Humans are social creatures. That is a given. At some level, everyone knows that we are social animals who could not long survive without others. Sure, there is the occasional hermit who can live alone, but they are an aberration and not the norm. No, humans are about as social as you can get.
Look at babies. At no time more than infancy is our reliance on others more pronounced. I am not talking about our needs for food, shelter, and hygiene. Rather, I am talking about the basic human need for social contact. Our limbic brains NEED social interaction – human touch, the sound of a human voice, the sight of a human face – to function. Studies have shown that without social interaction babies will die. An infant can be raised in the most hygienic of environments, but without an actual human touching, holding, etc. them, they will die.
Oh, and before I forget, I should probably talk some about the limbic system of our brain. The limbic system is the part of the brain that controls our emotions. It is the limbic system that sets mammals apart from amphibians and reptiles. The limbic system allows us to relate to other limbic animals. Through our limbic system, we can tell when a dog is happy or frightened, we can tell what a person we are talking to is feeling, and we can even know the reasoning behind the cries of a newborn baby. It is a mother’s limbic connection to her child that allows her to differentiate between a hungry cry and a hold me cry.
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“But George,” you ask, “what the devil does this all have to do with happiness or unhappiness?”
And to that I say, “Hold your gorram horses. I’m getting to it.”
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Our society is obsessed with Hollywood. Between the movies and the celebrity culture, you can’t spend a day in America and not hear something about a given celebrity’s latest escapades or the latest hot movie. Hollywood movies have given rise to a very strange view of relationships. Everyone is searching for the stereotypical Hollywood movie romance. They want to have the kind of experience where the wind picks up and tosses their hair as the music swells to a crescendo as they kiss someone for the first time. It is a romantic view of things, but exceedingly distorted in the probabilities that it will happen unless staged to happen so.
Celebrities are no different from anyone else in this respect. They want to have the kind of amazing scripted beautiful relationships that they portray in their movies and TV shows. They get caught up in a whirlwind romance with their latest fling, and the paparazzi go wild. Every tabloid, women’s and teen’s magazine, and half of the “news” magazines are about nothing but the latest “who’s dating whom” stories. Our society thrives on it. We have even come up with a method of referring to the relationships by making a conglomeration of the names of those involved.
Of course, everyone wants to be like their favorite celebrity, but therein lays the problem. Celebrities are as (if not more) fallible than the average person. They get caught up in their newest fling and rush straight into marriage, thinking that this is finally the one . . . unfortunately, life catches up to them and they aren’t as deliriously happy six months later and they get a divorce.
Seeing their favorite celebs do this, the average person gets into a relationship, and when it isn’t as picture perfect as their favorite movie romance, or they aren’t as cute a couple as Couple AB, they end it and break up. The majority of the time, they also cut off most if not all ties with their former partner.
And now we have come to the crux of the issue. As humans, our day to day functioning is as much based on external forces as internal. Our interactions with friends and family determine our moods and feelings. Our limbic system works with the cues (both conscious and unconscious) given off by those around us to regulate our bodies and minds. Much like my star analogy a month or so back, how much a given person affects our mood is based upon how influential they are and how close to them we are. We are connected to every person we interact with on a regular basis. Our memories, bodily regulations, thoughts, beliefs, and actions are influenced by this connectivity.
By creating extremely intimate relationships with our “significant others” we bring into our lives a star that is extremely close. These people warm our days and nights, and we thrive with them around us. Then we sever these connections because the relationship isn’t living up to the Hollywood Romantic-Comedy ideal. Of course it isn’t, because only in a scripted interaction could something as silly as this happen:
Jerry: Hello? Hello.
I'm lookin' for my wife.
Wait. Okay...okay...okay.
If this is where it has to happen, then this is where it has to happen.
I'm not letting you get rid of me. How about that?
This used to be my specialty. You know, I was good in a living room. They'd send me in there, and I'd do it alone. And now I just...
But tonight, our little project, our company had a very big night -- a very, very big night.
But it wasn't complete, wasn't nearly close to being in the same vicinity as complete, because I couldn't share it with you. I couldn't hear your voice or laugh about it with you. I miss my -- I miss my wife.
We live in a cynical world, a cynical world, and we work in a business of tough competitors.
I love you. You -- complete me.
And I just had --
Dorothy: Shut up. Just shut up.
You had me at hello.
You had me at hello.
That’s right, the guy screws up, and all he has to do is show up, make a long winded, horribly canned speech, and BAM! Everything is fine again. It is sweet, it is corny, and it is utter horse shit. It doesn’t work that way in real life. In real life we get into an argument and break up. Then, because we are so used to the deep limbic connections between ourselves and the person we just broke up with, things get uncomfortable. So, we remove these people from our lives to remove the discomfort. But this person was the one who we currently had the deepest limbic connections with, so things are thrown off balance. To use my earlier analogy, we are just removing the sun from our sky. What would happen to the earth without the sun? Chaos would ensue. The earth would be engulfed in almost utter darkness after perpetual sunlight. We would drift aimlessly through the cosmos. In much the same way, our moods are thrown completely out of whack when we cut someone thoroughly out of our lives.
Why would we be so affected by the loss of one relationship though? It is actually a simple explanation. In much the same way that a baby looks to its mother to learn how to react to the environment (although to a much lesser degree), humans look to each other for emotional cues during our daily life.
Don’t believe it? Well, consider the following scenarios.
A. You are cut off in traffic, and a few seconds later you come alongside the car that cut you off. The driver is singing and dancing to thumping rock music and is completely oblivious to what they just did.
B. You are cut off in traffic, and a few seconds later you come alongside the car that cut you off. The driver mouths, “Sorry” and sheepishly looks away.
It is likely that those two nearly identical scenarios would elicit completely different responses. The first would cause most people to become irritated if not outright angry. The second is more likely to cause little or no emotional reaction because the other driver is expressing regret and remorse for what they did.
Thus, when we remove the most influential limbic relationship we have, our brains need time to adapt. It is like the average person losing one of their senses. We would need time to adapt to the lack of sensory information coming to our brain by relying more heavily on our other senses. The loss of an important limbic relationship is a direct parallel to this. When we lose a major source of limbic input, we turn to secondary sources and draw more upon them, but we aren’t used to drawing on these sources for some of this information.
In our society these gains and losses of limbic relationships are omnipresent. We are a culture of serial daters. When partner A doesn’t fit our ideal, we drop them and move on to partner B, C, D, E, and F. If it isn’t us doing it, it is one of our friends, and even if one of our direct peers hasn’t recently broken up with someone, the proof is as close as the nearest newsstand. You can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading something about a famous couple breaking up. Our society encourages us to “shop around” while looking for a mate.
Look at our ancestors. When marriages were arranged and divorce was highly discouraged, the prevalence of depression was much lower. Now, I am not advocating arranged marriages, I am just saying that there appears to be a correlation (this is all hypothetical at the moment of course). The introduction of serial relationships to our society may be partly responsible for the apparent depression epidemic.
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“But George, what about people who have been single for long periods of time? Why aren’t they happy?”
“I’m getting there”
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Unfortunately, single people in our society aren’t spared from this whirlpool. No, they are as susceptible as the daters are. As I said earlier, we are inundated with Hollywood Romance and Hollywood couples. On TV, in movies, in books and magazines, everywhere you look you see happy couple after happy couple (followed a few months later by a story about their break up, but I digress). Any single person looking at this yearns for this apparent happiness. They see the smiling faces of couples, who haven’t yet decided that their relationship isn’t Hollywood perfect and should be scrapped, and wish that it was them. The longer they remain alone, the more they get sucked into the idea that a relationship is blissful happiness.
Of course, this leads to problems when they do get into a relationship. When the lonely single person finally finds someone and gets into a relationship, they are expecting things to be as immediately perfect as the latest Romantic Comedy showed that they should be. These people are even more likely to fall victim to this kind of thinking and terminate their relationships early . . . which of course leads to them being emotionally disoriented when these new and deep limbic connections are closed off.
In our society, it appears that you are damned if you date and damned if you don’t.
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