“Between love and madness lies obsession.”

What is love? Surely it must be something more than what Haddaway sang about.

Well, the feeling of love is caused by the release of certain hormones, one of the most famous ones being oxytocin, the poetically named ‘love hormone’. The release of these hormones is also connected with simple crushes, short-lasting attractions, which can cause confusion between love and lust. Which in itself would not be so bad, if we could be sure that whatever we are feeling was definitely more than a dream.

Neurologically speaking, the signals going through one’s brains when one is awake are indistinguishable from those being fired when one is simply dreaming. Therefore love itself could be no more than something we’ve dreamt up, as dreaming awake is not uncommon. Just think of how the first stages of love are generally described, the feeling of light-headedness, the need for personal proximity, the inexplicable trust, the quickly drawn conclusions about the likeness of the other to oneself… sounds pretty dreamy to me.

One thing we can rule out about love is that it is not a morbus, a disease. It is a (relatively) simple biochemical process that happens with almost every person at some point or other, quite possibly on multiple occasions. ‘Curing’ it would mean disrupting the natural processes that go on in one’s body. Oddly enough, even the trigger of the emotion is pretty impossible to ‘cure’. There have been different trials with different hormones, even artificially creating a jump in oxytocin levels when one is exposed to a certain object (such as a foto) or person, thus training the person to associate that object or person with the feeling of love. These experiments have failed.

So love is a function of our bodies, aimed to find better mates. This is slightly off-target when contemplating about homosexuality (and many different philias such as zoophilia or necrophilia), but these are practically unchangeable psychological conditions^[1]. It is triggered by spotting certain details, the conditions of which probably unique to the person spotting. It can drive us nuts, completely destroy our ability to think clearly or about anything else than the trigger. But in other cases, it can cause bursts of creativity, the ‘muse’ effect, it can create apparent self-confidence, often only present when the trigger is not around^[2]. It has side-effects that vary wall-to-wall, from drowsiness to hyperactivity, from extreme shyness to active social behaviour, from mental drainpipe to a dream factory. But to know what it is, I guess one has to experience it first-hand.