Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo spent her early career researching the neuroscience of love, even as she privately doubted that she’d ever find it in her personal life. Then she did, in a whirlwind romance with Dr. John Cacioppo, an esteemed researcher on the effects of loneliness who happened to be 20 years her senior. They married inside of a year, and spent almost seven years together before a rare salivary cancer took his life in 2018. Her new book Wired for Love: a Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss and the Essence of Human Connection is part memoir, part popular science tome, a brief but engaging look at the subject of her research, interspersed with the story of her life with John.
The Cacioppos’ story together is bittersweet, wonderful at first until it turns tragic, even more than you might expect from a marriage of two people separated by over twenty years. John even warns her before they marry that they’re not likely to have that many years together, and he worries about ‘leaving’ her too soon, but that can hardly prepare them for what’s about to befall them. It would seem like the plot of a Nicholas Sparks novel if it weren’t someone’s actual life: Their areas of research were already similar, and they met and fell in love despite the huge age gap and the fact that they lived on different continents, after which they published several joint papers in a field that needed more attention, only to have him die of a rare, aggressive cancer before he turned 70.
The real interest in the book is her work on the neuroscience of love, and if anything, I wish there were more of it. Some of the content revolves around how little interest there was in the topic when she began her academic career, with almost no research on the subject, and substantial institutional and individual objections to her attempts to undertake this research. (I’m sure much of it was worse because she was a young woman trying to research this, which I’m sure elicited eyerolls from the men who ran the neurology departments and IRBs who had to support and approve those proposals.)
Eventually, she did get published, and her research came to more public notice, earning her the moniker “Dr. Love,” which I couldn’t read without hearing Paul Stanley’s voice. Her published papers include works on the “toxic effects of perceived social isolation,” an fMRI analysis on the interactions in the brain between sexual desire and love, and multiple papers on the neurology of loneliness that she co-authored with her husband. It’s important work that has helped highlight the large health cost of loneliness, or perceived loneliness, which others, including current Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, have identified as an “epidemic” with large medical and social costs.
Wired for Love only scratches the surface of Cacioppo’s work, to the detriment of the book; it’s not a book about loneliness or the neuroscience of love, per se, but it could have used more in the science half to balance out the tragic romance story of her personal life. It’s even more powerful knowing that her story starts and ends with her being alone, which could have led to some discussion of the neuroscience of grieving, or how to cope with the loneliness after the death of a loved one. The half of the book about her whirlwind romance and too-brief marriage with John Cacioppo was beautiful, but it didn’t educate readers as much as it could have given her body of work as a researcher and the importance of the subject. I was left wanting a good bit more on the science side.
Next up: I’m three books down the road already, but right now I’m reading Hervé Le Tellier’s novel The Anomaly, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2020.