me, and thinks sriracha is a personality, or whatever. And the result is that you're looking for somebody just like yourself. And the essence of hotness is complementarity.
You want somebody who's like, enough the same...but just different enough to be interesting. And there's a lot of neurobiology behind why we want difference. There's a ton of neurobiology that says why we want that kind of difference—because we're ascertaining how we can have really successful kids, and people who are just like us have the same immunological profile, and so you judge with personality.
GP: Sort of the opposite of the old royal strategy, right?
AB: Oh my god, totally. And they didn't like each other. I mean, you find those old marriages, you look back on it historically, they weren't attracted to each other at all because, you know, they were marrying their cousin or something. I married a girl who literally didn't speak a word of the same language as me. I just totally fell in love with a girl who didn't speak a word of English, and I didn't speak any of hers. She spoke a lot of Romance languages, and I spoke none at the time, and I literally quit my job and moved to Spain and went on thinking, I bet I could learn that language. I bet I could close that deal.
GP: My god. And you did.
AB: It worked out. I mean, three kids and four grandkids later.