So in the end...?

Grant has put the entire debate into very aptly worded terms. I never said love had to be a spiritual experience. David, you said love is simply a survival mechanism. I've seen a lot of "what we call love can really be called... (fill in blank)". And my question to you is what's wrong with all that? So love is a survival mechanism. So love is actually a selfish emotion. What is wrong with all that? Feeling hunger is a survival mechanism, and I don't see you ranting about how eating is a bad thing. Especially considering you don't believe in a higher power or a level of existence above the human plane, everything to you thus must exist within the world in which we live. EVERYTHING we do is driven towards self preservation or self gratification. Love happens to encompass both. The difference with love is that in the proces of self preservation and self gratification, someone else ALSO benefits. I mean, you could say that love is a lot less self centered than eating because when you eat, only YOU get the benefit of the food, nobody else. But when two people love each other, they both benefit from it. We fall in love and what we feel when we're in love is really all we need to experience to make it worthwhile. When you're starving and you have a really good meal, you feel satisfied after you're finished eating aren't you? The fact that it's a different feeling than being in love doesn't mean love is any less important.

You're also twisting the mob mentality into something completely strays off the main point of your original point, which is that love originates from European literature and that's the reason why we do the things we when we're in love. You're saying that we do somethings because everyone else does them. But love is something we feel and we wouldn't do the things we did in love UNLESS we felt good about doing them. Ok, sure so everyone hugs people that they feel close to. But when you hug someone, do you do it ONLY because it's what you're supposed to do when you like someone? Obviously not. That's a completely stupid concept. When you hug someone, you also get close to them physically and it's the feeling of physical closeness that makes us WANT to hug someone. On some level in the human brain, being physically close to someone we like feels good. If it felt awful then people wouldn't do it... and it wouldn't be an element of European literature.