TOW #23: Love by Lauren Sister (written, nonfiction text)

Some describe love as a flame, something that burns brightly and passionately for a given period of times but goes off eventually. Some also describe love as a magical thing that cannot be easily explained through reasoning. However, according to Lauren Sister, a journalist who has been researching the chemistry of love, love is a very mechanical thing that comes with its reasons. She claims that people have a tendency to be attracted to ones who have the qualifications that they lack, a innate tendency to produce the best offspring. Also, we fall for people who have the qualities our parents had, because “Love is reactive, not proactive, it arches us backward, which may be why a certain person just “feels right.” Or “feels familiar.”... He or she has a certain look or smell or sound or touch that activates buried memories” (31). To support her claim, she uses very scientific terms like oxytocin and neurotransmitters and builds her ethos. She also uses anecdotes to explain the stages of love. She claims that her husband and she fully experienced the burning flame of love. However, this is not the end of their love. It is the end of one stage of another love, and the beginning of another stage of their love.

Despite its practical mechanisms SIster tried to explain in her essay, love is still a magical and wonderful thing because the chance that one might meet another person who triggers one’s oxytocin, “a hormone that promotes a feeling of connection” (55) is rare and for the other person to feel the same feelings about one is even harder.

Her claims are definitely interesting and original but I personally felt as if she was being too finicky. I believe that some things in life can be beyond reason and do not believe that it is our objectives to discover every single detail in human life. There are benefits to knowing the mechanics behind love: If people knew that they would succeed in love with one or the other, there would be no failures or disappointments in relationships. However, it is because people fail, that we have population control and desires.