I am curious as to what everyone thinks of love.

Is it just chemicals in the brain?
Something beyond reason?
A cultural construct?
An act of god?

Being a devout atheist I've always been inclined towards a strictly rational explanation obviously, but I've been having a lot of trouble maintaining all my old certainties. Life can become so unexpected...
 

Love is nothing more then basic instinct to keep the survival of the human race. We only talk deep about it cause the chicks seem to dig it.

You love your mother and, if you don't go before her, you are going to be the saddest soul in the world when she goes.

If you have a gf/bf/wife/husband you "love" so much that if you lose them, even with a breakup, that you mope for days, months, or years, that's a different kind of love.

Both involve the familiarity of the connection with the above persons. You tend to miss folks you hang with more than those you don't. 

But then there's the phenomenon I witnessed when someone I knew cried when Elvis died.  Or for those of you who were around in 1980, remember when John Lennon was assassinated?  The whole world mourned.  One young woman in New York jumped off a building because she couldn't live in a world without John Lennon.

So, back to a few years ago when my friend, in his early 20s, got together with this gal.  He fell for her hook-line-and-sinker and with her encouragement let down all his defenses and gave in completely to the emotional journey.  He was talking about having kids and growing old with her.  

Then one day she just calls it off.  Just like that, she had had enough of it and wanted to move on.  Poor guy was crushed.  It was like a Monday when she told him, and he tried for like a week to get her to talk to him, but she wouldn't see him or take his calls.  She was done.

He brooded for weeks.  His daily routine was to get up, go into the other room where he had cleared out all the furniture except for a folding chair and an ashtray on the floor.  All day he would either pace the room or just sit there, chain-smoking.   He felt physically sick without her.  Ever hear of someone being "love-sick" when not around the object of their affection?  This was a really bad case of it.  To this day he can't talk about her and gets really upset if you mention her name.

He behaves like a drug addict, her being the drug.  What he was going through was withdrawal.  Something in his brain had triggered a shower of chemicals into his pleasure center each time he saw her, was with her, or thought of her.  The memory of her triggered this too. 

So, for whatever reason we love, evolution has seen to it that it has a chemical component that is like taking heroin.  Also, it is necessary to ensure the continuation of the species, because him loving her so much leads to him wanting to fuck her brains out all the time, which sooner or later would lead to a baby.

Back to your mother or father.  Surely you don't want to have a baby with either of them, so there's something else going on, but it too has to be chemical.

And then there's me with my best guy bud who goes off to Iraq or Afghanistan for months at a time as a pilot.  We grew up together and though the chances of him not coming back because of being shot down are slim, there are all kinds of stuff that can happen to him because of a broken part on the plane or some stupidity promulgated by the military that leads to non-combat deaths on base.  Like that poor Navy Seal who was electrocuted in the shower because some stupid contractor did not ground a power cable properly.

If my friend died, I would be the saddest person in the world.  And I certainly don't want to have kids with the dude, I'm not around him because he's been elsewhere for the last 15 years, and he's no John Lennon.  But I do love the guy, in a non-ghey kind of way.

So, make of it what you will. You've heard of people not "loving" anyone?  Well, I think all that is is a person not letting anyone "in" to be loved.  And by that I mean he or she does not allow the neural connections to form that would let the chemical soup take over.

So my final answer is it's chemical, brought about by a connection of some sort, be it familial, sexual, or just the enjoyment of the company or a connection on an artistic level.

This is all I know about love:

 

I say it's a combination of a chemical reaction in your brain plus human instinct. My heart cannot, nor will it ever be able to think. It pumps blood. That is all. Every other emotion that humans feel are results of the body releasing some kind of chemical, and the body reacting accordingly. Fear, happiness, aggression, these are not things that happen for some unknown reason. Love is no different in this regard.

In relevance to the topic at hand, do you think that homosexuality originates for the same reasons as love? Higher mental processes as opposed to different species? Chemical imbalance?

Yeah, I did say she looked like a man didn't I? Touche, Cantrip, touche...

What you all neglect to mention is life is a chemical reaction,

 There is sooo much to describe, so I am going to dabble on the basics. The two basic chemical attractions

Here is how it starts,

First you notice a beautiful women/Man/Dog/Sheep, but what makes it beautiful? You gotta start thinking primal.

You like the look,

but what is it you look at?

First things that are noticed

Virility - shows by looking healthy not sick, we are pre programmed to associate sickness with not being virile. Taught skin, young looking. (hence women using make up to make them appear

Life giving attibutes- Does the man appear able to provide nourishment for children ( Way back when, Men were hunters and got food, now a days just a decent  job to get food and provide for a family), and does the women have a shape propotioned to have/birth healthy children, adequate mammaries to provide for the newborns to make the offspring strong.

As your brain looks for those kind of things, depending on what you are genetically/Naturally/Nurtureing disposition, depening on how much on who your looking at meets your requirments it triggers the "Am I in love" state?

 

The second and just as critical as the first is the Smell.

Our olfactory are able to sense a powerful odor that has no defined smell, called pheromones.

This can be very complex as it involved PHEROMONES. Aggregation by pheromones are synthetically done by wearing perfume, but we all have our own special scent, once we hit puberty, no one can descibe how girls smell, or how guys smell, they just do. When I am asked "What does a girl smell like?" It depends, either I like the smell or I do not. and I certainly do not particularly enjoy the company of a women whom I can't stand the smell, but with time people can adapt due to sensory adaptation. And then people will argue with me about learning to love someone, that is called conditional response (Pavlov's Dog). I am talking about the most basic, primal if you will.

 

The brain a strange thing,

It's late, if you need to me to clairfy let me know.