essays in love.

On my flight back from Dubai I was seated next to a man whose name I don't know how to spell. Despite, at the time, being completely enamoured by A, I felt nervous talking to him. I guess I understand why, now.

I spontaneously decided to visit a friend from my past after my art class. It was late in the night and he had already been drinking. There were wine marks on his lips as he leaned in and told me that there are infinite possibilities surrounding us and that life continually repeats itself in alternative realities. A very Nietschian sentiment. He said it to appease me, to let me know that my decisions weren't heavily loaded with implications and weight.

As I sat in that aeroplane, thoughts full of A, I felt anxious. The man talking to me was attractive, well travelled, well read with a whole life behind him. I had committed myself to A, but the comfort that I felt around this man made me question that the reality that I had chosen was going to make me most happy. We got to talking about the partners we knew would be waiting for us at the airport. "Do you think it'll be the same as it was before?" he asked. "Better, the distance has made us closer." I replied. He frowned, "Every time I leave, I change. The person that returns is so different from the one that had become the object of love for every one of my girlfriends. I wonder if it'll be the same for you." I always remember what he said and I think that I agree. I changed, but not for the better. I view my last relationship in two phases - pre-Baltimore and post. To change, you don't need to wander out into the world, but you need to experience something novel.

I started reading Essays in Love and of course I thought of every one of my past relationships, in particular A which didn't bother me at all. And so I wanted to write this entry though perhaps I shouldn't. I had an amazing weekend which is odd because I generally want to block out my birthdays. They always seem to remind me of disappointment, but turning 20 was the most fun! Some of my reflections on love/attraction/courtship are as follows.

1. There is a theory that we fall in love with those that we feel have something that we lack. Through this union, we start to feel perfect as well. Pre-Baltimore, A made me feel this way. He always seemed to have this creative mind that I felt I lacked, or rather, had lost for a while. In America, I'd walk around with a big smile on my face and I was so surprised by the attention I received. I can pinpoint almost the precise moment when I fell out of love. It was the day he no longer appeared perfect to me, the same day that I felt ugly and worthless.

2. It's odd how easily you can flirt with those that you don't find attractive. Give me a homosexual or old man, any day. I become the most inept flirt around a beautiful woman.

3. Why do we always idealise/feel more powerfully for those we don't have? I still have never felt as strongly as I did for my first love, who introduced me to Paul Desmond. It was a completely different love with A. I never suffered with A and once in the relationship, we never argued. We laughed at everything so there was never a feeling that I was losing him. I think it's important to have that balance. Some would probably say that I'm overdramatising thingz, but when you don't long or yearn to be touched, there doesn't seem to be that feeling of reward. In Baltimore, I went out of my mind but we could never recreate that crazy passion when we were together.

4. As Proust would say, classically beautiful women are for men without imagination.

5. The Manu of New Guinea don't have a word for "love". I think love is universal, but can you feel what we know to be "love" if you don't know what to expect? II guess no expectations leads to less disappointments! In our world of rom coms and great love stories, there is a certain expectation of what "true love" should feel like. At first, my reasons for staying with A weren't admirable but after feeling disappointed at my previous attempsts at love, I wanted to feel the security that I knew he would give me. In the same way that the charm of the Taj Mahal has been lost to photography, has love lost its mysticism and wonder?

6. I like that there are certain things that I do now that are purely A's influence. Like how I bend the bottom corners of pages whenever I read a beautifully phrased paragraph or sentiment. Or the way I've adopted A's method for brushing teeth. Of course, the relationship (like all my others, but I don't like talking about them), changed me. There's this intimacy when you're in love where you feel compelled to be honest with one another. To point out facets of character that others aren't bothered with. Like the way I wriggle in bed, my pessimism, my uneasiness in certain social situations. It's good. It helps you mature and recognise how to change. Or, learn to love your quirks.

7. As French writer Stendhal noted, humans are "social creatures", we are nothing if we're not surrounded by others. Alain de Botton describes humans as amoeba; organisms with an elastic membrane that can change shape. Different people bring out different sides of ourselves. Around A, post-Baltimore, I was always so composed and introverted. I always wondered why it was that I felt more alive around others. It's not that I wasn't myself - it was just a facet of myself that I didn't like. I think both of us started to unleash our own insecurities near the end. I thought I was inadequate and never voiced my opinion feeling as though he would crush every one of my arguments. You can't expect one person to give you everything that you want. But you need an intermediary that doesn't make you feel deformed or misrepresented. I feel happier now than I did with him. When did I stop loving him?

8. I think it's impossible to feel love (how the hell can you even define love!) all the time. People enter your life, you develop attractions for others, and you question if the person you're with is the one you're happiest with. They say the first six months constitute the 'honeymoon' period of the relationship and that once you step over that milestone, most start to question if it's time to persevere or take off.

9. I spent eight months of my life with A. He'd visited me when I came back from hospital, he held me when I thought Kita was dying. He had been a part of my life so when it ended, I felt like a part of me had died. It didn't matter if I loved him or not, I just wanted things to stay the way they were. I was devastated because I knew a part of me would never return. Like cats, I think humans have multiple lives. We can conquer death. Although, I know, that i will never feel the same again, a new life form will replace that which I have lost. It's not sad, it's just change and it's thrilling.

10. Living in the present is a scary thing, at first. One evening, I told him, "I'm scared that I won't know when to end it," and he told me to live in the moment. When you have no expectations, you feel lighter. I remember being in Asia with my friends in high school and feeling an overwhelming sense of freedom but the anticipation of its end would lead to an XTREME sadness. When you want to live in the present, you rarely do. I wanted to feel happy simply being with A, but thoughts of international placements, travel plans and what had happened three years ago kept bothering me. And so I felt heavy.

11. It's as if the ingredients of love's collapse are contained within the beginning. At first, I loved his intelligent conversation. Later, I came to view it as arrogant and insincere. I loved the way he kissed and cuddled and how he gave me space but it seemed so mundane towards the end. When you sense that the love is dying, you try to bring it back my doing the same things that kindled it. I tried eating out at restaurants again, wearing the same outfits that I did on the first few dates, reminding him of the first moments we shared together. I could feel it escaping me, but I knew that if the love died, a part of me would as well, so I struggled on and tried to hold onto it. It's like what Joni wrote about in her final telegram to George Nash, "if you hold sand too tightly in your hands, it will run through your fingers." I felt myself falling.

12. I read in a magazine last week that our memories aren't kept in time, but in place. The article used this to argue for the importance of architectural design and innovative space to human interactions and well being. When you're no longer with someone, you still feel their presense. everywhere In the space on the left side of your bed, in the empty chairs outside the restaurant that where you shared calamari. When I stopped seeing us sitting outside The Flying Taco, at first I felt guilty. Now, I smile.

13. It's always the one that no longer loves that makes the tender speeches in the end. I don't need to explain myself anymore. I'm glad I read this book, at least. In the same way that a century becomes remembed by a few important events, so will our love. Maybe I shouldn't have written this blog entry but I don't feel like I've divulged anything. It's just about love and who isn't facinated by it. I wish I had loved him, and though I know I did once upon a time, I couldn't sustain it. Something changed after Baltimore and the clock keeps ticking now.

reminiscing.

I'm reminiscing. Bee Hives is a good album. I drank too much. Yay to drunken times with the fam.

the end of an era.

It was the stuff you read about in science fiction novels. 63-year-old William Sheridan from New York, whilst waiting for a compatible heart donor, drew pictures as a way of killing time. His 2D stick figures bore no semblance to the world around him and mirrored those that you might find in a kindergarten. A heart transplant later, this all changed. Sheridan’s childlike drawings transformed into creative and artistic depictions of landscape and wildlife; of billowing brooks and wild imagination. You see, the transplanted organ had belonged to 24-year-old Keith Neville, a stock broker with a passion for art and once it was relocated into Sheridan’s body, the New Yorker had indeed, a change of heart.

Sheridan isn’t alone in this phenomenon. Over 70 personality change cases have been recorded following heart transplants, unlike any other organ. James Clark in the United Kingdom, never one for romance, all of a sudden started to write passionate poetry for his wife after receiving a transplant from an amateur poet. You have to ask the question, does a life threatening operation simply put things into perspective, making one more open to trying new things and experiencing life to the fullest or does the heart have some sort of mysterious connection to emotion and our personality?

Aristotle and the ancient Greeks 2500 years ago saw the heart as the seat of the spirit and the rational soul. When you feel bad after a sudden loss in your life there’s this tightness in your chest and it feels as though your heart is beating irregularly. It’s little wonder that so many years ago, it was seen as the centre of love and emotion. By the late 19^th Century with advancements in medicine and technology, the important relationship of the brain to intelligence and emotion became established. Despite the growing evidence that the heart is merely a responder to stimulation by the brain, there is a growing movement among scientists that is trying to reverse this understanding. Some scientists are now convinced that the heart is so much more than just a biological pump; it may have memory and emotional intelligence.

You make me so lonely baby,
I get so lonely,
I get so lonely I could die.

Losing someone that you love is difficult. It’s hard to sleep, concentrate and find happiness in the things that you once loved doing. You can lose a ridiculous amount of weight and feel hopeless and nauseous all the time. The blood flow to your brain, changes. The anterior cingulate cortex associated with physical pain and distress in depression, becomes active and your immune response is weakened. Although it seems infantile and silly, evidence now suggests that you can die from a broken heart.

Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Jim Callaghan, who died 11 days after his wife of 67 years, is one person who is believed to have died from a broken heart. A study conducted in 1996, examined 1.5 million cases between the ages of 34 and 84. It was discovered that the risk of dying from something that resembles a heart attack 6 months after the loss of a loved one, increased from the norm by 20 to 35%.

Broken heart syndrome, also known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, is a recognised medical condition that is caused by extreme stress often after the loss of a loved one and is more commonly found in older people. Fear and grief leads to a greater secretion of noradrenalin and adrenalin, hormones associated with the fight-and-flight response. These hormones lower the pumping ability of the heart and can cause chest pain and symptoms that closely mirror a heart attack. It differs from a heart attack, though. The heart undergoes a transformation; it takes up an atypical shape that compromises its pumping function. Its base squeezes normally but the middle and tip do not. This is not an ordinary heart attack. It doesn’t kill the heart muscle, just renders it helpless and can affect perfectly healthy people that don’t have any blood clots. Sufferers often recover within two to three weeks. It is a reaction to emotion.

Dr Ilan Wittsen of Johns Hopkins University has examined this remarkable condition. Blood samples from patients believed to be suffering from Broken Heart Syndrome contain high levels of adrenalin and noradrenalin which are more elevated than in normal heart attack patients. The heart responds to emotion like no other organ, but does it have a brain of its own?

Is your heart filled with pain?

Shall I come back again?

Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

In 1967, Dr Christian Barnard performed the first heart to heart transplant. Although the patient survived only 18 days, it was clear that the heart was a secularised organ, capable of beating on its own without the help of the brain. A person can remain heartless for about 15 minutes and even after a transplant, the connections linking the heart to the brain can remain severed. It continues to beat autonomously because of the Intrinsic Cardiac Ganglia.

The Intrinsic Cardiac Ganglia, affectionately known as the “little brain in the heart” is integral to the heart’s maintenance and performance. It is a collection of cells dispersed throughout the heart that strongly resemble neurons, the cells of the brain. In addition to this, it has brain-like supporting cells, proteins and messengers. There are about 40,000 neurons that sense and control your heart rate and communicate with the brain. If the heart contains neurons, why can’t it behave like a brain and remember and associate?

Dr Garry Schwartz, professor of psychology at the University of Arizona considers the heart to be a “bio, psycho, socio, spiritual organ” and is convinced that it has independent intelligence and paranormal abilities. He argues that there is circular communication between the heart and the brain and that memory can be transferred to the heart. In the case of James Clark, Schwartz believes that the donor’s heart had cells associated with poetry prowess. Clark’s change in personality from a masculine English brute into a sensitive, and ‘in touch’ gentleman also convinced Schwartz, that the heart affects emotion and love. It’s probably important to note that all this is coming from someone who believes that psychic Allison DuBois, the inspiration of television’s Medium, can indeed contact the dead with 77% accuracy and that none of this research has been published in a peer reviewed journal.

Schwartz calls this theory cellular memory and believes that memory exists in every cell of the body but most strongly with the heart. Cellular memory has been the topic of many books and films. In the 1924 book inspired, silent film, Les Mains d’Orlac (translated, “The Hands or Orlac”), concert pianist Paul Orlac loses his hands in a tragic railway accident only to have them replaced by the hands of a murderer. Orlac becomes consumed with murderous thoughts and develops a thirst to kill, like something off an episode of Passions. It would be terrifying to think that now in the golden age of science and medicine we may transform transplant patients into living Frankensteins.

A Californian research organisation known as the Institute of HeartMath (IHM) has developed an entire discipline on heart training and meditation. Crazy haired Research Director, Dr Rollin McCarty is convinced that our high stress, anxiety saturated, socially awkward society may be the result of negative emotions being transferred from one person to the next by a magnetic field that radiates from the heart and through the skin.

In one study, McCarty got subjects to look at a series of photographs, both pleasant and unpleasant ranging from disfigured persons to large, fulsome boobs and recorded response times of the heart and brain. He found that the heart responded correctly to the image, at a rate greater than predicted by chance, before the brain did and before the repulsive picture, for example, was even viewed. McCarty suggests that it’s not the brain that perceives negative stimuli and then signals the heart to beat faster but that the heart intuitively reacts, then the brain and then the rest of the body.

Starting today I’m teaching my heart

Not to ache anymore

Just because we’re apart.

Reversing common scientific notions especially to a more primitive, 2500 year old idea is a difficult task. UWA’s own Nobel Prize winner, Barry Marshall had to face decades of dissent and publication rejections until he deliberately infected himself with a bacterium and had a severe inflammatory reaction. He proved that stomach ulcers could be treated with an antibiotic and were the cause of bacteria, not stress, lifestyle or diet but it was a long and arduous process of acceptance.

Science, as it stands, is reductionist and not holistic. It concentrates on each organ as a single entity, not the overall picture in order to get to the heart of the matter. One thing is for sure, you feel something in your chest when you lose something or someone that was important. Perhaps that’s the heart thinking and feeling for itself, but according to current scientific though, it’s the brain that’s holding the reigns.

Although his ideas may be a little farfetched, Dr Rollin McCarty has developed an effective way of coping with heartbreak. Pick something that hurts you, but don’t think about it, just feel it. Visualise the transfer of energy from your breath into your heart and activate feelings of positivity. It sounds wanky, but meditation really doesn’t get the credit that it deserves.

Find it in your heart to do the things that you love and make you happy. Give yourself time, talk and reflect. In order to transcend pain, you must first experience it; pain is your body’s way of motivating recovery. A broken heart can be repaired and strengthened, just think of William Sheridan and the artistic flare he never knew he possessed. I cross my heart.

***

Not entirely sure why so many people liked this article more than all my others. It really is the end of an era. Who knew one silly office could mean so much to you. A sad, but healthy day.

and then, of course, there was pollock.

'Jack the Dripper' you never cease to amaze me. So many complexities, so much fun. The second piece is Pollock's 'The Moon Woman'. I love it - it doesn't look cheesy or cliched. It's just happy. This is one of Pollock's early paintings... clearly.

I saw his later 'action paintings' all over NYC this year and I couldn't directly say why I fell in love with them. This quote by Hans Namuth is close to what I feel. "(Pollock's paintings) reveal that his all-over line does not give rise to positive or negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is not inside or outside to Pollock’s line or the space through which it moves…. Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas."

Harold Rosenberg also said that "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint.' The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value — political, aesthetic, moral." It is perfection in my eyes. Pollock used to get dirty, on all fours. He stood over his paintings and applied sand, glass blended with impasto. His paintings are so much fun! Why does a painting need to say anything?

I mentioned previously that I want to have a second childhood and I don't know a better way of doing so than by painting! Last week in my art class, I brought a photo in with me to paint. I was bored. Today I went in with no idea at all. And then I remembered a memory and I saw these pictures and something just clicked. I like abstract art as a mode for expressing my memories. I like impressionism when painting from a photograph

I included the first image by Chagall ('Paris through the window') because I felt like I was looking into my own world. I miss Paris. I miss art. I like to see things like a painting. I will go to Paris this/next year. It's on. I don't have any commitments, best to do so now before I end up in another serious relationship. I feel so alive lately. So happy, like a Pollock painting. I feel like I'm becoming more open and creative and childlike once more. It's a happy feeling. I'm not there yet, but I can feel myself "moving forward" ;)

Oil paint is amazing. Oil paint is gooey and yucky and fun fun fun. I spent about 2 hours just enjoying painting with oils - the way they blended into one another, the silky feel of my paint brush bristles moulding into the layers of colour. I wasn't really concentrating on what I was painting. I listened to a playlist that reminded me of another time and felt like laughing.

The man/woman image seen in both these paintings is one that I find really powerful. I once read that Plato believed that at the start of the world, there was this one being. It was rather short, with a head that had two faces, looking in different directions, with two sets of sex organs, four legs and four arms. One day, Zeus got jealous of this creature’s willpower and stamina and ability to work in unison and so well for long periods of times that he cut the creature in two with a lightning bolt, creating man and woman. Plato believed that now humans search for their lost half to re-fuse together and become one again.

Uh, I want to feel lightness... this lightness that I'm feeling now with another being. Why is it that I never feel lightness in a relationship? Only heaviness. I'm 19, it shouldn't matter and for the first time in a long time, it doesn't. I think I ruined something that could have been wonderful and could have been exactly how Plato saw it, but that's what happens when you've been fucked over too many times and can't handle intimacy and openness. A part of me wants to start it again, now. A part of me wants to stay where I am because perhaps he will never understand me. Luckily, it's not just my decision to make.

I'm not scared anymore. :)

jazzed up.

These songs remind me of someone that I don't really miss so much anymore, which is odd because I couldn't listen to either of them for about two years without feeling the need to cry and burrow into the ground. On another blog, I published 5 songs that represent my life to date but I completely forgot about this time in my life. Maybe, because it coincided with some of my worst moments, I'd dissociated myself from them.

I often wonder, is it possible to love someone, really be in love with that special someone, if you never technically dated? A friend of mine told me last week that when she looks back at her past relationships, she realises that she only truly loved those who continue to mark her years after. I think that simplifies things too much. In retrospect, everything looks different. Magda says that you can only truly love someone that loved you back.

I was walking around the art gallery last week and randomly ran into a friend from my past. After talking for a while, he mentioned something that has made me jump for joy. The boy that had driven me mad for about a year, that drove me into the arms of my biggest mistake, that kissed me only once, that gave me the CD that contained these two songs had felt the same way about me. I never thought that someone like him could be infatuated with someone like little me. He always seemed bigger than me.

Hindsight changes everything. It obscures the feelings you may have felt and dilutes the thoughts that raced through your mind. I thought that I had met my first love at 19. I now realise that I was kidding myself. I wanted to tell my last partner about everything in my past, but not this one stolen moment (there I go with the jazz references, again). It's difficult to get over your first love. My God, I wonder how things would have panned out if only we had been honest about the way we'd felt.

I should get a diary, but I prefer to type. If ever I get upset, I will remind myself of the love that blossomed for a little while, but never really bloomed.

it's unbearable!

So I started reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being and there was this one passage that really resonated within me. Near the start of the novel, the narrator brought up the idea that life is like a musical composition and that there are motifs that keep on being repeated - like how Anna Karenina meets her love at the site of a train station suicide and then takes her own life in this same manner. Or how the bowler hat keeps returning, each time with a new meaning, for Sabina.

The idea reminds me of the structure of a Sonata. In the Exposition, the themes are brought up and then played around with in the Development. They're inverted, given new harmonies, turned major or minor and embellished, but it's still the same motif and when you hear it, there's this sense of familiarity, clarity and unity. That's exactly what the composers were aiming for in the first place. I'm going to be 20 in three months time, I'm probably nearing the end of my Exposition, but I feel as though sometimes I'm seeing and hearing the same things over and over. I feel aulde.

I don't think this is the place to divulge some of the more personal recurrences that I see, but there are small things. Like how your partner smells exactly the same like the other people that you've been with despite the fact that none of them use the same cologne. It's like you're with the same person over and over again. For me, the songs 'My Girl', 'Sunny Side of the Street' and 'Lady' keep being played everywhere I go and I can't help but feel this strong pang of nostalgia in my gut every time I hear them. Whenever I stop over in Singapore, I see the same bench where I rested my head against Magda's shoulder after our long flight from Perth. I don't know where it is in Singapore, but I always find it or walk/drive past it unintentionally. I don't want to know its whereabouts. Everytime I see it, it's almost as though I see us sitting there and the notion that I will never again be the exact same person that I was 6 years ago, used to freak me out. I'm being incredibly wanky (do I overuse this word?), but I like the idea that we're constantly evolving along the same old motifs.

I think I'm obsessed with knowing everything about love and sex; for crying out loud, I want to be a sexologist. I'm concerned that because I'm constantly trying to learn and experience as much as I can, I will never feel the unbearable lightness of being. I was with someone that I thought I loved, but I was never comfortable around him. There was always something in my gut telling me to leave. I didn't end up ending it, though. My gut also told me to stay, and so I felt heaviness.

My grandmother's name is Marianna and when she was a teenage girl, a fortune teller told her that she was going to marry a man named Marian. She disregarded this piece of information, laughed it off, because it would obviously be too ridiculous to marry someone whose name was so similar to your own. Law and behold, that's exactly what happened. You have to ask the question, do recurrences happen because they're predetermined and a part of our musical composition or because we want to see connections. I'd like to think the former point is correct, but then again, I think back to Friday night / Saturday morning. In my drug addled mind, I thought that it was no coincidence that Animal Collective's 'My Girls' played on as I connected with another person since my break up. It felt like that night in October last year when i danced with my last partner. Was it another motif repeating itself or a clear sign that Amps doesn't change its set list?

I often wonder if Maj chose the right guy or if the fortune teller's words were in the back of her mind when she said 'yes' to Kaku's proposal. It's odd though, someone came up to Mamulek out of the blue once when she was on her lunch break and told her that she had to spend more time with her brother. Wujek Waldek died a few months afterwards. When I was in India, waiting for the train to Jodhpur in Jaisalmer, a man told me that "red bird is going to fly at 21" and when I asked if this was a bad thing, he said "no, very lucky hand". I hope so. The women in our family seem to have easily readable futures :) Either that, or the turbaned stranger didn't know how to speak English properly.

I've side tracked a little. Fark, I know how to ramble. Was talking about it with Magda the other day; I tend to be quite open about my experiences nowadays, even on public forums like the internet. I guess the more secrets you have, the more likely you are to talk about those that aren't as significant.

If the musical composition has an Exposition, and a Development of the themes presented, then it has to finish with a Recapitulation and Coda. In the traditional Sonata, the Recap was essentially a repeat of the Exposition which is boring. If life is like a musical composition, (and even if it's not, I will always see it this way) I think it would be like one of Ravel's sonatas. The themes return, but they're way funkier and more intensely harmonised than the initial presentation :) I'm still at the start of my life - my music is only just beginning to develop its themes and motifs.

I like this book, and I like how I've changed over the last three weeks. It seems silly and corny to say that I'm starting to feel like myself again. Maybe I wasn't living my life to the fullest over the last two or three months, but now I am.

like voles in love.

Once upon a time (all great love stories start this way), there was a beautiful prairie vole; the most beautiful prairie in all the research pens. Let’s call her Sally. Sally wanted love, the type that makes your tail curl up and sets off butterflies in your stomach, but none of the prairies in her pen had ‘it’. One day, a new prairie entered the pen, let’s call him Harry. Harry was everything that Sally had been looking for. The sex was unbelievable and they couldn’t keep their paws off each other in the first few days of meeting. Over the next few months, the raw, physical passion that they had felt upon meeting subsided, but it was replaced with a feeling of contentment, safety and love. Sally had found her soul mate.

In nature, few animals are capable of maintaining monogamous relationships. Unlike their close cousin, the montane vole, prairie voles, can mate for life and remain with their furry love until the very end. A research team led by Sue Carter explored this difference in vain hope of perhaps discovering some of the clues to long lasting love and relationship satisfaction. Little did they realise that what they’d find would be applicable not only to the voles, but all animals including humans.

Love is like snorting cocaine. It lights up our pleasure centres and makes us crave for more. It releases powerful “good feel” hormones and like cocaine, it can isolate us from other people, hobbies and things and keep us returning over and over to the same person. When Sally was ‘in love’, the “cuddle hormone” oxytocin was released. It’s this hormone that lowers anxiety, lets us trust people and steal babies from strangers. Merely being close to someone that you care about is enough to increase oxytocin levels. When the research team blocked female prairies’ oxytocin output, their relationships became fleeting like the montane voles. Upon injection of the hormone, however, bonding pairs were reformed and female prairies would bitch slap any hoe-bag prairies that tried to steal their men.

Male brains don’t have as many receptors for oxytocin as females do, perhaps explaining why they, like dogs, need excessive pampering, rubbing and touching to stay happy. Instead, partner preference seems to be reinforced through the actions of another chemical, vasopressin. Stimulated by testosterone and orgasms, this hormone provides men with a laser-like focus that keeps them tracking their mate. It was the length of this chemical’s gene that Sue Carter found different among the prairie and montane voles. Free lovin’ montane voles have a shorter gene variant than the love crazy prairie voles but this difference in gene length isn’t just restricted to voles. Frivolous and promiscuous chimpanzees have a short variant of the gene whilst their bonobo brothers, which use oral sex and genital rubbing to resolve group tensions, have one that’s longer.

Ladies care more about the size of your man’s vasopressin gene than anything else. Even among humans, there are 17 different vasopressin lengths. The partners of males with short vasopressin genes are more likely to experience greater relationship dissatisfaction, problems in the bedroom, bad communication and marriages are twice as likely to end in divorce.

With divorce rates climbing up to 40% and over in Australia, one has to ask, what are we doing wrong? It would be easy just to run down to the chemist, get a vasopressin test and figure out the length of your date’s vasopressin gene, but surely that’s not the only factor here. What helps us find the person, or prairie vole, that’s right for us?

Let me tell you ‘bout the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees

Birds do it, cats do it, and ferrets do it. Most mammals have a gland on the top of their nasal cavity, called the vomeronasal organ that detects sex pheromones and gets the little creatures excited and rowdy. These chemicals can alert potential mates as to when females are most fertile. A single Bombay moth releases enough pheromones to attract one billion males into her warm cocoon whilst silkworms can detect pheromones up to 11km away. So far, the existence of this organ in humans has been disputed but recent research suggests that pheromones may play a role in human attraction.

Ovulating lap dancers earn almost two times more than when they’re on their periods. During a 5 hour shift, dancers earn, on average, US$335 if they’re at their most fertile (during ovulation), US$185 when menstruating and US$260 when in between ovulation and menstruation. By contrast, dancers on the pill show no such discrepancies. Perhaps not as obvious as the silkworm that slithered through dirt for 11km to get some suga, but evidence is now coming in to suggest that pheromones and scents do play a role in the human world of love and attraction.

Our sweat and bodily secretions contain proteins of the immune system which bacteria on the surface of the skin break down to produce a perfume that is uniquely our own. This signature scent may play a role in helping us find ‘the one’. Late last year on his ABC program, Race Relations, John Safran panty sniffed for the sake of science. In his quest to determine whether he had a biologic predisposition towards Eurasian women, Safran collected ten dirty underwear samples and smelled each pair whilst blindfolded. The experiment showed that John Safran did indeed favour the Eurasian knickers over those that were Jewish.

The test performed by Safran was a modification of the Undergarment Test which showed that we tend to prefer the scents of others that are genetically dissimilar to ourselves. In terms of reproduction and evolution, this makes sense. If you do the dirty with someone who is more genetically different than yourself, your offspring will have a wider range of resistances since immune system genes are co-expressed. The kids get immune system genes from both the mother and the father. If you impregnate your sister, your children and future generations, are more likely to be mentally retarded and have genetic disorders.

The Human Leukocyte Antigen system (HLA) contains a large number of genes related to immunity and has been linked to relationship success and attraction. Cheating increases with the more HLA genes that you have in common with your partner. Couples with similar HLA genes are also more likely to have unsuccessful embryo transfers and in vitro fertilisations. It’s almost as though the body is trying to tell you that the person you’re with isn’t your prairie vole.

The Science behind homosexuality

Pheromones play a role in homosexuality as well as heterosexuality. Evidence for homosexuality has been provided through undergarment studies. It has been shown that homosexual males prefer the undergarment smells of other homosexuals and the smells of heterosexual women over heterosexual males. Lesbians also rather the smell of other lesbians, and heterosexual males over homosexual males. We seem to be more attracted to the smells of one sex over another and these attractions can increase the fitness of a population.

Evolutionists have been puzzled by the fact that homosexuality hasn’t yet been wiped out by natural selection since there is no way that the human race can propagate through same sex relationships. Two theories for this conundrum have been proposed.

If you look around you homosexuality is everywhere in the animal kingdom. Even on our beautiful Swan River, realise that one in every four black swan couples that you see is a homosexual one. In fact, homosexual black swan couples are infamous for stealing eggs or sometimes even being part of threesomes only to drive their female egg incubator away to raise the children themselves. Surprisingly, the children taken under wing by the homosexual couples have a great chance of surviving, perhaps revealing the importance of homosexual relationships to the survival of the fittest.

A strong correlation has also been recently found between homosexuality, bisexuality and increased fertility in female relatives. One study suggested that there may be a gene on the X chromosome which when expressed in women, allows for greater reproductive success but, when expressed in men, manifests itself in homosexuality. So, despite taking one male out of the mating field, the increased fecundity of the aunts, sisters and cousins of this homosexual male acts as a sort of reproductive compensation.

Am I with a prairie vole or a montane vole?

Our attraction and ability to form loving relationships to certain people makes sure that future generations are viable and healthy. In the case of Sally and Harry, the loving, monogamous bond between the voles ensured that their babies were brought into a caring and nurturing environment thus allowing for greater fitness. In humans, as in voles, children raised up by a single parent tend to have higher rates of mortality. In Australia, 83% of psychiatric hospitalisations and 75% of teens that commit suicide come from single parent backgrounds.

Pheromones seem to play an important role in attraction but with the overuse of perfumes, deodorants and chewing gums, perhaps we are masking the scents that can draw the right, prairie vole in. The pill, as well, has the ability to affect our sense of smell and perhaps affect our natural mate choice. No doubt, there are many different theories for why divorce rates are on the rise and unless you’re prepared to stop shaving your arm pits and quit using deodorants, you may always be attracting montane voles. Love is a mystery and attraction is a multifaceted pull that I don’t I think will ever be completely understood. Just ride on that wave because some of us might be lucky enough to know what it felt like when Harry met Sally.