What Love Makes Us Do

Science has tried to answer the things we think love can make us do, especially after the notorious Ken and Barbie murders in Toronto in the 90s, where a seemingly perfect couple went on a murderous spree.

The girlfriend, who by all reports had normal childhood, had defended her out-of-character compliance with her abusive boyfriend's psychotic crimes as acting out of love.

Can falling in love lead to acts of evil? Forensic scientists have looked at the factors that contribute to individuals committing evil acts, and at the reasons accomplices give. Science seems to give an unlikely answer - love.

Is there a link between love and violence?

Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studies couples head over heels in love says:

Love is an obsession. You can't stop thinking about the person you love. It's a craving. Romantic love is like an addiction, the brain gets hooked.

First the couples are interviewed to make sure they meet one specific requirement - such intensity that a human being would literally do anything to win their partner. Dr Fisher says:

When I interview these people I need to know they are madly in love. Do they laugh too much? Do their eyes sparkle? Do they look as if they have too much energy? What percentage of time do they think about each other when they're not around? Do they get any sleep? I was looking for personality changes. We can become exceedingly impulsive, show dependency, craving, a willingness to take risks, the absolute blindness to their partner's flaws - and my last question was always the same: Would you be willing to die for him? And invariably they would say, Yes.

Her studies suggest that it is there is a sense of elation and euphoria that love makes us feel via the neurotransmitter dopamine which links it to addiction. If Dr Fisher is correct, then the same physiological forces that control love and addiction could lead to violence.

She describes romantic love as a positive addiction when things are going well, and a negative addiction when things go bad.

Most of us can control ourselves. We're not willing to go and murder or stalk somebody. When we can't control ourselves is when romantic love can lead to chaos. The violence associated with romantic love is staggering. The suicides, the homicides, the crimes of passion all stemming from this primitive brain chemistry for romantic love. There's nothing as violent as love. Nothing.

It may just be an argument over semantics, but I believe that Dr Fisher's description is not of love, but a corruption of love. Anything abused becomes a corruption of its true self. Using the euphoria that love can create in us to enslave someone for their own evil ends is a perverse ideology, which is in direct contradiction to the true purpose of love - to connect and heal us, not harm us.

Regular readers of my blog will know the faith I have in the healing properties of love. It is not love that hurts, but the things we do in the name of love - when love does not ask it of us.

Love does not make us hurt others, nor does it ask compliance towards orders that commands us to hurt others.

It is a terrible truth that if we want to stare at the face of evil all we need to do is look in the mirror. The Ken and Barbie murders are really a very fundamental question about the nature of good and evil, and how that can pervert love.

The transformation from girlfriend to partner in crime shows quite clearly that anyone can be led to commit unspeakable acts in an abusive relationship, suggesting that evil is really an absence of love, not a cause of it.

It serves as a warning that we need to learn about real love, and how to recognise and embrace it in our lives.

Yours in love,