Metabolizing Love

Does having a scientific view of mental processes sap all of the romance out of love? Movies and books have always tried to convince us that love is a profoundly human phenomenon and it is exactly what prevents us from being scientifically defined and packaged. When we’re being oppressed by some advanced, emotionless alien race that sees us as mindless biological wind-up toys, BAM! The human spirit comes to the rescue and we show them passion that supposedly cannot be defined in scientific terms. When a robot tries to be a human, it is always love that they try hardest to understand. We like that these sensations are intangible, nebulous and full of mystery. When someone comes along and starts putting love and passion into clinical language that you only hear in a laboratory, we say, “Stop! Get your geeky hands off love!”

Love is... love is... oh, forget it. If I try to define love, you’ll just deny it. No, love is too grand to be defined by a mere sentence, isn’t it? That’s the way we like it. But if you take the view that our perception is merely a cocktail of chemicals sloshing around in our brains, punch drunk love is merely an indulgence of the right compounds, brought on by sips of laughter and gulps of expectation. We’ve all got our favorite recipe, but that’s about as unique as love gets. And that doesn’t mean love is any less enchanting.

When I see a hot girl looking at me, I certainly don’t think, “My dopamine levels are peaking!” I think, “Oh shit, she’s beautiful!” Likewise, with more intense feelings, I am not shrinking back in a paranoid cave within my mind and going, “It’s only chemistry, it isn’t true love!” I’m living it up! Maybe, upon reflection, I look back and think about the neurological processes that just occurred in my brain, but even that line of thinking is one of fascination.

You can’t take the romance out of love because romance is an integral component of love. Love isn’t a joke that you can kill by explaining it. If things are genuine (or at least appear to be) then there is no diminishing its power. However, therein lies love’s telling truth. Love can be faked or mistaken, which belies its psycho-behavioral roots. If love were this ethereal, spiritual thing, I think it would result in a lot fewer false positives.

While we cannot pin down love to its exact chemical components at this moment, it does not mean that it cannot be done in the future. As it stands, we are actually quite far away from such a breakthrough in our knowledge. The point is not to look at our limitations now and assume that we’ve come as far as we ever will. Nothing is safe from knowledge. One day, we will learn what makes love work, in a mechanical sense. And people will still fall in love after that because regardless of all the cold, unfeeling molecular processes involved, it still feels damn good.