What is Love?

I used to think quite a lot about love such as: What is true love? What's the main characteristics of love? Without longing, desire, jealousy, is love still love? How to love appropriately? Why love? Why do we love one particular person rather than someone else? Must love be exclusive? Can we truly love more than one person at a time? All these questions have whirled around fiercely in my head quite a lot time, and I still get no single answer in black and white.

Recently I happened to watch the old informative talk given by an famous anthropologist Helen Fisher, in which she tried to explore the role human brain plays in love.

She mentioned 3 main characteristics of romantic love:

1. craving, an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally.
2. motivation: want this person irrepressible
   
3. obsession: all day, all night, you just can't stop thinking about this person

It was said there are three brain systems:lust, romantic love and attachment. These three brain systems don't always go together, which means you can have a deep attachment to one person while you feel intense romantic love for someone else. In other words, we are capable of loving more than one person at a time.

Today is a really bad day for me. No way to be out of the glum silence, no one to share, I turn to surfing again. (Yes, I know I'm desperated. If it were before, I can call you. You used to have such magic power to change my mood in one second just by chitchat. ) Then one post written by another famous sociologist Li Yinghe is catching my eyes. She is defensing for a trendy lifestyle with multiple intimate relationships among a small group. She refers the exclusivity of love to a way of thinking, an ethic, not to be born with nature.

Well, it also occurs to me that the characters, the plots in some movies like "The Gloomy Sunday", "The End of Affair" are not too eccentric to imagine, not too weird to exist. At least, there are reasonable explanations and evidences both from psychophysiology and sociology.

Though they still can't answer all my questions clearly, to some point, they provide a new angle to see.