Love in the Age of Chemicals Ch. 07

I wanted to touch, to kiss, to taste her breasts, which had been pressing up against my chest that whole time, but my mouth was frozen in place and my hands could only pull Miranda urgently towards me, driving her hips down for one more bit of depth to ensure the best possible planting of my seed inside her. Even as my excitement plateaued and I could properly take in the sensory input around me, Miranda still trembled, her pleasure prolonged and magnified by sharing it with me. I slowly leaned down and seized a hardened nipple with my lips, teasing it with my teeth and caressing it with my tongue. Miranda fell into one more spasm, which I experienced all over my body, then she relaxed. Draping her forearm over her eyes, she breathed deeply a few times.

I watched a satisfied smile form on her face. The rise and fall of her breasts as her breathing slowed was soothing to feel against my chest. I thought of how odd it was that being naked next to her was at the same time so comfortable and yet so exciting. I hesitated to break the silence.

"When did you start to see me differently?" I asked, resuming the conversation that our love-making had preempted.

She exhaled loudly and stopped wiggling. "Probably early on. Probably around the dinner party was when I first started to notice a little bit that I looked forward to seeing you each day. Not just as a friend or potential sex partner, but as something more."

"But we'd already had sex by then," I pointed out.

"Well, yeah. I was honest about why I was suggesting sex in the first place. It was about working off that horniness that was so distracting. I hadn't had sex in over a year and I missed it. I missed human touch. But you were right, chasing that experience was taking its toll on me -- academically and emo-ohhhh-tionally." I interrupted her with another long, slow thrust of my softening member. Reluctantly, I withdrew and lay on my side next to her.

Miranda continued, "I don't think I can say there was a moment when I fell in love with you. It was gradual. Like I looked around one day and knew everything was different. That my heart had already changed and I was just noticing it. Mmmm..." she paused as I kissed along her neck while rubbing her belly. "I think I knew for sure that time in the shower. After we had both opened up about... about our pasts. And realizing I had real feelings for you, maybe that's why I was all worked up. I was starting to think you felt the same, and... and it was just such an exciting thought."

We kissed softly, tenderly, enjoying the afterglow of our coupling. "I think I was the same," I said, lifting my head. "It was a slow revelation. I wouldn't have even called it love or anything like that -- perhaps because I lack the emotional vocabulary, or perhaps it was self-deception." I paused, rolling onto my back. Miranda followed, curling up next to me and tracing patterns in my chest hair. "And even when I decided to buy this bed... I justified it with practical reasons... things that were accurate and factual and that didn't trace back to my feelings for you. But by then I was unable to envision a future without you in my home. It would have been wrong. And I knew I wanted to keep things the way they were. I knew I was buying this for you."

Miranda giggled and said, "Well, I hope you know that the bed is not the last thing we'll need to be changing around here."

I sighed and turned to face her. "Another 'one more thing?'" I asked.

"One at a time, at least," she said dreamily. "One step at a time."

*******

Eight months later:

"And so you see, notions such as love or fear or depression are really just outmoded ways of describing specific synaptic activity -- activity which we are approaching the point of being able to stimulate and activate almost at will."

I smiled to myself as I felt a flash of déjà vu. I could remember two years earlier, reading that same line from my lecture notes. A line that inspired a young lady to raise her hand and...

"Professor... Doctor... Dr. Kirsch?" Startled out of my reminiscence, I looked up at another young lady, in some ways not much different from the one two years earlier, but in truth, worlds apart from her.
"Yes, Miss..."

"Andrea," she stated. "So what's to keep us from saying that emotions aren't real? If it's just a chemical reaction, do fear and love and other feelings actually exist as we know them?"

"Excellent question, Andrea," I said, looking to the back as the door opened slowly. I paused to smile as Miranda slipped into the room, Rosalind sleeping in her arms. Mother and daughter took a seat in a chair against the back wall.

"The answer, Andrea, is that they exist only as we know them. What I have described are the emotions viewed from one perspective -- the perspective of the neurochemical process. What we are more familiar with is the experiential perspective -- emotions as they affect us, as we feel them."

"So which perspective is real... or, or right?" another student asked.

"It's the chemical one, dummy," Andrea said teasingly, half-turning her head to view the questioner. "We're in a science class, so of course it's the science-y one."

The young man who had asked the question blushed at the sound of muted laughter.

"Actually," I began, trying not to watch my wife and daughter the whole time, "neither perspective gives the whole picture, and each complements the other. The chemical process tells us why we experience fear or shame or anger or love the way we do, why, from a physiological standpoint, it causes our body to react in certain ways. Why we blush when embarrassed or cry when sad. But the chemical process doesn't explain itself. It cannot account for its own existence. Unless we are to write off emotions as glitches in the system of the human brain, we must assume they are part of our evolutionary design, an intended component of our neurological functioning. The questions then become, 'Why do we fear?' or 'What purpose does love serve?'"

I paused and looked around the room. Despite having reached the end of our allotted time, I did not see anyone packing to leave. I saw instead an unfamiliar scene: eyes around the room, eagerly awaiting my words. So I continued.
"I am a scientist and not a philosopher. My professional qualifications do not equip me to answer those bigger questions, I think. But as a human being, I can posit my own suggestions on a topic to which I have devoted considerable attention over the years. I would suggest that fear, for example, protects us from danger. Shame serves to reinforce social norms that protect us. Or... or hopefulness motivates us past difficulty by giving us a mental image of better possibilities. Our emotions, far from being chaotic and disruptive factors, as we may be tempted to see them, are instead highly developed survival tools. And so, to limit our understanding to just the chemicals we see and measure is to hold an incomplete view, no less so than refusing to acknowledge that chemicals are at work when your heart flutters when the object of your affection passes by."

"And so what purpose does love serve?" asked a voice from the back. The class seemed to assume it was one of their own number asking that question, but I could see the teasing smile form on Miranda's lips.

"Love," I began with a sigh, "is merely to ensure procreation."

The nervous laughter in response to my answer was interrupted, appropriately, by Rosalind's sharp cry as she woke from her nap. Twenty-six startled heads turned to see Miranda gently rocking our daughter back to sleep.

"Apparently my daughter wishes me to reconsider my answer," I joked. "So I will say instead that love pushes us towards one another. It serves to bind us to the person who will guard and protect and accompany us through our journey. It's the most powerful survival tool we have. The intensity of our early infatuations often causes us to misunderstand the goal of those feelings, and so we may believe we are merely lusting for the body of another, that we are being driven to reproduce. But as every lover learns, no matter how far we distance ourselves from our beloved, physically or emotionally, that compulsion to return does not abate. Even when other sexual opportunities present themselves, we find them inadequate. Because lust is a tool. A tool our chemically-powered brains use to push us towards another person. When our bodies are experiencing the chemical process we call 'love,' we are not, at the root, lusting after a body. We are instead wanting to be close to the whole person. Lust drives us closer in one sense so that we can be closer in other, deeper, more important senses."

"But isn't your whole field of research, your specialty, focused on manipulating those processes?" another student challenged me. "Why mess with them if they're so important?"

I sighed, thinking of the circumstances years and years ago that had set my research in motion. As a younger man, I would have given a much different answer to the question my student had posed from the one I was about to give. That younger man would have been both unwilling and unable to reframe his scientific inquiries in the way I had done, inspired by Miranda, Andrew, and my evolving perspectives. Those adjustments had not only borne fruit in my personal life; professionally, I had secured my research when I received a favorable response to my carefully reworked and resubmitted grant application. With five years of guaranteed funding and the prospect of more if my results were encouraging, I was just beginning to explore the possibilities in the next phase of my research.

The sound of Miranda clearing her throat startled me back to the present, where my students still awaited my response.

"Why does a doctor 'mess with' a patient's body?" I asked. "One of the advantages of understanding our chemical brains and the chemical passions they give rise to is that we can identify true errors -- not the emotions themselves but emotions that are behaving anomalously, harmfully, or pathologically. Chronic depression, rage, unhealthy fixations -- are they not to our emotions much like cancerous growths in our organs? Natural elements that have grown unchecked and which have begun to do harm instead of good?"

"So you're an emotional oncologist!" suggested a playful voice from the front row.

"Well," I blushed, "I wouldn't put it in quite those terms, but the analogy is apt, so far as it goes." Then glancing at the clock, I dismissed the class and waited for the room to empty. A minute or two later, I walked to the back of the room, and Miranda rose to greet me with a kiss.

"I just fed her," she told me, slowly passing the infant into my waiting arms. "So she should be good until my class is over. Are you taking her to the lab?"

"Not today," I answered. "Having recently lost my research assistant to motherhood, I'm going to head home and try to get some reading done. Apparently I had not noticed when someone pointed out a few potentially helpful articles on the evolutionary purposes of emotion and cognition."

"I told you to read those articles a whole year ago," she chided me with a roll of her eyes. "I guess you just weren't ready to know it."

"Nonsense," I objected. "How can someone not--" I was cut off by a look of warning. Thinking carefully for a few seconds, I tried again. "I suppose that someone may at times lack the cognitive network to accept certain information. Lack the conceptual pegs upon which to hang things, so to speak."

"That's better," she said, setting the diaper bag on a chair and pulling her bookbag onto her shoulder.

"Or you need to work on writing more clearly," I teased as she turned to leave.

Spinning back to face me with a defiant smile, Miranda pointed her finger in my face and said, "You watch it, Buster. I had my six week check-up this morning, so you'd better be nice." Her bluster dissolved, though, as we both leaned in and listened to Rosalind's soft breathing.

"I'll see you at home, OK?" she whispered, her face nearly touching mine.

"Of course," I whispered back. Then touching her lips with a hint of a kiss, I added, "I love you."

"Me too, Puppy," she assured me as she turned again to leave. "Me too."

*******

Epilogue:

Deacon's vows

To be read with much trepidation on the occasion his wedding, celebrated on the second anniversary of his marriage, at a much-too-large gathering of family and friends, with Reverend Oswald Duncan officiating:

My dear wife, Miranda,

I was urged by some wise friends to consider using this opportunity to talk about the many things you have brought to my life in the two short years that we have spent together. But I have chosen instead to consider all the things you took from me.

You took from me a world I understood and thought I could control.

You took from me a narrow view of life, shaded only in black and white.

You took a life turned in on itself with no room for others.

You took my routine of lifeless, mindless activity.

You took a quiet home, a sanctuary of one.

You took my solitude.

You took all those things from me, and I hope they never return.

I will take instead the uncertainty of love, and the vibrant colors of change. I will take a life looking outward with room for you, for our precious daughter and her future siblings, and for our friends. I will take a home that stirs with the noise of life. I will take companionship, friendship, family, and even Doctor Fuzzyface.

I promise to you that I will learn new habits and routines that affirm your beauty and your worth. I promise I will cling to you like a drowning man clings to a life preserver. I promise to be a faithful student of the foreign language you are teaching me. I promise to never stop trying to understand you, so that I can never stop trying to demonstrate my love for you.

*******

The End

A note on the context for this story:

As with all my stories, Love in the Age of Chemicals has crossovers with other stories. Dottie and Thomas's story can be read in "Of Hope Lost and Found;" Gina (Dom's mother) tells her and Andrew's story in "A Strange Arrangement;" and devoted readers may catch a few of the other references scattered throughout this tale. Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, and thanks for voting. This one took a lot out of me, so I may go on hiatus for a few months, but fear not. Many more stories are already in the works.

A note on Asperger's:

The narrative tone of this story was intentionally crafted to express Deacon's style. He is literal, and so there are few (if any) cases of metaphors, figures of speech, or imagery in his account. He thinks in metric. He values precision. He is seldom colloquial. At times, I had to fight the urge to write more descriptively in order to remain faithful to his perspective, and I thank you, readers, for your patience.

I do not write as an expert on this topic, but I have worked with and counseled people with Asperger's and (more often) their families. Asperger's is still not well understood and it exists on a spectrum, meaning one person may be very different from another and yet both have the same condition. Also, people with Asperger's sometimes have other complications -- Deke has a moderate Social Anxiety Disorder that interacts with his Asperger's.

Some have asked how he is able to perceive emotions in others. In Deke's case, I picture him doing what an acquaintance of mine did: investing months and even years recording and charting facial expressions, tones of voice, hand gestures, etc. in order to have a scientific study of emotional expression. Given Deke's field of study, this seems plausible.

People with Asperger's are not incapable of giving and receiving love, but the way they do so will often be different. It usually involves studying and learning new habits, learning consciously many of the things that other people do instinctively (ask about someone's day, hug a person who is sad, consider what the other person would like). It can be exhausting, as Deke noted, but when the other person is patient, persistent, and forgiving, it is surprising what can happen over the years. Asperger's doesn't get "fixed," nor does it need to. Love and marriage do not rest on the shaky foundation of our feelings for one another but rather on the bedrock of commitment, out of which flows mutual self-sacrifice, service, and yes, loving feelings. This, I promise, will be Deke and Miranda's experience, as I hope you'll see when they pop up again in later stories.