Dr. Brown's "Brain Systems for Survival"

Love for survival, I think, had a different meaning in years past, maybe up until the seventies? Before then, people fell in love and got married and had children that they were supposed to raise in a loving environment and teach to be a person instead of just a human. Now, love is not a prerequisite to having a child. We don’t love each other with the intentions of raising more people that we love and who will love. We don’t love to ensure our species survive. We have sex so our species survives. We love because it makes us happy, or is supposed to at least.

But sex is still important, and not from an evolutionary or biological standpoint. It’s important because it’s part of the human experience, as is love. Sometimes they’re not synonymous. People have sex and fall in love because it’s considered normal. It’s an experience most humans relate to and for a person to fit in with society, they must have similar experiences, human experiences. And that’s the real continuation of humanity. We feel the same way about love as cave-people did. The emotion hasn’t changed, just the language used to describe it. So even though when we fall in love and claim that no one has ever felt this way before, our friends are sitting there listening thinking “yeah yeah, that happened to me too” and it probably happened millions of times before, just not exactly the same. You’re human. You can’t expect to feel a new emotion that’s never been felt before. But it’s still important because it makes you understand everyone else a little bit clearer, even if you don’t notice.

Dr. Brown also mentioned overlooking peoples’ faults when we’re falling in love. To me, that is synonymous with seeing a person for what you want them to be, not what they are or like looking in the mirror and having a false impression of what you see. 

Remembering some of my thoughts during this presentation, I struggled to define romantic love on my own. It can’t be defined as its own emotion because it differs from person to person and is often comprised of several other distinct emotions. My conclusion was that for me, romantic love is simply a state of dizzying confusion, the happy kind, I guess.