It's all in the brain
People have some pretty strange notions about love, not least of which is the rather absurd idea that love resides in the heart. In many people I know, there is a stubborn resistance to the idea that love may just be a complex interplay of brain chemicals, triggering specific responses in specific regions of our brains.
Biochemistry seems to be proving that it's true. It's probably old news to some (cf. John Williams the avant garde physicist/idleThinK commenter), but research has uncovered a chemical (a peptide, for biochemists out there) called oxytocin that seems to be largely responsible for social bonding, parental attachment or affectionate and romantic love. Apparently this research was partly inspired by an examination of the brains of prairie voles (i.e. fancy name for desert rats), which studies have shown to be more monogamous than people. In other words, if divorce lawyers were prairie voles (and most of them are rats, anyway) there would be severe unemployment, because prairie voles don't get divorced. An unusual occurence in nature (cf. human beings).
Well anyway, when researchers cut off the supply of oxytocin to the hormone recepters in these voles...they stopped being monogamous, and went around...indiscriminately copulating...with everything, making no lasting attachment. In other words, when you block the oxytocin receptors, the animals don't form bonds, and then there is Lots of Indiscriminate (and unprotected) Sex*. The human teenage male dream, I'm sure.
There's lots of evidence of the release of this chemical (along with dopamine) in situations such as new-mother love, sex*, tending for children, breast-feeding and even...haha...drug activity. In fact there was one study comparing the brain activity of people looking at pictures of loved ones and pictures of non-romantic friends. The brain activity of people looking at their loved ones was very different. And interestingly enough, the brain scans for these people looked a lot like 1) the brain images of new mothers looking at their infants, and 2) the brain images of people under the influence of cocaine. Love really is a drug :)
Of course it's daunting, and somewhat demeaning, to think that the core ingredients of our loving relationships are shared by humans and...rats. I mean, come on, give the human ego a rest, eh? Love is the source of so many of our highest achievements - in music, art, literature, film, philosophy, etc. Some people even think it's a spiritual or "god-given" emotion, and here are some biochemists saying "yeah, rats fall in love and have soul mates too"? Of course we'd like to continue thinking the feeling itself is just as unique.
But anyway, all this does is explain how we form attachments of love. What it doesn't explain - and this is still the most mysterious part - is how we choose our romantic loves, our soul mates or our life partners. So we produce oxytocin when we're in love. And oxytocin creates the biological capacity for long-term love. Fine. But what makes our brains produce oxytocins for one specific person, and not another one? Does it mean that if you inject me full of oxytocin, I'll become romantically attached to the first thing I see? (Which may well be the injection needle...or maybe the devastatingly handsome doctor doing the injecting...haha).
One thing's for sure, it's definitely not in the heart. How did people come up with that anyway? I mean, the iconic symbol for the heart doesn't even look like the real human heart. How did that come about? I don't know. I think I should design a new range of Valentine's Day cards and put little iconized symbols of the human brain on it. That would be more accurate. I could sell stupid little cups with brains on them, or brain-shaped cups, and have little ceramic Cupids with a quiver full of brain-tipped arrows. Brain-shaped chocolates in brain-shaped boxes. I could create a revolution in cartooning. Ten years down the line, showing a cartoon character in love would mean drawing little flying brains around it. I could even change the colour of Valentine's Day to "a kinda murky pinky bluey wrinkly grey". There's money to be made here, folks.
* I deliberately bolded the words "sex" because everyone knows that grabs attention like John Candy in a thong. If you're one of those people who scanned this blog, thinking "blimey this is too f*ing long to read", and then caught sight of "sex" and started reading, well, shame on you :)
And if you tried to click on "sex" because you thought bold and underline = link to p0rn, then more shame on you :P