The Age
Rob Brooks
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/romantic-love-is-at-heart-the-triumph-of-hormonal-alchemy-20120213-1t23y.html

Tina Turner called it a second-hand emotion, but according to anthropologist and author Helen Fisher it isn't even an emotion at all: ''It's a motivation system, it's a drive, it's part of the reward system of the brain.'' Love is so many-splendoured because it does so many jobs. At least six different hormones signal to several dozen different tissues and organs at various times in our romantic lives, arousing us to crave sex, attracting us to healthy and high-quality mates, bonding us to our beloved, and all the time helping us to thwart the conflict between us and focus on our common interests - including the difficult business of raising a healthy child.

This seems to be another example of looking for evidence to justify a conclusion.

QuoteSeed beetle penises resemble tools of mediaeval torture that inflict internal damage on the female. The female's pain is the male's evolutionary gain as the unwholesome experience dissuades her from mating again with another male

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This is an important point. On a number of levels. But the one I think we need to consider here is, that this demonstrates that living creatures do indeed develop negative notions for what might otherwise be constructive purposes.

QuoteThe first flush of obsessive-addictive love comes courtesy of a spike in dopamine and a dangerous drop in serotonin. Dopamine - the addictive part - causes the euphoria of falling in love and of orgasm. Those pleasant feelings evolved to reward us when we do what is good for our genes. Little surprise, then, that once we acquire a taste for that special somebody, or for sex in general, we want to keep on coming back.

While I'm sure everyone will be as pleased as I am that this researcher managed to fall in love immediately, I suggest that that spike isn't about falling in love at all. It's about experiencing lust. A rather different thing.

For most of us, that first experience of lust turns to major disappointment. For those of us who take a bit longer to get the idea, it leads to a succession of disappointments.

But it teaches us, from an early age, the difference between love and lust. Rather like that beetle, learning through experience, not to play around.

Not a lot to recommend in teenage disappointment to be honest.

I don't agree with you here spacial. There are hormones involved in love, and those same hormones play multiple roles. The oxytocin that's so excellent for pair-bonding is the same stuff that makes a person's body expel the placenta after giving birth. Dopamine is involved in both lust and romance, and it plays a role in gambling addiction. Parkinson's patients have really interesting compulsive reactions to their therapies. And so on.

I'm not sure why the journalist threw in the beetle example. Housecats and ducks also have really traumatic sex, and it doesn't make them monogamous. It's just part of the arms race, and not an atypical development in any species.