CNN has a brief article about a study to determine what goes on in the brain during romantic love. The title of the article, “Love is the drug”, should tell you a little about what they discovered. I’m not going to get into brain chemistry or anything like that (not my field, not a subject I’ve read a lot about, and not really what was studied in this article anyway), but there is an interesting quote at the very bottom of the article – because it’s a common complaint that folks have against science in general.
The interviewer asked whether studying love in this manner took away the “mystery and romance”. Here’s the reply from anthropologist Helen Fisher, who (with others) performed the study:
You can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and you still sit down and eat that chocolate cake and it’s wonderful.
In the same way, you can know all the ingredients of romantic love and still feel that passion.
It’s a sentiment that scientists echo quite frequently, but probably not frequently enough. Understanding how something works doesn’t cheapen it. Consider Halley’s comet. Is it somehow less impressive because we understand why it glows and when it will come back?