Why We Fall in Love?

Today is was searching something else on TED video's and Helen Fisher popped up. Her book Why Him? Why Her? is of my favorite and there is lots of truth to it. Please don't use it as a 'bible" but it will definitely answer lot of our "questions". This one is from her previous book - Why We Love? - Love is a drive (Yes, it's Dopamine driven)

"What 'tis to love?" Shakespeare said. I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was, by looking at the last 45 years of research on, just the psychological research, and, as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love.

The first thing that happens is, what I call – a person begins to take on, what I call, ‘special meaning.’ As a truck driver once said to me, he said, "the world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne." George Bernard Shaw said it a little differently. He said, "love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another," and, indeed, that's what we do. (laughter) And then you just focus on this person, you can list what you don't like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, "love is blind.”

I'm trying to understand romantic love. I decided I would read poetry from all over the world and I just want to give you one very short poem from 8th century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It's a little bit like – when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot, their car is different from every other car in the parking lot, their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party and, in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat. And it goes like this.

It's by a guy called Yuan Chen: “I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. “The night I brought you home I watched you roll it out. He became hooked on a sleeping mat,” – probably because elevated activity of dopamine in his brain – “just like with you and me.”



Btw, Bollywood answer is cool too!!




"The God of love lives in the state of need. Love is a need, like hunger and thirst."
-Plato