Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
Love confers an evolutionary advantage and employs complex neurochemical assaults on the brain’s pleasure centres to better promote successful child rearing.
Wait. That second thing wasn’t in any romantic sonnet.
But it’s a synopsis of some love research found in Glenn Dixon’s new book — Juliet’s Answer — in which the Calgary author also explores this most potent human emotion through his own unique journey out of heartbreak.
Dixon employs both the tongues of scientific men and the angelic language of Shakespeare (quoted from Sonnet 116 above) in his soft-cover take on amore.
The book, released last month, chronicles Dixon’s lopsided romance with a woman he’d coveted for decades.
And the heart-crushing denouement of that wasted pursuit led him to a unique club in Verona, Italy, where he worked as the lone male among women who’ve long answered letters — mailed from around the globe — to the heroine of Shakespeare’s most romantic tragedy.
Dixon concedes that his correspondence efforts in the literary home of Romeo and Juliet may not have produced much healing advice for his lovelorn letter writers.
But for him, they served as a revelation.
And on Valentine’s Day, Dixon’s biographical story might provide insights into the topic du jour.
There is doubtless a biological element to love, says the former high school teacher, pointing as evidence to its persistence across history, cultures and sexual orientations.
He also points to research showing that fresh intimacies prompt the release of neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin that can spark the brain’s reward centres or act as antidepressants.
To forge long-term attachments, studies have also shown that the brain releases oxytocin — the same hormone that peaks during pregnancy and causes a mother to bond with her baby.
And all these neurochemical alterations evolved, research says, in service of a specific biological advantage: that early-human couples who stuck together were more successful at raising children and passing their genes on to future generations.
“But I think love is more than biology,” Dixon says.
“There’s some magic to it that everybody feels. It’s one of the deepest things we feel as human beings.”
Dixon says that love transcends biology in its poetry, romantic customs and the depth of its emotional arousal.
“Emily Dickinson has a quote … something along the lines of ‘it’s all we can know of heaven and all we can stand of hell’,” he says, paraphrasing the 19th-century American poet.
“It’s both ends of the spectrum; it’s the worst of the worst and the highest of the highs.”
Now a full-time author, Dixon’s third book recounts his two personal encounters with love — one high, one low — and the Shakespearean journey that bridged them.
It began with a woman he calls “Claire.”
Dixon’s infatuation with mercurial Claire was thoroughly unrequited, from its post-university inception through dawning middle age. (As a gauge of the lopsided disaster, a reader might call to mind Wile E. Coyote’s continued devotion to ACME products when previous purchases have smashed him into a butte or shredded his snout.)
After Claire’s final and breathtakingly callous insult to his troth, Dixon decided to spend a school’s-out summer in the northern Italian home of the star-crossed lovers.
Dixon taught Romeo and Juliet throughout his two decades in the classroom.
And what lured him to Verona, specifically, was the weird enterprise called the Juliet Club (Club di Giulietta), which he’d first learned of through an essay at the back of the text that he used with his students.
“They get letters sent to Verona directly to Juliet, and there’s this group of women who sit down every day and answer all those letters,” he says.
The club — which survives largely on volunteer work and a stipend from the city — is led by Giovanna Tamassia. Her father, Giulio Tamassia, was a prominent Veronese baker who donated space in the 1980s and served as the club’s chief replier.
But the correspondence tradition dates back to the 1930s when a groundskeeper who tended the Monastery of San Francesco — said to house the tomb of the “real” Juliet — began answering letters left there in the dozens by tourists.
The multilingual group of women who now reply are known as Juliet’s secretaries. And in the wake of Claire’s betrayal of his trust, Dixon volunteered to join.
“They get almost 10,000 letters a year now from all over the world and all age groups,” Dixon says.
But why would these writers — mostly tech-savvy teenaged girls — forgo the ready advice a chat room could provide for snail-mail entreaties to a fictional character?
“They feel that this is somehow a different thing,” Dixon says. “I think they feel that it comes so directly from the heart it has to be handwritten.”
And most writers are not really seeking the advice which, though always handwritten, is often pat.
“It’s not really that the answers are that important, it’s not like we’re solving problems,” says Dixon. “It’s the act of writing the letters. It’s like tossing a wish into the air.”
During a recent interview, Dixon — who was born in Vancouver but has lived most of his life in Calgary — spoke from an orchestra seat in Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre.
The foliage that overspreads the theatre’s ceilings evokes a Shakespearean garden and provides a backdrop to the Groundling Theatre Company’s current productions of Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale. The acclaimed shows, which run through Feb. 19, place most of the audience in temporary seating on stage, facing the whimsical, leaf-lined house.
And Dixon thought it apt that this interview setting — where he was recalling his own romantic strife — rings nightly with the Bard’s standard themes of love, lust, jealousy and sex.
Sitting in the empty theatre Dixon admits — with his disastrous pursuit of Claire as the prime evidence — that he’s no expert on love.
He’s also perplexed by fate, and the role it may play in it.
Dixon, who does not want his age used, says the love between Shakespeare’s teenaged protagonists was written in the stars — that a celestial fate forced their love and deaths upon them.
And many pining writers to Juliet, he says, believe they are likewise fated for someone — that there’s a waiting lover out there meant just for them.
Yet ardourless science has something to say about fate’s role in love as well, Dixon says. He cites studies that show simple geographic proximity, such as at work or in a neighbourhood for example, is by far the prime player in finding a partner.
For his own part, Dixon says he’s ambivalent on the matter — and with good reason.
In the book (spoiler alert) the love who is his salvation — “Juliet’s Answer” to him — is a casual acquaintance who shows up unexpectedly in his backyard as he mourns his estrangement fromClaire on his patio.
“I kind of railed against fate,” Dixon says. “I was brought up believing we are the masters of our fate, we are the captains of our soul.
“And yet all these crazy things started happening to me, all the lows and the highs. I’m still struggling with this one.”
As for Claire, Dixon does not know if she’s read the book, or what she might think of its portrayal of her.
“I hope when all is said and done, that we can be friends again. She had her choices to make and she had every right to make those choices,” he says.
A passionate traveller, Dixon has visited 75 countries — squirrelling away his teacher’s salary and taking advantage of long summer breaks. He’s been on the road even more since he gave up the profession four years ago.
He and his current partner, Desiree, a competitive surfer, are often at a beachside “paradise” in Mexico, where she spends much of the winter.
And though he doesn’t miss some chores of teaching, like planning and marking, he does miss his students.
His last Grade 10 class, which plays a significant role in Dixon’s book as they wade through Romeo and Juliet together, banded for a group hug with him when they found out he was quitting.
(After flying into Toronto recently, Dixon was approached at the airport by a former student — a man now — who stopped him to say how much he’d influenced his life. “That was so gratifying,” he says.)
Dixon is starting his fourth book, and he and his partner recently made several short films in Verona about the Juliet Club.
In the end, Dixon says what he’s learned of love — from his Juliet Club colleagues and the tumult of his own two passions – could be best summed up in a quote from Polonius in the equally tragic Hamlet.
“ ‘To thine own self be true.’ I used that one quite a lot,” he says.
Take care of yourself first, be happy on your own terms, be open to love, and then you’ll be surprised at what happens.
Love can’t be explained? We’ll try
We spoke to U of T’s Ronald de Sousa to further break down the science of love.
Forget the seven-year itch.
Humans, by our evolutionary nature, begin scratching around for new love after three to four years, tops.
Despite Shakespearean ideals of enduring, monogamous love, that yearning, romantic version may have never evolved to last, says Ronald de Sousa, a University of Toronto philosopher who has specialized in the biological underpinnings of human emotions.
De Sousa says research — especially by Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher — suggests that love is actually a combination of three distinct neurological states or “syndromes.” These are “lust,” which is self-explanatory; “limerence” or the obsessive, intense feelings of romance; and longer-term “attachment.”
“And the thing about the three is that they have very different rhythms if you like and a different shelf life,” says de Sousa, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. “Lust can last for minutes or hours, limerence never lasts for more than three or four years.”
And while attachment has no expiration date, it alone bears little resemblance to the burning, romantic love of poetry and song.
“When people are ‘in love,’ one of the strongest illusions that they have at that time is that that feeling of limerence is going to last forever,” de Sousa says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that people stop being ‘attached’ to one another (when limerence passes) —it usually means that they are not so obsessively concerned with one another.”
It also means they’re not that excited about having sex with each other, he says.
“Unless (that is) they take the precaution of also having sex with other people, which tends to kind of spice things up and helps to preserve the intensity of that sexual relationship.”
Each of the three syndromes plays a role in reproduction and the successful passing on of genes that drives evolution, de Sousa says.
“Obviously the point of lust is to get you to actually mate,” he says. “The point of limerence … is to keep you obsessed enough and close enough to one another for the minimum period of time that might be necessary in order to get an infant out of the most helpless phase.”
Attachment, which very often develops between lovers, differs little from parents’ feelings about their children, de Sousa says. But because people often have more than one child, the attachment element cannot be monogamous.
“Yet it’s part of the ideology of love that you’re supposed to be interested in that intense way only in one person,” de Sousa says. “And it’s actually a bit of a puzzle why that should be so.”
De Sousa cautions, however, that these are merely theories. It may be the romantic in him that admits alternative explanations of love are also plausible.
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