Instant Love ... A Certain Chemistry ... By Mil Millington - Part 5

Well. I've got to be honest with you here. I feel like a bit of a jerk right now. Kind of like when you play a practical joke on someone, thinking everyone will get a blast out of it, only it goes wrong and people get upset. I mean, sure, I feel responsible - I'm, God, right? It comes with the territory. But I got to assure you that, for what it's worth, I had only the best intentions. You got to believe what I'm telling you when I say that I never intended things to get messy like this.

Oh, I don't mean for Tom or Sara or George, obviously. I knew about that - that's the very reason I'm showing them to you now, so you can see waht I'm talking about. No, I mean not for anyone. Because, like I say, Tom and Sara and George could be anyone. I have to check that you understand me here. It doesn't matter, for example, that George is a famous actress, okay? I know you people are built to understand complex stuff and be able to see patterns and meaning - and that's good. But the trouble is, it makes you want to see patterns and meaning, and hate to think you're not complicated. If that terrible Fiona chick had been willing, then Tom might easily be in a hotel with her now. And later he'd think that maybe it was some indefinable connection they had - both being English in Soctland or both working in publishing or whatever - that was the critical thing. But that ain't it. Remember: filter out the scenery. Remember: Sara or George or Tomr or A.N. Other or you - it's all the same thing, okay?

Look, when I set this universe up, I was kind of making it up as I went. There was no "Creation 101" I could have attended beforehand, you know what I'm, saying? Sure, so I could have done a few things better - I'm the first to admit that. No one can say I'm not prepared to stick up my hand and say "mea culpa" when I screw up, 'cause that just isn't right. And I'm, at least trying to make up for things as best as I can - I mean, that's why I'm, here now, okay? We got to deal with the situation we're in; we can't go back and rewrite the book, but I can at least read you the rules we have, so your know where you stand. Should have done it a long time ago, I admit - strike two against me - but you know how you put these things off.

Okay, enough with the beating myself up. Let's get on with business.

You remember what I was saying about the whales? How I just kind of thought up all this stuff and went at it? Sometimes I got a bit carried away, got into a groove and kept pumping out these ideas. I'm like, "Yeah, that's good! Whoa - and I know what else would be cool ... " and I don't know when to stop. They call it plentitude; I just kind of thought of it as "being on a roll." Well, I don't want you getting the idea that I simply threw you guys together, okay? I was really on the case, thinking about all these angles and stuff, all these possibilities. Like I say, though, like with the whales, I don't really know how I do stuff; I just, you know, want badgers and - there you go - badgers. Which suits me, by the way. If I have this great idea for a plant, I don't want to have to figure out cell division and invent osmosis and stuff first - who has the time, right? But like I told you earlier, I'm totally into all these scientists of yours getting out their microscopes or whatever and working out how I did everything. That gives me a real kick. And - I'm guessing here, but I figure I'm right - I think it helps you to understand what's going on if you look at it like that. So, that's how I'm going to explain all this to you, okay? So you kind of hear it in your own language, you know what I mean? And also, so you can check up on it and see I'm telling you the truth here. I'm showing good faith by making sure you can do that.

Now, first off, I thought you'd mostly all be dead by forty. Let's get that straight right from the start. That was the time frame I was working in, and I don't think anyone can accuse me of not doing enough to make this reasonable. Natural disasters, disease, wild animals, cold, starvation - the list goes on. So, I don't think that any charge of negligence is going to stick, you know? And until fairly recently, it worked. How was I to know you'd start coming with all this stuff to keep yourselves alive? Flood warnings and antibiotics and office work. You think it's reasonable to blame me for not guessing that some wise guy would go and invent a dialysis machine, eh? So, for a start, any problems with your love life when you're over forty: not my fault, okay? Past the warranty. Stuff you do beyond thirty-nine you do at your own risk, you know what I'm saying?

So, I'd got this sex stuff - which, I think you'll agree, is kind of neat - and my only problem was how to ... um, how to implement it. You have fourteen years to get a chance to stop being stupid (Okay, okay, third strike, there - let's push on anyways), a bit of finding your feet, then all the sex while you try to defy the odds against dying for a decade or so. Now, it was kind of important you had sex. I was worried you might not do it enough to keep yourselves in offspring, so I put a lot of work into getting you to go for it. (Well, yes, - I went over the top, obviously. Everyone can be smart in retrospect, can't they?) First I made you want it - badly. How? "Gonadal steroids," apparently. As I say, I'm just using your words here - if I'd been naming stuff, you can bet I'd never have come up with "gonadal steroids." I mean, ugh, right? Anyways, you have these gonadal steroids - estrogen and testosterone - to get you all fired up and looking for sex. Off you go.

Now I need to refine it a bit or ... well, I'll let you picture what happens if I don't - but queues would move even slower at the post office, if you know what I'm saying. So, I get you to be attracted to someone, rather than absolutely everyone (I'm going to come back to this later, so remember it, okay?). I'm pretty clever here, if I say so myslef. I throw in a bit of that brain chemistry that you people call psychology - basic stuff, but I do it real smooth like, so you don't notice.

For example, I make you most attracted to faces that are similar to your own. That's to say that, if your're a man, you like your own mug, only in a more feminine style, and the same if your're a woman - you go for the structure you see in your mirror but with the manliness turned up. (You didn't even know that, did you? You think I am making this up. I'm not - ask people at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, if I'm just making this up' they'll smack you right in the face.) Better, I thought, that you're drawn to faces like your own than if you're drawn to faces like your dogs'. Tell me I'm wrong. Mostly it's very simple rules that I come with. You don't know about them, but they're pretty fomulaic. Symmetry: you prefer symmetrical people. Smell: women prefer the smell of men whose immune systems are different from theirs. Oh, and they go for male pheromones pretty reliably too. (I got a bit carried away with women and smelling, to be honest. Ended up with women being a thousand times more sensitive to some smells than men. No need for that, really. Just on a roll again.) And all the time I'm seeing to it that you get really excited about this by doling out the monoamines.

You remember the monoamines, right? Remember I mentioned them a while back, just so you wouldn't start giving some kind of spiritual agenda to the woody that Tom got while he was interviewing George? Yeah, sure you do. Well, let me clue you in on the monoamines.

Monoamines are a collection of chemicals - neurotransmitters - and they, well, they are sexual attraction, basically. What happens when you feel attraction? Nah, don't give me any of that, "Oooh, I go all tingly" or "It's like tiny little bunnies are hopping around in my stomach and my mind starts twinkling" stuff. Not only are metaphors part of the trouble here, but I asked you what happens, not how you interpret it. Attraction isn't controlled, it couldn't give a damn about your morals or your worldview, and it definitely isn't the work of Cupid, tiny pink fairies, or magic of any kind. It's monoamines. You've got your serotonin, your norepinephrine (that's adrenaline to you and me), and your dompamine washing about in your head. Your brain's lighting up around the medial insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, the caudate nucleus, and the putamen, while it's "good night" to the posterior cingulate gyrus, the amygdala, and, right-laterally, the prefrontal, parietal, and middle temporal cortices. What the hell does all that mean? It means you're mad as crab, basically. I'm not kidding here - you're clinically barking; you really shouldn't be allowed to drive. Monoamines are the ruthless, amoral storm troopers of sexual attraction; these things really do take no prisoners - dopamine alone buys your entire better judgement in exchange for a warm glow - and together they make the kind of cocktail that can, say, lead to you ending up in a hotelroom on top of a soap star.

But, as you'll have guessed, all of this is no good if, when you manage to get sex, you find it's about as appealing as chewing a truck driver's sock. So, stage three: neuropeptides. What we have here, basically, are your standard oxytocin and vasopressinn. You have sex, oxytocin hits the pleasure centers of your brain, and you think, "Whoa. That's something I'll be doing again." But - and this is where I got real smart - oxytocin also encourages you to be faithful. I really put in the effort with this one. Did the road work. I tested the idea of faithfulness with prairie voles first - to see if it was possible. Didn't know I was using oxytocin, of course, but that's what it was, and I tried faithfulness with midwestern prairie vole males and skipped it with the northwestern ones. I have to tell you, with prairie voles, it was fine either way. But with you I went for the faithful approach - figured you'd enjoy the grounding. So, I hit you with oxytocin when you had sex, and I made its release what the white coat call a "a classically conditioned reflex." What that means is you get oxytocin when you have sex, but if you have sex with one person enough it gets so as a bit slips out when you just see them. If Tom thinks he feels guilty now, just wait until he sees Sara again and he gets a shot of oxytocin to hammer it home.

So, there you go - pretty well planned, I think you'll agree. You don't have to bother about sorting yourselves out to reproduce, 'cause I've set up everything for you. No thought required on your part.

Then you go and begin moving goalposts.

I didn't know you were going to change from small groups to cities of eight million, did I? I thought you'd be very lucky to reach the four-decade mark before you died from the flu or were eaten by a wolf, so why bother about the long-term durability of faithfulness? The effects of the monoamines only hold out for - best-case scenario - thirty months. After that your body becomes "tolerant" to the neurotransmitters and, well, passion fades. That's the end of the running through parks in rainstorms, laughing - there's only reflexive oxytocin holding you together now. And how well do you think that's going to hold up when another round of dopamine and serotonin arrives? And I didn't even think it was important to fix that glitch where women - whatever country and culture they've grown up in - have a cycle of about four years from getting together to thinking about finding someone else. Serial monogamy seemed to be fine; chances are that within four or five years either she or her partner would have succumbed to appendicitis or been carried off by an avalanche or something - and even if that didn't happen, well, there'd hardly be four million other people hanging around within an hour's drive for her to move on to, would there? And why not give men an extra helping of testosterone to keep their eyes open? Better to have loved and lost, right?

And this is where it starts to get very embarrassing for me. 'Cause I didn't think infidelity would be a big issue. I certainly couldn't have guessed that more people would be, would even get the chance to be, unfaithful than faithful - you really shot me down in flames there, didn't you? 'Cause I didn't allow for it, it's all done really, really badly. I never thought to throw in a bit of sleight of hand to make it look random or varied. I didn't even give it the thought I put into snow-flakes, is what I am saying. It just runs on the basics, it falls back onto the low-level, unrefined chemistry and psychology (and psychology is nothing but chemistry in a groove, of course). That's why every affair is like every other affair. It doesn't matter whether it's an infidelity between two people who make the same bolts at the same factory, or an English wrriter living in Edinburgh colliding with an actress from the country's highest rated soap ... it's always the same. The trivial details vary and the settings are different, but the people go through the same thing time and time again. I know you must have spotted this, which is partly the reason why I felt I should own up here. Admit what you all knew anyway, just to clear the air.

I messed up. But I got lots of other stuff right. Take bananas, for example. Bananas I got dead-on. Okay, okay, I sense the hostility, and that's fine; best to acknowledge it. If we don't both acknowledge it, we won't be able to move on.

And, you know, I think we can move on, a little. I'm not going to discuss that now, though. Right now, I think you need some time to yourself, a little bit of space.

We'll talk later, okay?