Page 12 - Advanced Romance

Advanced Romance* 9
But this is just one study and Tennov relied on anecdotal evidence instead of scientifically reproducible experiments. It’s also true that not all humans experience the grace and agony of limerence. If you haven’t felt limerence, it’s understandable that it’s hard to believe. Does it mean you’re unhealthy if you haven’t? Nor necessarily. As Paul Simon says: “If I’d never loved I never would have cried.”9
Limerence often involves ecstatic love as well as despondent despair, so it is a dangerous thing. If it hasn’t happened to you, you may have reason to feel blessed. On the other hand, in his book The Social Animal, David Brooks defines limerence as a potentially positive, unifying, transformative encounter with the divine, or oneness of mankind.10 I agree with Brooks that if understood more, love can increase the oneness of humanity, and the happiness of most people, substantially.
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So why has it taken so long for humanity to objectively investigate love? The obvious reason is that religion and culture have served to camouflage love
to such an extent that it has been hidden from view.
It became a fundamentalism to ignore sexuality if possible, and to keep it under rigid social control if not. This has of coursed changed since the 1960s (hooray!), but I believe we are still in the Dark Ages as far as