What Is Love?What is this thing called love? This simple question begs for an answer. The symptoms oflove are familiar enough. A drifting mooniness in one"s behavior and thought, the fact that itseems as though the whole universe has rolled itself up into the person of the beloved, somethingso wonderful that no one on earth has ever felt about a fellow creature before. Love is ecstasyand torment, freedom and slavery. Love makes the world go round.Until recently, scientists wanted nothing to do with it. The reason being that love is life"smost intense feeling and love is mushy. Science is hard. Anger and fear are emotions that havebeen researched in labs and can be quantified through measurements. Pulse and breathing rates,muscle contractions, etc. Love cannot be charted or measured. Anger and fear have a definiteroll in human survival: fighting or running. Love does not. And since it is possible for humans tomate and reproduce without love, all the swooning and sighing is beside the point.Up until the past decade, serious scientists assumed that love was all in the head. Now theresearch has become more intense. This may be because of the spreading of AIDS and that casualsex carries mortal risks. Others point to the growing number of female scientists and suggest thatthey may be more willing then their male colleagues to take love seriously. Whatever the reason,science has come around to a view that romance is real. That it is bred into our biology.We have always been influenced by love in our culture. It is a dominant theme in music,television, films, novels and magazines. It is a commercial bliss. People will do or buy anythingwith a promise of romance. Does this imply that love is just a false emotion that we picked up after years of it beingdrilled into our head again and again by society? If romance was purely a figment, unsupportedby any rational or sensible evidence, then surely most would be immune to it by now.