Short Essay — Love, Eventually.
I fancied to note, “Why Him? Why Her?” The exciting thing about the author’s writing is that it reveals that love is about getting yourself addicted without getting high. From fascination to abandonment (despair), people in love are like reckless addicts. According to the author of this article, “love addiction” is no longer used metaphorically but is really similar to the effects of drugs on the human brain (Fisher, 1992). Professor Helen Fisher, who has a background in anthropology, is convinced that love, as the most powerful emotion in the world, must be represented in the brain. In an MRI study published by her team, the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA), the brain’s “live area,” was identified for the first time. Active ApEn cells in the Ventral Tegmental Area make dopamine, the brain’s neurotransmitter that makes people happy, and distribute it to numerous areas of the brain. This reminds me of the famous English philosopher Russell who described the need for love as one of the three passions that ruled his life. So, isn’t that an addiction also (Russell, 1967, p.13)?
Why is “love” so appealing? Love, in and of itself, is a thrilling experience, in my view. But unfortunately, we are so Love fools. Florentino has been waiting for Fermina for 51 years (Márquez, 1988), and as Helen Fisher says, we often cannot define love, even though we all fall in love eventually. We didn’t expect to be swept up in the emotion of love. This is not to say that when a person matures and enters the age of love, they automatically and consciously select the best among many potential objects based on specific criteria. Or, more precisely, actively seek out the one who makes you happy. However, love not only often goes unnoticed, but it is also beyond our control. As a result, we sometimes start relationships with people we shouldn’t, or with people, we don’t want to live with. As a result, Wong Kar Wai talked about how love is always a matter of timing in the 2046 movie (Wong, 2004). In fact, love is a time-sensitive phenomenon. So, it’s irrelevant to match the right person too early or too late.
Love’s enchantment is obvious. Armand Duval “blushed and his heartbeat rapidly” when he glimpsed Marguerite Gautier, believing he was in love (Bolognini, 1981). Helen Fisher describes the typical reactions of people who have been struck by Cupid’s arrow in her article: daydreaming, obsession, fascination, sadness, anxiety, fetish, restlessness, a constant haunting of the mind, a complete focus of attention that not only disrupts one’s life, studies, or work and makes one unmotivated to do anything else, but also triggers changes in one’s physical and mental condition and even personality. We can, of course, feel love, but that is not the same as knowing it. In reality, love is not mysterious, and love’s magic is not magical. What makes it weird or magical is that we do not fully understand its reasons. Our daily lives are essentially guided by our desires, intuitions, sentiments, and emotions, but we have little understanding of where these drives originate or what they are utilized for. Humans are no different than any other creature.
In ordinary life, what we call love can result from an erotic yearning or a non-sexual emotional distraction. Love is never random for the same reason. Even birds and insects choose their spouses deliberately, with female long-winged insects hunting for men with the same size wings. House swallows pick partners with just the right tail proportions, and male monkeys prefer females with symmetrical teeth, for example. It is easy to see that animals like the best genes to reproduce, and so are we humans. People favour symmetrical faces, striking good looks, and superior intelligence. Evolutionary instinct has set the buttons that trigger love in us, not because of noble or sacred “love values.” In fact, most of the choices are directed to the benefits of reproduction — the “love value.”
According to Helen Fisher, the active area of the brain of people who fall in love is the ventral tegmental area of the brain, VTA. It’s the same as saying our body has a lot of circuits, processes, and systems. When specific cues or information appear in our surroundings, they cause us to behave a certain way. We respond because they help us achieve our goal of “reproduction,” regardless of what happens in the interim, whether we rejoice or suffer. So we enjoy the rush of love naively, but we also experience the drug withdrawal that follows with the loss of love.
Although, in comparison to our forefathers, we are now far more fortunate. For one thing, we live in a materially prosperous society that liberates us from the constraints of hard labour. The second is that we have amassed a significant amount of knowledge. People can revise and rejuvenate themselves as human beings, in my opinion, via studying. In other words, outside reproduction, the purpose of human life will eventually become the basis of life via achieving “pleasure.”
Furthermore, knowledge’s reason can aid us in developing self-discipline and free will, allowing us to avoid being slaves not just to other people but also to nature. Of course, my proposal may be idealistic, but it is a small measure of freedom that the times have afforded us, particularly women. All we can do is tear this small opening wider and let happiness in more aggressively. After all, both you and I persist today because of love.
