This article about romantic love is well-worth reading in it's entirety. Here's a summary of some choice quotes:

Dopamine. God's little neurotransmitter. Better known by its street name, romantic love. Also, norepinephrine. Street name, infatuation.

These chemicals are natural stimulants. You fall in love, a growing amount of research shows, and these chemicals and their cousins start pole-dancing around the neurons of your brain...

"Love is a drug," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." "The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions" when one is in love. "It's the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine."...

Passion! Sex! Narcotics!

Why do we suspect this isn't going to end well?

Because these things are hard-wired not to last, all of them. Short shelf lives. The passion you fulfill is the passion you kill. The most wonderful, soaring feeling known to all mankind . . . amounts to no more than a narcotic high, a temporal state of mania.

Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist and author, once cited the case of a 90-year-old woman who had suddenly become radiant, flirty, even frisky. The diagnosis: a long-delayed onset of neurosyphilis had loosed the reins on her inhibitions. She did not want to be treated.

Damn, maybe there is something to those arranged marriages.

Scientists continue to confirm what we, at many levels, already know, namely that love is a drug, that love sucks, that love blinds us. The thing is, most of us, like the 90-year-old lady in the article, don't want to be treated.

Labels: dopamine, love, romance, romantic love