Divine gift, innate ability or hormonal disfunction?

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Ok, here is the deal. Do you think that love is:
a) a gift given to mankind by an otherwordly power (god, deities, whatever...)
b) something special about humans that we have as a special ability
c) a simple hormonal disfunction that occurs when you meet a person whose feromons stimulate the secretion of certain hormones and induce the feeling we call love?

What do you think, taken you believe in love. I don't.

 

Sexual desire (AKA wowie zowie boobs) is natures way of getting us to create offspring.

Love is natures way of keeping the parents together to provide safety and knowledge of how to survive to their offspring.

This is the case for animals.

For humans, love is the very reason we exist.

 

Mostly (b but I think (c plays in some as well. But frankly I dont think it matters. Even if love would be a purely biological thing does it make it less wondrous? As I also think that some animals, especially pack animals are capable of love I dont think it is purely for humans. What I do think is that love is the something amazing and wonderful that we should treasure and that life isnt worth living without it. A life without love isnt lived, it is merely survived.

 

None of the above.

Many animals are clearly capable of falling in love - wolves and geese come to mind. For many species monogamy is the norm (faithfulness is less natural: by monogamy I mean "the inclination to form a lifelong pair bond", not the sexual exclusivity that is often a part of that bond). Love is the mechanism by which monogamous couples and/or families are formed. It certainly is NOT unique to animals. Heck, if you've ever had a dog, you know that some animals are better at forming emotional bonds than we are!

 

It's an innate 'disability'.

You become blind to who the other person truely is, right up until they cheat on you.

If it was a divine gift, it wouldn't disappear quicker than you can say, 'She's got the house, the car, the dog, everything, *****'

Love is a mental disfunction, only lust is due to hormones, God bless 'em. Trust your hormones, everything else is just 'Snake Oil'.

Anyone currently 'in love' will not have believed a word I just said, which just goes to prove my point.

 

Actually all three

Love, when it's really love, is believed to be God's gift in Christianity and even the whole hormone thing is also considered God's gift, one that is being abused or misunderstood most of the time

Sort of. Animals are getting close sometimes though.

Basically one big yes from me here. It's hardly elligible to be called love, but things are as they are. At crush stage phenyloethyloamine strikes your brain down and once you receive a moderate degree of success, dopamine and norephetamine are secreted into your blood. Those are amphetamine's sisters and to some extent give similar effects. This is romance stage. It lasts for two years per average, but in reality there's no such thing as average and the number of years might be quite astonishing at times. When the fire burns down, beta endorphines make you feel comfortable with the person's company. People who apparently need a hug are those suffering from beta endorphine shortage. As you see, it's still some kind of biology or biochemistry, but not exclusively lust or desire.

There's also a psychological side to the subject. Hormones still being hormones, all of us have will and some level of awareness of what's going on in our mind or body. We may or may not follow hormones: submit or not submit, resist or fail to resist or not be willing to resist, or even 'help' the thing. Some of us know themselves better than most others do, some are just painfully natural What also matters is knowledge, age, experience, individual personality traits.

Well, and I don't really believe either. The first I'll think of is what sort of thing I've been eating or drinking (and how much ), how much sleep I've had recently, and how short I've been on beta endorphines (also known as lonely).

 

Why do so many people insist on analyzing love? It's a wonderful emotion, can't we just leave it at that.

It's certainly not limited to humans, as Sprite pointed out.

My question to you is, can you define it? Because I can't using those three options that were given. I don't feel that it's any of them.

 

Defining love is what my question is all about. Cause I don't really believe in "true love", and I once got into an argument over the subject with a friend, but I don't know what were we fighting about. I mean, what is love? Personally , I think what we call love is an emotion induced by hormones secreted into our bloodstream. The sensation we then experience and call love---I believe in. But I leave it at that. And all that BS like Werther, Romeo, killing yourself over lost love and the like--I don't buy that.

 

I'd say c) although I wouldn't call it a "disfunction", it's a natural phenomenon, hormones, chemical reactions... the works, primarily aimed at reproduction.
What we humans usually call "love" is imo a combination of the work of those chemicals and hormones with others things like friendship, trust, intimacy and such.

 

You need to distinguish between love and lust, something that I find most teenagers and young adults I know, incapable of doing.
Lust is just hormones, but love is ......different. It can't be analysed, or explained. Its definatley a gift, or even a curse.

 

Actually there's something more to hormone rush than just lust. What we are discussing here is love but taken from a sceptical point of view - at which point it still isn't reduced to what makes animals breed.

To hormone play we add pheromone matching, perhaps some genetic patterns and social conditions that aren't necessarily biologically determined but shape one's memories - and as a result we get something that is called 'love'.

 

If we are talking about the lust a man feels for a woman the moment he sees her then we are talking about hormones not to mention that the type of women or men a man or a woman respectively likes are stereotypes that are imprinted in our DNA as the models for suitable mates for offsprings.
But love is a word that does not mean only that rush of blood in the lower head. It is for us humans the noblest of all feelings and the hardest to get. Every person is dreaming or have at some point wished to fall in love or to find the true love of his life.
I believe that love is more than anything a mental thing and the true love at least in our days is becoming an outopistic idea

 

Saying hormones is only lust is nonsense. A high due to hormones can come even when lust is not involved, a sort of infatuation (sp?).

I wouldn't say love is a hormonel disfunction either, I'd rather say it's an evolved and highly important emotion that aids us in survival. You look out for those you love, become a team, and a team is often more successful than a solo.

I don't see analyzing love as being a bad thing, though not particularly necessary either. Even if someone could explain what it was in detail to me, I'd probably think "whatever dude, I still think it's awesome", but that's just my opinion

 

You know what's really good?

Love and lust AT THE SAME TIME.

WOHOOOOOO