a bonobo humanity?

You know I’ve never met anyone quite like she before

Temptation, New Order

How can I even try, I can never win…

You’ve got to hide your love away, The Beatles

I’m reading Alexis Wright’s dauntingly long book Praiseworthy for a book group, and I was stopped short by this passage:

… in the all-twisting, all-turning immersion of limerence, skyrocketing in an out-of-proportion infatuation that would never be consummated.

Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, p25

Limerence? I had to look it up. As a lifetime writer and therefore amateur wordsmith, I’m always surprised and a little shocked, at my age, to be confronted by something new in the field. But the shock was even greater on learning the meaning:

Limerence is a state of intense romantic infatuation or obsession with someone else. People experiencing limerence may have intrusive thoughts, feel melancholic, or have tragic concerns for the person they are infatuated with. They may also constantly obsess about whether their feelings are reciprocated

This definition comes from a ‘generative AI’ website, which is pretty hilarious, but I digress. The word was coined by a psychologist, of course, and to me it has huge resonance, both personal and intellectual. In fact I once wrote a novel, Sextet, never published, in which I tried to make comic play of what I might now call ‘polymorphous limerence’, an infatuation with a number of women, each of which might be the ‘one true one’, or not. The central character is ‘bowled over’ by not just one but a number of impressive young women, and feels more or less unworthy of them all. Being tongue-tied and hapless before each of them, but having more faith in his writing than his speech, he decides to send hand-written letters to six potential paramours (a concept completely spoiled by the startlingly swift onset of the internet). Whittling the number down to a mere six is a major task in itself, but anyhow it all falls apart in a tragicomic way (I can’t even remember how it ended).

There’s no doubt though, that I was playing with a theme that has ever fascinated me, the powerful myth of ‘true love’ that’s at the heart of monogamy (well, apart from the arranged/forced marriage type). Which brings me to bonobos.

I’ve often speculated fruitlessly about human monogamy and its origins, considering that neither bonobos nor chimps practice it. Indeed monogamy is a strangely arbitrary ‘system’ of species-furtherance, practised by many bird species, eschewed by many others (though the most recent bird research reveals that their sex and breeding practices are every bit as complex and nefarious as ours). Amongst primates, about 30% of species are monogamous, up from between 3 and 5 percent in the whole mammalian world (10% according to other sites). It’s speculated that human monogamy began with H erectus about two million years ago, but who knows? There’s also a distinction between social and genetic monogamy – but all this is taking me far from the very human concept of limerence, and its apparent absence in our closest living relatives, who certainly seem to be full of fellow-feeling. It seems that concepts of possession, or possessiveness, are key here. Ownership and jealousy play their part, promoted by social expectations, as well as yin-yang perfect fits, and of course for those who are partnerless, loneliness, in a human world that is so much more internal than external compared to other primates (but then I’ve never been a bonobo – maybe next time?).

There’s not much in the way of isolation in bonobo communities. Everyone tends to rub shoulders, euphemistically speaking, with everyone else, so hiding your love away is hardly an option. Also, the plague-paradise of internal thought, so unique to humans among the primates, and perhaps among all living beings, and so much intertwined with language, the language of desire, hope, anxiety, despair, longing and  – limerence – is what has brought about our transcendence as a species. Not only the negatives, if such they are, but the positives – the transformative ruminations of Newton, Einstein and Darwin, among so many others (some of them even female). Limerence might be an unfortunate by-product of all that busy neural thought-language activity – but hey, it has often produced great music, and for that humanity will ever be grateful. A limerence shared is a limerence halved, maybe!

References

Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy, 2022

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7416880/

Why some birds mate for life – and why some play the field (and the trees, ponds and rooftops)