See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/299770622

Conditional Love

Chapter · January 2013

CITATIONS READS

0 264

1 author:

Ana Maria Fernandez

University of Santiago, Chile
92 PUBLICATIONS   888 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Sex differences in jealousy from an Evolutionary perspective View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Ana Maria Fernandez on 06 April 2016.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Chile Ana Maria Fernandez

Conditional love

“I am in love with life and I am fascinated by the social interactions and emotions I

study”, says Dr. Ana Maria Fernandez. “And although I am not a feminist, I admire

deeply all the women in experimental social sciences that make their contributions to

understanding the human condition from a female perspective that complements the

masculine perspective on these topics.”

The kinds of love that sustain reproduction, such as parental love, friendships and romantic

love, are the object and the engine of our lives. As humans we are a social species, and loving

leads to social exchange which is necessary for our minimal adjustment to our world. But not

all forms of love are equivalent.

Although the satisfaction of our deepest feelings of social exchange is fulfilled by the love of

friends and family, we experience deep empathy for and we accept family and friends “as

they are”. This seems to be because our psychological adjustment, as well as our brains, are

specialized to seek out and require social bonding from birth to death in order to develop into

human beings. My study of evolutionary psychology and the teachings of Leda Cosmides and

John Tooby have helped me understand that familial love is moderated by genetic relatedness:

we accept more imperfections and give more than we receive to those who are closely related

to us. In the case of friendships and other forms of social bonds, we behave strategically and

reciprocally, we expect and give according to what the other means to us socially, and how

we think we should be valued by others. Most friendships and family relationships lead to
deep feelings of love, but how unconditional they are depends on the degree of relatedness we

share, and parental love is the closest and most unconditional form of love we may attain.

Similarly, we inevitably experience and seek out the most fragile sort of love to share our life

together with a significant other, who usually becomes our reproductive partner. As the

anthropologist Helen Fisher has documented, our body and our brain are completely affected

by desire, sex and romantic love. Paradoxically, romantic bonds are not an unconditional

form of social exchange, but involve constant evaluation of our current situation,

expectations and the possible alternatives we may have if we seek out alternatives, or we stay

with our stable partner.

As any emotion, love involves intense psychophysiological reactions that drive the search to

attain this state over and over again. When someone is dealing with the loss of a loved one, as

is the case of dealing with the loss of romantic love, it can lead to intense feelings of jealousy

that may indeed cause irrational aggressive reactions or deep withdrawal and depression. I

have studied violations of trust and sex-differences in the situations that trigger romantic

jealousy, and the specific emotions that may be involved in the deep affective reaction men

and women have when they experience romantic betrayal. My research has led me to

hypothesize that masculine jealousy is dominated by aggressive feelings that motivate

active violence towards the partner or the other. Physiologically, betrayed men seem to

experience a boost of active aggression and motivations to attack. Women on the other hand,

feel angry and betrayed of course, but the feminine reaction to unfaithfulness is more

withdrawal and seeking out social support. Physiologically, they seem hurt by betrayal,

losing active motivation to react towards the partner or indeed anything.

 Quote: “We accept family and friends more ‘as they are’ than our partner”

Ana Maria Fernandez is Associate Professor at the Psychology Department of the

Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Chile). She has been fascinated by evolutionary

psychology since she studied at the University of Texas. It helped her sustain her research on

romantic relationships and jealousy while she was doing her master in experimental

psychology and it motivated her doctoral research at the University of Chile and her

postdoctoral stay at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

View publication stats