Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching, and so it begs the question, what does love have to do with it? Love is a powerful emotion, but at least in the scientific community can be explained through brain chemistry. According to York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun there are three stages of love. The first being Lust, a raw physical attraction to someone else driven by testosterone and estrogen. The second stage is Attraction, also known as being “love-struck”, the attraction stage in created and maintained by three main chemical releases of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin. This stage of love can alter the way a person see’s the other, in many cases it can blind a couple to each others flaws and only focus on the good. The final stage is attachment, the stage in which people remain in love, many times, until they die. The last stage is kept going though the release of oxytocin and vasopressin. Science has for the most part been able to describe an emotion in terms of a simple release of chemicals at certain times in the brain, and yet something so simple can cause people to do strange things.
Love causes people to behave irrationally and often times at the expensive of other people. Historically England’s King Henry VIII was enamored with Anne Boleyn. The Pope refused to annul his current marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that Henry could be with Anne. The king, fueled by his love for Anne, became the supreme head of the Church of England and divorced his wife himself and married Anne Boleyn. He later fell in love with one of Anne’s handmaidens and had Anne beheaded because he now loved Jane Seymour. A present day example of love gone awry is that of 21 year old Patrick Moberg who had believed he had found his soul mate. He met a girl on the subway and they “had a moment” but he didn’t get her phone number. So what’s a guy to do in NYC? Well build a website dedicated to this complete stranger of course, and scan hand drawn images of the two on the subway train drawn exactly with what they were wearing. Love has and always will cause people to do crazy things with each other, but love doesn’t stop there.
Love has the power to cross species boundaries and cause some people to feel the need to marry animals. People have married dogs, cats, ponies, horses, and even a dolphin.
It would seem that love is indeed much more complex than simple releases of chemicals in the brain, how could a chemical so small effect so many on such a grand scale? It doesn’t seem logical as to why the human body would continue develop such a system to stimulate love in the human body when so many illogical events unfold from its creation. It would seem as though the words of fictional character Albus Dumbledore help sum up love “Do not pity the dead Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.” Love may be dumb, crazy, and irritating, but it’s what makes us human, and one of the many reason to enjoy living. What are your takes on love? Is it worth all the effort, or should we even strive to understand such a complex emotion? Comment below, tell us what you think!
-Spencer Brenes, James Cronberger, Jill Jardine.
IMC Hawks Blog 
Great article! Love is such a complex emotion. I love my dog, I love pizza, and I love my mother. But the love I have for my mother trumps all. I have found myself in different stages of “love” with past boyfriends. Being infatuated with someone for a while until I realized that I was more in love with the idea of being in love than I had love for the guy. Love is such a strange concept, yet it can be so beautiful. It is such an important part of life. Studies show that babies need love and physical touch from humans to properly develop. It is obvious that we all need and yearn for some sort of love. But to define love is too hard. Maybe love is just something that is meant to be felt, not understood or defined.
My personal opinion on love can be a jaded one at times when it comes to PDA, I, as with many people, don’t like it at all. And again I, like many people, have gotten burned when it comes to love, but my views on it are still positive. My views on soulmates are a little different however. On most studies on human love, marriage, etc it is not humanly natural to stay with one person for the rest of your life, but it has become the social norm to try and do so. That being said i’m going to take one for the team and admit that I follow my love life beliefs on a chick flick series, Sex and the City. But before I am written off as a typical girl, I would like to say I follow the beliefs in which one of the main characters stated “Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with.” When it comes to love I feel as though too much thought goes into it, therefore making it way more complex than what it should be. Love should be a go with the flow type of thing. Happening, coming and going freely as it chooses.
Love is a complex thing. There is a saying, “in order to find love, you can’t go looking for it. You have to let love find you.” Looking for love isn’t a bad thing when you know where to look, but sometimes you can find love in the wrong places. I hope that one day I can find someone to make it to the attachment (final) stage with!
My opinion of the very first sentence is that there are certain things about love that can be defined, at least by mutual agreement but none of which have anything to do with Valentine’s Day. Most of the ‘brands’ behind Valentine’s Day represent nothing true about love and I don’t think this particular day adds anything to what love is truly supposed to be. I agree with my above classmate that this an emotion that needs to just be experienced rather than contemplated. When you over think it tends to complicate things so while we are trying so hard to figure out this emotion we could be missing out on what it is in essence. Valentine’s Day is our species over thinking love and making this emotion even more complicated, if that’s possible. Love is also a relative term these days and one whose meaning has much ambiguity. I say let it do what it does and enjoy the complicated ride while never celebrating a Valentine’s Day because it truly should be everyday that counts and not one more than the other, especially not a commercialized holiday that we created to try and tame the insane nature of love.
Love is definitely worth it and once obtained whether insane or not it does something to us and gives us a life we will most likely always choose over one without it. We should strive to just be thankful once we’ve found it and let the rest do what it does because that’s what love seems to have a pattern of doing, different in every circumstance.
I loved this article. I liked how it went into depth about the stages of love, starting with infatuation or lust. I believe that is how a romantic relationship starts. I agreed with the comment that “love is more complicated than a simple release of chemicals in the brain”. Science can tell us a lot about how we react and why in relationships but I believe science can only go so far. Some things are a mystery and I believe that love and relationships cannot solely be defined by science.