(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
In 1889, the surgeon Dr William Stewart Halsted was desperate to retain his scrub nurse Caroline. The antiseptics he used in his operations were giving her painful skin rashes, and she wanted to quit. So he made plaster casts of her hands and sent them to a rubber factory to produce protective gloves. These gloves saved Caroline’s hands — and as a side benefit, they also reduced post-surgical infection by more than 800%, transforming medicine forever.
Only months after this historical moment, Halsted lost Caroline as his nurse — and gained her as his wife. Did love inspire his innovation? Or did his innovation inspire their trip to the altar?
Probably both, given the short time between latex and chapel. The gap between true love and creativity isn’t much bigger. They are sources of one another and if you manage it right they can spiral each other up into infinity.
When I say “true love” I’m not advocating monogamy exactly. That would be unfair in dealing with a holiday (Valentine’s Day) that began as a Roman orgy of generalised fertility (Lupercalia) in which couples were thrown together temporarily by lottery. But what I am saying is that when it comes to love and creativity, focus and commitment make a huge difference.
Now, I’m sure you’re not surprised that love drives creativity. Love has inspired countless works of art, and brought together great creative couples such as Scott and Zelda and John and Yoko and even Marie and Pierre Curie. It might be to impress the object of our affections, such as the poetry of Cyrano or, well, a lot of poetry. Or it might be to celebrate the object of our affections, such as how Emperor Jahan built the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife Mumtaz, who died during the birth of their 14th child (that’s a lot of love).
But you don’t have to win a Nobel prize or a Grammy or build a Wonder of the World to use love as a motivator for creative expression. When we’re in love, we create automatically.
Love inspires hope. It expands. It demands new possibilities. Feelings of love jack up our norepinephrine and dopamine levels. These are the same neurotransmitters that facilitate creative thinking.
An experiment from the University of Amsterdam verified this connection empirically. Subjects thinking about loved ones overwhelmingly shifted into the mode of global, long-term connected thinking that stimulates creativity. Whereas those thinking about short-term sexual conquests slipped into the opposite type of thinking — analytical, selfish and not creative at all.
Lust unconnected to love, it appears, is bad for our creativity. Why would that be? It appears that, looking for sexual adventure, we flood our brain with testosterone, focus on solving the problem we face — sexual conquest — in the quickest, easiest way, detached from our “target” and looking for the most effective carnal result for ourselves.
In short, if you have important creative work to do, don’t go to a singles’ bar. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am is not the recipe for creative breakthroughs.
Love, on the other hand, makes us open to connect, encourages us to collaborate and opens us up to diverse ideas. It seems there’s a reason for this. Love is not unconditional. It expects creativity to pay it back. When we love someone, we want them to experience surprise and delight from us, so that they value us, remember us, build a sort of spiritual debt and fill our love bank.
To do this we need to push past the obvious birthday gift of a tie or socks. We need fresh ideas that are abundant, diverse and unusual — the definition of good results in creative problem solving and, luckily, a situation encouraged by a brain in love.
We also need to shift how we react over time. We need to be flexible to meet the moment. Again, creativity pays these bills.
The creativity benefit doesn’t just apply to romantic love. Every kind of authentic love ups our creativity and is made more successful by it.
Parental love drives us to find new ways to make more money and be better people, to defend the health and welfare of our children. It encouraged the development of storytelling into a refined art, inspired AA Milne to create Winnie the Pooh for his son, and motivated the creation of the flexible drinking straw to make the inventor’s daughter happier.
Friendship love can stoke the sort of collaboration that formed rock bands, writing partnerships, Apple Computers, and Monty Python.
Love for humanity as a whole drove us to invent Braille, pacemakers and the cure for polio.
And love for gods built the pyramids.
Creativity makes all of these types of love more wondrous. It builds self-awareness, self-esteem, and emotional resilience. It helps us get in touch with our core, and become and remain authentic. It fosters and entrenches deep emotional connections, enriches communication and cultivates empathy, making it easier to share experiences, grow together, and push through difficult times.
And yet there are principles of creativity that seem to go against long term love as much as for it. For example, openness and curiosity, which would seem to bias us more toward adventure than commitment.
Shouldn’t creativity demand experimentation in love, open us up to “think differently” about romantic tradition? Don’t the tech bros have it right when they prefer to sleep around, because rigid tradition and received wisdom limit the benefits creativity might bring?
Not exactly. Constraints are very good for creativity, especially when the constraints are inherent in the material. If Kenya had better banking infrastructure, nobody would have had to invent M-Pesa. And if his village in Malawi had electricity, William Kamkwamba wouldn’t have had to teach himself to build a windmill.
In innovation, constraints are often the source of the breakthrough. So when building the feedback loop of love and creativity, we generate power in finding the most revolutionary solution possible within the boundaries. And the most rigid boundary we deal with in creative work is usually our self.
We need to innovate ourselves first before innovating outside ourselves. In freeing ourselves of personas that are impeding our creativity, maximising psychological safety can give us security to take risks. And a committed and happy love relationship is a great place to grow that security.
A committed love relationship also allows the repetition that successful innovation demands, trying again and again and course-correcting after each failure. And the close communication of love offers the chance for attentive feedback.
In short, true love properly applied can free us to transform ourselves and the world around us. Yes, ethical polyamory can achieve all of the above. It can also create distractions. The more focus you bring to your romance and your creativity, the better, if you want to spiral up.
How you do that, I’ll leave to you, because love is trust.
Happy Valentine’s Day.