Caitlin Cataldi
Professor Delores Zumwalt
English 1302
June 22, 2013
Romance ideals
Love is like an addiction to drugs. Some people crave it while others fear it. We want intimacy, but we also fear it because we are scared of commitment, being close to someone or even being alone. Within society, people seem to invest more time in finding love immediately than they do in grasping the real concept of love. In a typical college town, you would see many teenagers hanging out in groups rather than hanging out individually. Hanging out in groups allows for less attachment and just looking to have a good time with the people you know. It is less risky and has less potential to being hurt. Spending time one on one allows one to build actual feelings for one another, but “the date” could lead to something that one might regret including sexual encounters. It is more risky and has more potential to being hurt. We tend to think that the only way to be happy in life is to find a loved one and spend the rest of our lives with that significant other. Love is more varied and equally satisfying. Our view of love is inaccurate.
When people are powerfully attracted to one another, they discuss having “chemistry” which only turns out to be a metaphor. When you are in love, there are a lot of chemicals reacting in your brain and body. In Love: The Chemical Reaction, Lauren Slater discusses “that certain powerful chemicals in our bodies, especially dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, stimulate both the “high” of early romance and the less exciting but more stable feelings of long term relationships” (374). We can predict that certain parts of the brain are much more involved than others in passionate attraction. “Why doesn’t passionate love last?” (Slater 378). We have a tendency to fall in love, sometimes over and over again, subjecting ourselves each time to a very sick