Sam De Brito was again talking about Helen Fisher, the Anthropologist who defines love into various states based on neurochemistry and neurobiology. And a friend of mine has been thinking about love so I was talking to him about it too.
Helen Fisher describes Romantic Love as a craving for the other person's particularity. You have a desire to be with only that person in particular, and you love everything about them. One of her more revolutionary claims is to define this state as not an emotion but a motivation. Like hunger.
And that sounds right, doesn't it? When you feel romantic love, you desire and delight in the other person's particularity and you crave it like you crave food where you're desperately hungry. But of course, in this case that hunger can never be fully satisfied, because the only way to satisfy it would be to meld completely with the other person and become one with them. Which we can't do because of our essential separateness.
Which leads us to what Sartre said about love and alienation. "Love is the desire to annihilate the Other's Otherness," he said, and that desire is doomed because we are all essentially separate and alone.
So that's why romantic love is so torturous, and can take hold of you so completely. But even though it's doomed because of our essential separateness to each other, it can also feel sublime. Because it is so wired into our neurochemistry, in its sublimity and awfulness, is it an inescable part of being human, and therefore worth celebrating and wondering in?
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