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 In our discussion on Tuesday we focused a lot on whether love evolved because it resulted in more reproductive success and usually equated monogamy with love.  However, I don’t think we can really relate the monogamy voles exhibit to love in humans because it is very possible to have love without monogamy and monogamy without love.  If the emotion of love never existed I think that people would still stay together to raise their children and gain mutual health advantages.  In our society today many people say they are in love but are not monogamous.  Although I can see that evolutionary survival advantage of monogamy, I don’t know if there is a clear advantage for love.  Mostly I think the best thing about love is that it makes people feel good and strengthens a community and family unit.  Strengthening a family unit could increase reproductive success, however a community and family unit could function without it and therefore I think the most important reason people feel they need love is because it makes them feel good.  This leads into the discussion of whether love is an addiction and I think it is in that people (and most organisms) inherently want more of what makes them feel good.  This is not necessarily a trait that will allow a person to be more reproductively successful but it is still an important part of our nature.  

To abruptly change topics, I’d like to address the question of whether it is important to pursue love research.  I agree with the idea that all research is worth looking into because you never know what you will find, however at the same time I don’t think there is really much to do on love.  I think the only reason most people are interested in love research is because they want help finding the “perfect” match, but ultimately love is such a subjective feeling that it will always be different for each person.  Yes, certain brain areas may light up to give this general feeling, but I think what causes these areas to become active are very different for each person.  I think places such as eHarmony could only seem effective at making matches because all the people are committed to finding love and perhaps that is the most important factor in making a long lasting match. 

Finally, I’d like to add that in all of these discussions I’ve found myself having difficulty accepting that love is purely a biological/cultural/psychological phenomenon and therefore this topic has been one of the hardest for me to discuss.  I don’t want to believe that I only love someone until I have sucked all the “newness” out of them.  I am a person who loves romantic comedies and strongly (and probably naively) believes that love should have the magical quality seen in the movie and can last forever despite the current 50% divorce rate.  Thus, I’ve found all of our conversations about love inherently lacking because we don’t (or can’t) address what makes it so enchanting and special.