Is romantic love just a fleeting chemical reaction?

[The Sphinx]

Is love so short?

ROME (Reuters) - Your heartbeat accelerates, you have butterflies in the stomach, you feel euphoric and a bit silly. It's all part of falling passionately in love -- and scientists now tell us the feeling won't last more than a year.
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The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers.
...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051129/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_love_molecule;_ylt=AiBMbPEhqaLsHjOi592q6rwDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl"

 

[Aether]

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

--Sonnet 116

 

[rachmaninoff]

What if Shakespeare had had all the advantages of knowing modern biochemistry?

 

[Aether]

What if Shakespeare had had all the advantages of knowing modern biochemistry?

That wouldn't make any difference. The point is that "love", like "truth", is what still remains when all is said and done.

 

[fourier jr]

the sample size was only 58 people? they've got to do better than that i think.

 

[franznietzsche]

ROME (Reuters) - Your heartbeat accelerates, you have butterflies in the stomach, you feel euphoric and a bit silly. It's all part of falling passionately in love -- and scientists now tell us the feeling won't last more than a year.
ADVERTISEMENT
The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers.
...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051129/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_love_molecule;_ylt=AiBMbPEhqaLsHjOi592q6rwDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl"

That article is throughly offbase and wrong. That is not what the researchers said, they are just trying to create news by twisting science. Move along, nothing to see. Its been known for years that feelings of romantic love are linked to various neurochemicals. After all, we are nothing but chemical machines.