Nadene Goldfoot
Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds know a lot about love. These Harvard Medical School (HMS) professors and couples therapists study how love evolves and, too often, how it collapses.
They have also been happily married for nearly four decades.
Love may well be one of the most studied, but least understood, behaviors. More than 20 years ago, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love—the kind that leaves one breathless and euphoric—in 147 of them. This ubiquity, said Schwartz, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., indicates that “there’s good reason to suspect that romantic love is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature.”
- Love relies heavily on a complex network of brain chemistry and neurobiology, though defining it purely as a simple reaction leaves out human choice and psychology.When people experience romantic attraction and love, specific chemical and neural systems activate in the brain:
- Dopamine: Floods the brain's reward circuits (like the caudate nucleus and ventral tegmental area), driving pleasure, focus, and intense cravings.
- Norepinephrine & Adrenaline: Cause physical sensations like a racing heart, sweaty hands, and butterflies.
- Serotonin: Levels often drop during early romantic obsession, which correlates with fixated or recurring thoughts about a partner.
So, when we say the words, "love you," what are we saying ? A strong, deep emotion of affection, care, and attachment. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, love is a strong affection for another person based on 1. kinship, 2. personal ties, 3. sexual attraction, or 4. deep admiration. You can feel 2,3,and 4 for the one person.
So it seems there are different levels of love:
- 1. To Honor your father and mother is to also love them; Interpersonal Affection: Warm attachment or deep care felt for family members, friends, pets, Trust is built in a baby the moment it is born between mother and child for warmth and food. Any event throwing this off may break that feeling of being able to trust people. Wars do things like this; to break the trust. The treatment during childhood-what kinds of love being displayed, also build the same view into the child.
- 2. Friends, Personal ties: Special long time people in childhood, long term friends: Active Choice and Commitment: Viewed by many philosophers and psychologists—such as through the Greater Good Science Center—not just as a passive feeling, but as a deep, unselfish commitment to another person's well-being.
- 3. Pets: Altruism and Compassion: Self-giving concern, kindness, and empathy extended toward neighbors, communities, or all of humanity.
- 4. Strong physical attraction : This comes first; all else forgotten about, this gets things going; sometimes as the only thing... Golda , Golda Mabovitch, before 1910 at age 12
- 5 Romantic partners. Question: What can we view as a Romanic Partner? Here's where the different levels show up. A romantic partner is a person with whom someone shares a mutually recognized social, emotional, and often physical relationship built on courtship-a big one, affection, and commitments. In interpersonal relationships, what "counts" during courtship is anything that tests, proves, or builds long-term compatibility with the explicit intention of marriage. Because courtship is distinct from casual dating, the focus shifts from superficial entertainment to deliberate character assessment and future planning. Here at age 12, girls are into romantic stories.
- Around 1913, Golda Mabovitych began dating Morris Meyerson, a sign painter and socialist.Golda Meir (previously Meyerson; née Mabovitch; 3 May 1898 – 8 December 1978) was the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. She was Israel's first and, to date, only female head of government.
- On 24 December 1917, Meir and Meyerson married. However, Meir's precondition for marriage was to settle in Palestine. She had intended to make aliyah (immigration to Israel) straight away, but her plans were disrupted when all transatlantic passenger services were canceled due to the entry of the United States into the First World War. She then threw her energies into Poale Zion activities. A short time after their wedding, she embarked on a fund-raising campaign for Poale Zion that took her across the United States.
- I think this is what happened to her marriage: She worked so hard in her politics of running the government of Israel with her party that she forgot she had a husband and didn't give him the attention and affection he needed. They had a child together. Perhaps Morris forgot how important the birthing of Israel was to Golda, too, and they did not even try to share this interest of hers. This is not known.
- "They married on December 24, 1917, and remained married until his death in Jerusalem on 25 May 1951. She never remarried. Despite never divorcing, the couple grew apart over the course of the marriage. When Meir took her children with her to the United States in the 1930s, Morris stayed behind in Jerusalem."
Meir had two children. Her son, Menachem, was born in Jerusalem in 1924 and died on 14 December 2014 in Tel Aviv. He was a professional cellist who studied at the Israel Conservatory and Manhattan School of Music. Her daughter Sarah was born on 17 May 1926 and died on 30 January 2010 in Revivim,
- 6 Romantic Passion: Strong physical and emotional attraction ; Seems to be the most important in most partnerships, and why we have so many divorces, too. Example with Golda Meir.
- 7. Romantic Passion plus: Strong physical and emotional attraction combined with devotion or tenderness toward a partner.
Resource:
Harvard Medical School
Golda, autobiography,
Wikipedia
https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/publications-archive/brain/love-brain
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