When I wake up each morning, I have two surprises. First, that I am still alive in a reasonable shape at my age of over 95 years, and second, that I still have yearnings for an intimate and loving relationship at my age.
During my professional life, though I focused primarily on the biological aspects of sexual and reproductive problems experienced by my patients with injuries to their spinal cord, I was also aware of their emotional yearnings for intimate relationships—for being lovingly enveloped even though their sexual reflexes had ceased to respond. I tried to understand the biological basis of loving relationships but reading about oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and other brain chemicals did not provide me with adequate answers. It is only now, retired and living alone after a 68-year-long happy and loving marriage, with time on my hands I searched for additional answers to what love or loving intimacy is about.
I starting by thumbing through some old philosophy books about intimate human relationships and found that Aristophanes, a comedy writer in Plato’s circle of stage personalities from some 2400 years ago, offered some interesting thoughts.[1] In one of his comedic plays, Aristophanes suggests that the first human beings had one head with two faces (one on the front and one on the back of the head), four arms, and four legs. Two persons occupied one body—a male and a male, a female and a female, or a male and a female—and they lived happily as inseparable pairs. Zeus did not like this arrangement and separated the bodies. The deep intimacy formed in a relationship of two persons inhabiting one body was gone. According to Aristophanes, this was the origin of love—a yearning, a basic unique human emotion—that then drove the search for and the thrill in finding the partner, reuniting, and recapturing the joy of an intimate partnership, but now in separate bodies.
Looking for more scientific explanations, I found that anthropologists suggest that love is a combination of three functions in our brains: lust, romantic attraction, and attachment. These functions produce three different urges: to have sex or at least a sensuous relationship, to be attracted to someone in a romantic sense, and to have an attachment—to care deeply for a partner.[2] The manifestations of these three brain functions vary because their expressions are determined by the contemporary environment in which we grow up. Love in its components is a complex biological, cultural, and social phenomenon, observed in one way or another in all the cultures of the world.[3] It is an experience of great importance to us all, yet it is still not well understood.
At last year’s Christmas festivities, I found myself in the company of two little persons, one was 2½ years old and the other 6 months old, children and grandchildren of my very close friends. I watched with delight all the hugging, holding, loving, and caring provided to the kids by their world of mothers, fathers, grandparents, and others constantly surrounding them with their deep physical and emotional expressions. It occurred to me that perhaps I was witnessing the laying down of the basic neural circuits and neurochemical resources in the brains of these children, which would eventually stimulate, permit, and enhance these little humans’ capacity for the feelings and actions we identify in later life as intimacy and love.
Perhaps my yearning for intimacy at 95 is my brain’s desire to recapture the feelings, sensations, or memories from my life experiences as a newborn, laying in the arms of my caring and adoring family. It is a nice thought, and it makes me feel younger.
—George Szasz, CM, MD
References
1. Plato. Symposium. Accessed 13 January 2025. www.gutenberg.org/files//1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm.
2. Voorst van R. Six in a bed: The future of love—from sex dolls and avatars to polyamory. Polity Press;2024.
3. Karandashev V. A cultural perspective on romantic love. Online Readings Psychol Culture 2015;5. doi: 10.9707/2307-0919.1135.
This post has not been peer reviewed by the BCMJ Editorial Board.
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