Can Love Redeem the Sins of Jonah Lehrer? A BOOK ABOUT LOVE By Jonah Lehrer 288 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.
We’ve all experienced the delicious madness when love first blooms — whether it happens in a bar, on a snowy street or when one person slips a hand into yours by a campfire. Your faces glow with that radiating aura. You marvel at the miraculous ways you are both the same! You’re up all night, sleepless, not eating. There are bursts of overflowing communication, and having crazy, silly fun in public. Every second apart produces an ache, and every minute together goes too fast. Your solar system has a new sun.
For Jonah Lehrer, true love is not usually like this. In “A Book About Love” he argues that this wild first ecstasy feels true but is almost nothing. It’s just an infatuation, a chemical fiction that will fade with time. For Lehrer, love is more flannel pajamas than sexy lingerie; it is a steady attachment, not a divine fire. For Lehrer, attachment theory is the model that explains all kinds of love.
Attachment theory was developed by researchers like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the decades after World War II. The basic idea is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. That secure base is established during the first years of life by having an attuned relationship with a parent.
Most children are securely attached. Their parents mirrored their emotions and attended to their needs. They carry through life a mental model of how to establish reciprocal bonds. They can be brave and independent because they know how to be dependent on someone else.
But other children do not develop that attuned relationship early on. They carry avoidant, fearful or disorganized attachment models in their brains and are likely to have trouble bonding with others.
The effects of early attachment styles reverberate. In one study, babies who had bad attachment patterns were nearly three times more likely to have chronic illness at age 32 than were securely attached babies. In the famous Grant study, done at Harvard, men who came from the most loving homes earned 50 percent more over the course of their careers than those from the unhappiest homes. They were much less likely to suffer from dementia in old age. As Lehrer writes, “Early attachment is more predictive of achievement than any other variable measured in the Grant study, including I.Q. scores.”
Lehrer sees faith in God through the prism of attachment. Having an insecure attachment pattern in childhood nearly doubles the chance of having a sudden religious conversion as an adult. God is the ultimate secure base. Book Review Newsletter
Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
He also sees marriage through the prism of attachment. Marriage itself, Lehrer argues, is not about finding a soul mate, or your mystical other half. It’s not even about finding someone like yourself. As he writes, “A 2010 study of 23,000 married couples found that the similarity of spouses accounted for less than 0.5 percent of spousal satisfaction.” It’s about finding someone with steady emotional tendencies and then being stubborn in the face of the nagging incompatibilities that will be there at the beginning and will never go away. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage
A Fraud? Jonah Lehrer Says His Remorse Is Real JULY 11, 2016 BOOKS OF THE TIMES Review: Jonah Lehrer’s ‘A Book About Love’ Is Another Unoriginal Sin JULY 6, 2016
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Happy marriage is about small mundane moments; sensing your partner’s sadness and sitting with her even when you’d rather go watch television. Even sex is less about pleasure and ecstasy and more about service and “hold me tight.” The people happiest with their sex lives, studies show, are the ones most motivated to serve their partner’s sexual needs rather than concentrating on their own.
When sex is good it’s only kinda good, but when sex is bad it’s really bad. Happy spouses say that only 15 to 20 percent of their contentment comes from sex, though unhappy spouses say that 50 to 70 percent of their unhappiness is rooted in sexual problems.
This is one of those books — and there are many these days — that deromanticize love, that seek to dispel illusions about poetic flight and ground love in spoon-feeding, diaper-changing, reading the same story again and again at bed time. “A Book About Love” is built around this question: “How does love hold us together, when everything else falls apart?” The answer is steady everyday attachment.
The hidden character in the book is Lehrer himself. He burst on the scene several years ago as an amazingly fluid, and amazingly prolific, young nonfiction writer. A Rhodes scholar with an interest in philosophy, literature and the brain, he wrote a very good book called “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.” His prose was supple, his mind was stocked with literary allusions, his heart was warm. His writing appeared in Wired, The Wall Street Journal, Nature and The New Yorker. It popped up every time you opened your browser.
It’s no doubt best when success comes down like a steady drizzle. But success fell on Lehrer early and all at once — and it ruined him. He was taking on every assignment, and it turned out that in the rush of churning out all this stuff, he had been, at different times, plagiarizing, manufacturing quotes, fudging facts, recycling his own material and so on and so on.
In 2012 he was exposed, and an avalanche of shame and condemnation came down on his head. His jobs went poof. He became a scandal and was exiled from polite society. And so one approaches this book with two questions. First, should he be forgiven and readmitted? For me the answer is yes. He’s had his public humiliation, and from the evidence of this book a chastened Jonah Lehrer has a lot to offer the world. The book is interesting on nearly every page. He mixes a wide range of reference, both scientific and literary, in a way that is sometimes familiar but sometimes surprising and illuminating. Good writers make writing look easy, but what people like Lehrer do is not easy at all.
The second question is: How did Lehrer’s professional catastrophe shape his worldview? Well, in his young-man-in-a-hurry phase he was a bad parent. During the first 16 months of his daughter’s life he never put her to bed — not once. After his disgrace he had plenty of time and gradually learned how to attune himself to his daughter. This is the book of a guy who discovered fatherhood when nearly everything else was taken away.
It’s also the book of a guy who has been through a maelstrom. The style of love he emphasizes — attachment — is the sturdy, everyday nonpoetic kind that can survive a maelstrom. A lot of writers are emphasizing this kind of love as the real and only dependable love, because these days love faces steep odds. Most marriages seem to end up in either divorce or unhappiness. Everybody goes into it with confidence, but the odds that you will have a truly happy marriage are probably no better than one in three. In these circumstances it seems sensible to emphasize the even, steady marriage, especially if life has just hit you really hard, the way it hit Lehrer.
But it could be the truth is actually just the opposite. George Eliot understood this. In “Middlemarch,” her heroine does something crazy and marries the wrong guy. The marriage is miserable. But then when she has the chance to marry again, she doesn’t play it safe and settle for something conventional. She does something else crazy and marries the right guy this time.
I think Eliot understood that when it comes to love, there is safety in danger. That early mad passion — the craziness, the shocking and inexplicable sweep of emotion, the daring leap that defies convention, the love that takes everyone by surprise — can be the refiner’s fire that welds two people together into one thing. It makes the love about something other than self.
Love defies cost-benefit analyses. In family life one is compelled to give more than one receives. Having kids does not make you happier; it makes you different. So it’s probably reckless to go into a marriage with a prudential frame of mind and safer to go in with that form of intoxication that fuses you into a unit and makes giving feel better than receiving.
No one would deny that our early attachment patterns powerfully shape our lives. But romance introduces a new transcendent element, hard to measure in studies or even understand, and woe to anyone who enters into a commitment without the propelling force of that deep magic.
David Brooks is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times and the author of “The Road to Character.”