The Brain and Love

I'm currently taking a motivation and emotion class for my psychology credits. I'm honestly not fond of it, but some of the things we discuss have some sort of relevance and are interesting. In Dr. Brown's lecture, I noticed, it was eluded to that love isn't really a feeling but more of a motivational drive. Internally, I sighed, remembering a lecture just last week on different emotions and how they all have some sort of motivation going on, biologically. One of these, of course, is love.

There's different types of love, even though Dr. Brown mainly focused on romantic. Yet, they all have the same purpose. A close, intimate relationship with someone that most psychologists would argue is essential to a healthy and long life. It's weird to think of it like that. That we all sort of need love to survive. All this year, we've looked at love and how it could potentially destroy someone--make them go insane, lose their lives, ruin them. But when we delve deeper, it's more than that. It can hurt, yeah, especially romantic love but it's all so essential. We have a biological motivation to love, something that's literally part of our brain, close to the same parts that control our heartbeat, our breathing, our movement. All these vitals and then our capacity to build and maintain relationships with others. So it's not a fleeting thing or something that's casual. It's absolutely necessary and engraved in us from the most basic biological concept.