Are You an Incurable Romantic
How romantic are you? Perhaps you can quote from Romeo and Juliet. Are you enraptured by romantic poetry? What is love? Anthropologist Helen Fisher says that romantic love is more than emotions (if you have ever been in love, you know that); it is akin to our drives for food, water and sleep. Dr. Fisher, a research professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, has conducted research on sex, romance, and the human drive for these essentials. Dr. Fisher went a step further in trying to understand why humans will go to such lengths to find and keep love. She examined the brains of individuals who had just fallen in love to determine what happens in the brain.
Dopamine and norepinephrine, chemical cousins of amphetamines, are a part of the "falling in love" process. Dopamine makes us feel giddy (good stuff) and norepinephrine stimulates the production of adrenaline. In other words, our hearts race. When we are in love, we hunger for nothing other than the object of our romantic quest.
Thanks to the magic of love and a few marvelous chemicals, we often experience mood swings, weight loss and daydreams ad nauseum. Tossing and turning replace once-blissful sleep. We undergo various perplexing and annoying changes. A manic/restless feeling becomes the norm when we are not in a dopey, impervious fog. Our "loved one" consumes our every thought.
These intense physical and emotional manifestations have been the energy behind romantic poetry, plays and art for at least the last few thousand years. Romance is the socialization and humanization of primal animal lust. Lust is fleeting, whereas romantic love is lasting. When we fall in love, we yearn to capture and treasure that intoxicating, crazy feeling. We designated a holiday, Valentine's Day, to celebrate the magnificent power and grandeur of romantic love. How many poems have been offered "at the altar" of love? I have written a few myself (blush), and I am a rational researcher. How many flowers have been pressed into books, as the presser prayed it would not be the last? Unhappily, love can die or, perhaps worse, never ignite in our beloved's breast. How many hearts have been broken into more pieces than Humpty Dumpty? And no, all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put a shattered heart back together again. There is no emollient for a broken heart. We offer a little prayer that it will never happen to us, as we sadly accept the reality that it may. When a broken heart strikes, one special song, such as "Have You Ever Been in Love" by Peter Cetera, can bring us to our emotional knees. Each beat can bring pain so intense one cannot breathe (okay, so maybe I've "been there"). Yet, romantics continue to love and expect a fairly-tale ending.
How romantic are you?
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