What if the purpose of love isn’t getting people into relationships, but out of them?

What if the purpose of love is to get us out of relationships, not into them? 

Falling in love, or something like it, has been well characterized in monogamous prairie voles, for example. In these animals, a series of clever experiments established that the hormones released when two prairie voles mate—oxytocin and vasopressin—bind to neurons in the part of their brains responsible for reward. These are the same areas activated by drugs of addiction, leading scientists to say that, in effect, drugs hijack systems that evolved to allow us to fall in love.

Monogamy is rare in animals. Only about 3-5% of them practice lifelong monogamy. In humans, it’s only slightly more common. If you look at pre-industrial cultures, which until about 50 years ago meant most of the cultures on earth, 80% practiced some sort of non-monogamy.

As humans with higher-order reasoning, and the ability to plan for the future and prioritize things other than our base instincts, we are capable of choosing (or being forced to choose) between priorities other than love.

So what is the purpose of love?

Such questions are inherently unanswerable, since evolution is not a process with the kind of will or intentionality these questions imply.

There was no creator guiding the process of humans’ long narrative across the millennia—there was no “purpose” to any of this evolution, only its results.

One of the “purposes” of love, not incompatible with the binding together of two people, is to make them crazy enough to ditch their current partners first? Certainly, the overwhelming evidence from our genes and from the history of human societies is that something is driving breakups just as powerfully as that same mechanism, or some related one, drives people to get together in the first place.