Why We Love?

• Helen Fisher.

Helen E. Fisher
Helen Fisher at LaWeb 2008 in Paris
Born	1945
Citizenship	Canada
Fields	anthropology
Institutions	Rutgers University
Alma mater	University of Colorado
Known for	The First Sex, interpersonal attraction studies

Helen E. Fisher (born 1945) is a Canadian-American anthropologist and human behavior researcher. She is professor at Rutgers University. Fisher has studied romantic interpersonal attraction for over 30 years. Prior to becoming a research professor at Rutgers University, she was a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Dr. Fisher is a leading expert on the biology of love and attraction. She is currently the most referenced scholar in the love research community. In 2005 she was hired by match.com to help build chemistry.com, which used her research and experience to create both hormone-based and personality-based matching systems. She was one of the main speakers at the 2006 and 2008 TED (conference). On January 30, 2009, she was featured in an ABC News special, Why Him? Why Her? The Science of Seduction, where she discussed her most recent research on brain chemistry and romantic love.
In her book, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, Fisher proposed that humanity has evolved three core brain systems for mating and reproduction:

1. lust - the sex drive or libido, also described as borogodó.
2. attraction - early stage intense romantic love.
3. attachment - deep feelings of union with a long term partner.

Love can start off with any of these three feelings, Fisher maintains. Some people have sex with someone new and then fall in love. Some fall in love first, then have sex. Some feel a deep feeling of attachment to another, which then turns into romance and the sex drive. But the sex drive evolved to initiate mating with a range of partners; romantic love evolved to focus one's mating energy on one partner at a time; and attachment evolved to enable us to form a pairbond and rear our young together as a team.
Fisher discusses many of the feelings of intense romantic love, saying it begins as the beloved takes on "special meaning." Then you focus intensely on him or her. People can list the things they dislike about a sweetheart, but they sweep these things aside and focus on what they adore. Intense energy, elation, mood swings, emotional dependence, separation anxiety, possessiveness, physical reactions including a pounding heart and shortness of breath, and craving, Fisher reports, are all central to this feeling. But most important is obsessive thinking. As Fisher says "Someone is camping in your head."
Fisher and her colleagues have put 49 men and women into a brain scanner to study the brain circuitry of romantic love: 17 who had just fallen madly in love, 15 who had just been dumped, and 17 who reported that they were still in love after an average of 21 years of marriage. One of her central ideas is that romantic love is a drive that is stronger than the sex drive. As she has said, "After all, if you casually ask someone to go to bed with you and they refuse, you don't slip into a depression, commit suicide or homicide--but around the world people suffer terribly from romantic rejection."
Fisher also maintains that taking certain antidepressants can potentially dampen feelings of romantic love and attachment (as well as the sex drive).
Both men and women use physical attractiveness as a measure of how 'good' another person is. Men often tend to value attractiveness more than women. In fMRI brain scans published in 2004 by Rutgers University evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher, in the early intense stages of falling in love, there were clear differences in male and female brains Men, on average, tended to show more activity in two regions in the brain: one was associated with the integration of visual stimuli, and the second was with penile erection. Conversely, women in these early stages exhibited increased activity in several regions of the brain associated with memory recall. Fisher speculated the evolutionary source was in the need for females to identify males whose behavior over time suggested they would help the female raise her offspring. However, in terms of behavior, some studies suggest little difference between men and women. Symmetrical men and women begin to have sexual intercourse earlier, have more sexual partners, engage in a wider variety of sexual activities and have more casual sex.

	Rich Harrison.

Why Don't We Fall in Love?

"Why Don't We Fall in Love" is song written and produced by Rich Harrison for American R&B singer Amerie's debut album, All I Have (2002). Released as the album's lead single in the United Kingdom in October 2002 and in the United States in July 2003, the song reached number twenty-three on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a top ten hit on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs. It performed moderately elsewhere, peaking at number forty in the UK and number seventy-three in Australia. The song is also used for the promo of the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless.

• Love?

  
  Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels. Love may also be described as actions towards others (or oneself) based on compassion, or as actions towards others based on affection.
  In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, or the platonic love that defines friendship, to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.
  Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.
  Love may be understood as part of the survival instinct, a function keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the speciesA person can be said to love an object, principle, or goal if they value it greatly and are deeply committed to it. Similarly, compassionate outreach and volunteer workers' "love" of their cause may sometimes be borne not of interpersonal love, but impersonal love coupled with altruism and strong spiritual or political convictions. People can also "love" material objects, animals, or activities if they invest themselves in bonding or otherwise identifying with those things. If sexual passion is also involved, this condition is called paraphilia.
  The Christian understanding is that love comes from God. The love of man and woman—eros in Greek—and the unselfish love of others (agape), are often contrasted as "ascending" and "descending" love, respectively, but are ultimately the same thing^.
  There are several Greek words for "love" that are regularly referred to in Christian circles.