Is that Oxytocin in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

I’ve checked with the other mods, and it turns out I cannot, in fact, ban you for this.

Instead, I’m mailing you a dead fish.

E-mail it; it’s faster.

didn’t Ed Hardy put it the best. “Love kills slowly.” (ridiculous…ohh my, its ridiculous.)

My observation OxyContin produces stronger love bonds than oxytocin.

I’ve seen folks give up everything for it.

Perhaps so, but absinthe makes the heart grow fonder…

Well, Easter 2010 will change that…

Thank you for clarifying that. With all due respect to begbert2, the first definition sounded a lot like an unhealthy codependence. Ask me how I know. :rolleyes:

I was a happy person even though my husband was extremely sick, and I’m still a happy person now that he’s gone.

His pain caused me pain, but it didn’t destroy my happiness. His death was the worst thing that has ever happened to me, but it also didn’t destroy my happiness.

I guess I’m saying that I don’t agree with you.

And liver weaker.

“Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
–Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961.

Love is a blanket term for any number of emotions. The feelings the OP rattled off are all facets of love. To say that love is too vague to exist is like saying candy doesn’t exist; a candy just called candy doesn’t exist (… I smell a patent…), but there are still maple syrup drops and Turkish delights and Big League Chews and decorated gingerbread men and so on, all types of candies.

All this love is making me hungry.

Serotonin and oxytocin are quite potent chemicals that act on the nervous system. For most people, they induce a pleasurable effect. You could become quite addicted to this effect. At which point, you, might as well face it, your addicted to love. What you want is a new drug. One that won’t make you talk too much. You should be calling doctor love for this prescription. This current thought process gives love a bad name, and you only have yourself to blame.

Love is a pretty flower, that smells bad.

Spock

Then why does it have a country named after it?

Very interesting… all the posts. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile and was feeling very jaded. Love songs were enough to make me vomit, and if I hear Genesis/Phil Collins I swear I break out in hives.

Serotonin & Oxytocin being chemicals we can and do become addicted to is very facinating to me - as they are released during orgasm. Marriage #2 for me was pretty celibate - does this make me less conditioned and therefore more likely to develop a dependency (like any other drug addict) because I haven’t built up tolerance? Can tolerance be built up? In that case what happens during self-pleasuring - who do we fall in “love” with?

LOL… this train of thought is interesting! This was my first post - glad to be in the company of the brainiacs again :wink:

That’s a perfectly normal reaction to Phil Collins.

The lecture referenced in the OP is pretty interesting. It certainly (if simplistically) goes some way to explaining the intense and wonderful feeling of being in love, and the intense and terrible feelings associated with a breakup. Though I would advise Dr Fisher that if she wants more non-US people to take her psychometric test, allowing for a non-US postal code might help.

What was her definition?

I always thought love was an action, not an emotion.

“Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave. And unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace, joy or freedom for me…Unless we live for each other, and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily. There can be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.” Frederick Buechner, “The Magnificent Defeat”

I obviously use the term “happiness” to describe a broader set of emotions and emotional reactions than you, because “worst thing that ever happened to me” != “happiness” in my book.

And it wouldn’t “destroy” your happiness in any permanent way, regardless.

Well, blast it, I’ve read that book, and given the similarity in both concept and terminology I doubtless cribbed it without knowing it. Clearly I’m less clever than I thought.

Loosely, “If you ain’t mooning and emo, regardless of what else is going on or how people are doing, then you ain’t loving.”