Love is a cocktail of brain chemicals.

From an article by Loretta G. Breuning Ph.D., expert on the mammalian brain.

Dopamine...

Oxytocin...

Serotonin...

When you receive the affection of a desirable individual, it triggers lots of serotonin, even if you hate to admit it. And when you are the desired individual, receiving admiration from others, that triggers serotonin too. It feels so good that people tend to seek it again and again.

Why did the brain evolve so many different ways to motivate reproductive behavior? Because keeping your DNA alive is harder than you’d think. Survival rates are low in the state of nature, and mating opportunities are harder to come by than you might expect. ...

There is no free love in nature

Every species has a preliminary qualifying event before mating behavior. Creatures work hard for any mating opportunity that comes their way. In the end, some DNA makes lots of copies of itself, while other DNA disappears without a trace. You may say you don’t care about your DNA, but you’ve inherited a limbic system that does....

Love triggers a cocktail of neurochemicals because it’s so highly relevant to survival. But it cannot guarantee non-stop happiness. It feels like it can while you’re enjoying the cocktail, however, so your brain may learn to expect that.

"The Neurochemistry of Love", Psychology Today, 18 Feb 2018

And now, a few words from the philosophers:

Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love - because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The myth of romantic love tells us, in effect, that for every young man in the world there is a young woman who was “meant for him,” and vice versa. Moreover, the myth implies that there is only one man meant for a woman and only one woman for a man and this has been predetermined “in the stars.” When we meet the person for whom we are intended, recognition comes through the fact that we fall in love. We have met the person for whom all the heavens intended us, and since the match is perfect, we will then be able to satisfy all of each other’s needs forever and ever, and therefore live happily forever after in perfect union and harmony.

[...]

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters.

Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth. 

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled

I hope to be saying a lot more about The Romantic Myth later. 

So, we have a few thoughts here on what love is... and what it isn't. 

Love is not what the Priests and Mystics say it is. 

Love is not self-sacrifice.

Love is not valueless feelings.

Love is not free.

To be continued...