The Story of Liu Mingsheng and Xu Chaoqin, and the Deep Science Behind Love

In 2001, a group of hikers discovered an incredible set of hand-carved steps leading deep into the mountains. The ancient-looking ladder was found near the village of Changle in East China. So, the hikers couldn't have known what they'd find at the top, whether it be an ancient Shrine, a monument, or a forgotten ruin. Moreover, the steps themselves are steep, and there are over 6,000 heavy Hyun blocks. It would be easy to mistake them for a relic of a more primitive time. But when the hikers followed the ladder up, what they discovered was anything but primitive. What they found was a love story so profound that when it was reported in 2006, it was given China's award for the greatest love story of the year.

At the top of the stairs, they found a 70-year-old Chinese man, Liu Mingsheng, and his eight-year-old wife, Xu Chaoqin. Unbelievably, those steps hadn't been carved by some passing army or native tribe. Liu himself had carved all 6,000+ steps with hand tools so his wife could get up and down the mountain more easily. He did this while struggling to farm, cook, and harvest outside the cave he shared with his wife. Because not only had Liu carved the steps, he and his wife had been living alone and raising children since the 1950s, back when their relationship, for cultural reasons, was forbidden. The two escaped into the mountains where they built a home in seclusion, started a small farm, and where Liu would slowly carve his ladder - day by day and one block at a time, all in the name of love.

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Back in 2018, marriage rates in the US hit historic lows, going from 10 wedding rings per 1000 people down to 6.5. That's a 35% decrease for those of you keeping score, and according to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, young people between the ages of 18 to 34 are having considerably less sex than they used to. Taking these two factors into account, it seems like love isn't in the air anymore. On the other hand, dating apps like Bumble and Tinder have seen surges high as 25%, and while new couples may be waiting to meet in person until the pandemic is over, that hasn't kept them from falling in love afar. This is either out of simple loneliness or from the existential crisis of being locked up for a year.

We want to tackle myths about lust and love for our episode today now that the world is learning to open its heart from behind closed doors. And we have three myths about love we want to bust.

Myth 1: Is it lust or is it love? Is there even a difference chemically? And if it's all just hormones rampaging to our head, how do you stay in love after the initial attraction has faded?

Is there a difference between love and lust? The answer is, in a nutshell, yes. Most relationships begin with attraction, and people get blinded to the incompatibilities during that first stage. Then later, your shades start to come off and then all the things you used to think you adore about them you now dislike or hate. So, what keeps people in love after the initial attraction is gone?

We're going to talk about chemistry because it’s the only way we get to the core of what is going on. This is an article that I got from Harvard. There are actually clear stages around relationships and love that you can chart. There are three stages listed: lust, then attraction, and then love. We don’t meet people and fall in love right away. First, we start with lust, and that's the one we really want to break down chemically. Now, when you first meet someone romantically, that lust derives from estrogen and testosterone. There is definitely something to hormone levels and initial attraction that is entirely driven by estrogen and testosterone. Each gender has a measure in their system, and these hormones are the driving factors that will make you fall into lust. And every part of that is entirely to reproduce.

Now we're going to talk about love and attraction. When you become attracted to someone, that is a result of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Then when you fall in love and form an attachment, you start dropping in serotonin and increasing in oxytocin and vasopressin. The hormone balances for each of these stages are unique and can increase dopamine, which is basically the feel-good drug. The most remarkable part to me is when you are in love, your serotonin goes down. So, here's the divider; serotonin is the happy chemical and it regulates mood, happiness, and anxiety. When it goes down, you start seeing people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Now, does that mean they get critical of the partner?

Serotonin has taken a dip, and this obsessive behavior is also the sort of thing. This phase of love is why people can cross continents and do ridiculous things for love that alters the course of their life. The fun part about researching for this is reading about it and seeing that the behavior and the patterns and how they don’t share much with the first stages. We talked about lust with testosterone and estrogen and how that's purely mating. That's just coupling the obsessive part, as that doesn't actually kick in until attraction hits. That's where you start seeing the serotonin go down and when you start seeing obsessive behavior begin. Remember, obsession is not always in relation to bad things. If you look at brain scans of people who've been married for a long time, they have fewer of these connections. So, when you start getting out of that phase, you get less obsession over time. Eventually, you do get into a long-term love that's called a business deal.

We've talked about oxytocin is also referred to as the love hormone or the cuddle hormone. It gets released when you have a lot of skin-to-skin contact and there's also something that this article mentions is vasopressin. Vasopressin plus oxytocin means effective social regulation and emotional regulation. Vasopressin is associated with long-term monogamous relationships. Oxytocin and vasopressin overlap with the brain's reward system and deactivate brain regions associated with negative emotions. The difference in behaviors of these two hormones may explain why passionate love fades and attachment grows.

The article also refers to this as the rustiness phenomenon, which I think is slightly insulting to old couples, but it is a scientific term. It means a couple gets out of the habit of having sex but are still in love. They may not be having sex, but they can still be in incredible amounts of love. I also see when you go into that third stage, you love that person and will do things for that person because you genuinely want to. As a final note here, if you reach that attachment phase and get a habit in place where you respect each other and you get regular boosts of oxytocin from each other through habit or contact, you can actually remain in love, and I think that's the takeaway for this section.

Myth 2: Love is a complex human affair. Other creatures might feel an animal connection, but romantic love is a construct of the mind, correct?

 Joe: I have a quick question for you, Todd. What is the longest pet you have ever owned?

 Todd: I have a beloved cat named Sarah, and I had her for 18 years. I loved that cat. What about you?

 Joe: I've had a couple of cats. I had one that I really liked named Brock, who I had for six or seven years.

We actually want to want to discuss if love is limited to humans, meaning are we the only creatures that feel deep love connections? Some people advocate for the Cupboard Love Theory, and that is the idea that animals don't truly love us. They believe that animals only love the fact that we feed them and shelter them. I do think that some animals definitely can share love and crave attention and cuddling too. I think they have to be capable of it, though it is probably not as romanticized as we humans make it.

Let's start with dogs. I searched for articles that talked about how animals feel love, how they demonstrate love, and whether or not they share those same hormones as we do. Would you be surprised to know that dogs throughout modern science history have been brutalized and used in so many lab tests? Today it's not as bad, but we have scanned dogs and looked at their hormone levels. What was found is that a dog’s brain does, in fact, light up almost the same as a human does when they are shown their owner. This comes from a New York Times article.

Have you ever seen videos of dogs adopting other animals? Almost always, it's like a dog and something else. It's very rarely a chimpanzee and a goose or something like that. With this, dogs are certainly able to love other things and other masters. In fact, they may be better at loving than humans are. What we're getting to is that humans will pair off with other humans and form love and bonds. Dogs are uniquely able to do that with other species, which is something that almost nothing else on earth can do. There's not a lot of evidence of ancient man pairing up with an animal when you think about it. Dogs are uniquely suited to socialize and form bonds and protect others.

Do you remember Koko, the gorilla? She has a pet cat named All-Ball, and she loved the cart so much that when it got hit by a car, she cried and expressed using sign language that she was sad. This is another example of how other species may feel deep love and connection, just like humans do. But the interesting part is that dogs seem to love indefinitely, and Koko oved her cat basically until the cat died. Do we have an expiration date on love as humans? For instance, have you ever heard of the phrase ‘the seven-year itch’? There is a Scientific American article called The Biological Basis for The Seven-Year Itch and they talk about how only 3% of mammals form monogamous bonds. One of the theories about why avian species are monogamous is because they have to sit on an egg until it hatches. We are not birds, but humans fall into the same category and that is probably the undertone for the theory behind the seven-year itch. We may not have eggs to sit on, but we definitely have kids who cannot care for themselves early on. However, kids grow up and don't need their parents as much anymore once they hit a certain age around (around 7), and that equates to people getting bored in their relationships and potentially straying. There is another one as well, which is the 4-year itch, and that comes just after the toddler age. People start breaking apart and losing bonds and think about divorce. So, the seven-year itch may not be accurate completely, but the idea that we actually have a biological imperative to go raise another kid after four to seven years.

Myth 3: Enough mushy stuff. Let's talk business. Single people or married people? Who wins big financially in the end? Is it safer for your bank to stay single, or do those tax breaks translate to big bucks in the long run?

Let’s talk a little bit about money in general regarding love, marriage, and finances. The number one reason for divorce is usually financial, and finances are also among the top 15 reasons why people aren't getting married or having kids. I searched for an article about who makes more money - singles, married couples, or an individual of a married couple. We have gone over stats about how married people or people in relationships live longer, but what about finances?

We're going to look at an Atlantic article called The High Price of Being Single in America. Did you know some countries are trying to build new laws to incentivize marriage even more than they already are? Singapore apparently has a really low replacement rate, meaning they don't have enough people getting married or having kids, so they're trying to give a more significant financial incentive to raise it. If you wonder why we incentivize marriage, that's basically the nutshell of it. But for this article, they were trying to figure out if a single woman would make more money in America throughout her lifetime than a married woman. It came down to a couple of major factors. If a married woman’s husband worked and earned between $51-103K, even the most conservative estimates, singles got screwed. Ultimately, when they factored in healthcare, taxes, and unfair pay gaps between genders, it came out to be a million dollars or more. Couples pay fewer taxes because they are doing it jointly and have more tax breaks. Now, we're not going to get into the cost of divorce, but everybody living in America knows it's insanely high. This is why you have to be careful and marry the right person, otherwise the money you save being married will all be voided with those divorce costs. As for arranged marriages that skip the three-stage process of love, places like India have reported that about 90% of marriages there are arranged. Even more, 74% of young Indians said that they prefer an arranged marriage over a love marriage. Furthermore, age and divorce rates are higher in love marriages as compared to an arranged marriage over in India. However, I'm not going to take that to heart. Even though this was in a Psychology Today article, I'm going to assume that's going to also factor in how taboo it is in certain regions to get a divorce. So, all of that is good as far as the stats on arranged marriages, but we're just not going to dive into how or why the divorce rate is so crazy low. We will just leave that to the statisticians to figure out.

Final Thoughts

Lust is testosterone and estrogen. Attraction is dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Lastly, attachment is oxytocin and vasopressin. If it sounds like an oversimplification of a process that gets blurry, frantic, and wild, it very much is. Just remember, the late stage of love can last, and they can be glorious, as long as you dedicate time to each other to make plenty of that sweet oxytocin with one another.

Love is not the sole domain of humans. Other animals form mating pairs, bond, and learn to love, even across species. However, the human habit of long-term partnering, even after children, might be uniquely Homo Sapiens. It might also explain the origins of the seven-year itch, or more accurately, the four-year itch.

Love, or at least marriage, makes for good financial outcomes in the US, but only if you are careful in selecting your spouse. While marriage can hypothetically save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of decades, divorce can cost you that in just months. So, the next time you're wondering if the excitement you feel is just lust or love, ask yourself this, “Would you risk setting your house on fire on the flip of a coin?” Because apparently, we would.