The Evolutionary Psychology Of Love - Robin Dunbar - #520

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Robin Dunbar. He's an anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford and an author. Love is something people have been trying to describe for thousands of years. Beyond asking what love is, it's a question of why humans feel something so strange in the first place. Why would evolution have exposed us to this extreme sensation with huge potential for catastrophe and pain? Expect to learn how love is adaptive, why humans need to have sex more than almost all other animals to get pregnant, why ancestral men who hunted big animals were only doing it to get laid, how the length of your fingers can tell you how promiscuous you are, whether Robin thinks humans were ancestrally monogamous, and much more. This episode absolutely blew my face off. It is so interesting. I adore evolutionary psychology, especially from someone like Robin, who understands it in the wider context of anthropology, of primatology.
This is absolutely great. I really, really hope that you enjoy this as much as I did. And if you do, don't forget to hit subscribe. It's the best way to support the show and it makes me very happy.

**Robin Dunbar** (1:16)
I thank you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:18)
But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Robin Dunbar. Robin Dunbar, welcome to the show.

**Robin Dunbar** (1:43)
Great pleasure to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
Do you ever find it annoying to be so well known for one landmark concept like Dunbar's number?

**Robin Dunbar** (1:55)
I have to say sometimes, but, you know, there are only about, I'm told, 10 people who have a number named after them, and I'm the only one that's alive.

**Chris Williamson** (2:09)
No way.

**Robin Dunbar** (2:11)
Something like that.

**Chris Williamson** (2:12)
Wow.

**Robin Dunbar** (2:13)
Which is a bit worrying.

**Chris Williamson** (2:15)
Oh, well, you think that they're killing off the people that numbers are named after?

**Robin Dunbar** (2:19)
Who knows?

**Chris Williamson** (2:20)
Yeah, you never do know. So originally, I want you to talk about friendships, but we're going to do that another time. You have a book that explains, very interestingly, from an evolutionary psychology basis, what is happening when we fall in love, what happens when we fall out of love. So it's just an absolute primer. How do you define love? What is it?

**Robin Dunbar** (2:42)
Well, I think humans have spent the last umpty thousand years trying to figure out how to define love. And the answer is, it is very difficult. It's clear that something weird goes on in the brain. And in fact, the brain goes completely crazy. And we kind of become fixated, if you like, is what effectively happens on a particular person.
And it's kind of easy to describe the appearance of somebody in love. I mean, all the great poets and Shakespeare and et cetera, et cetera, kind of do it extremely well. Essentially, you know, they sort of dreamy appearance and they can't get the person out of their mind and they want to be near the person, all these kind of things. But trying to understand what is actually going on inside the mind really has been a bit of a nightmare. But the reality is all cultures have or experience something very similar along these lines. That's not to say that every person in the given culture experiences. Some people are constantly falling in love. And like every time a new person comes in the room, they fall in love with them. And other people don't fall in love particularly with anybody. They get on fine with them and they maybe have babies with them. But you know, they're not, it's a bit give or take, you know, as you might say, they're not, they don't have that sort of commitment. So I suppose there is a sense in which there's a feeling of commitment, of rosy sunglasses. This person is the most wonderful person I've ever met. All these kind of cliches, you know, cliches are true based on observation of fact.

**Chris Williamson** (4:43)
What makes us fall in love with somebody then? How can we reliably fall in love with someone?

**Robin Dunbar** (4:49)
Oh, I don't think you can. I think it just overwhelms you when you least expect it. And sometimes it can happen, if you like, after the event. So one of the characteristic things of people who have been in arranged marriages will tell you is, you know, you get ordered by your parents to bury this person and you think, oh, my God. And then, you know, lo and behold, a little way in, you kind of just fall in love with them. And it just seems to work like that. I mean, you know, we kind of prefer to fall in love first before you marry people. Well, you know, that doesn't always work out either. So, you know, there is no rule that's universal to these things. It sometimes happens, it sometimes doesn't. It's hard to say. I would figure anyway, hard to say why it happens in particular cases. Often we don't really know. It really is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and it's a great trauma very often.