All You Need Is Biology?

For the sake of argument, I will be writing from the perspective that love and relationships are based on chemistry and biology. Personally, I believe love is beyond the realm of science even though there are some scientific components related to loving feelings (hormones, pheromones, etc.). The articles we read this week are asking us to adopt the viewpoint that love and relationships are formed because of chemical and biological aspects of life.

If love were solely a matter of chemistry and biology, we as humans would not care about finding our “true” love or our “soul mate”. We would view love as a situation “for the moment”, we would date others without intention of marriage or life-long monogamy. We would view physical attraction as a type of natural order and sexual intercourse would be mostly for procreation. Having children would only be for populating the Earth, not for the joy and happiness that a child brings to a family. Courtship would only be for obtaining another mate, not for finding a life-long partner.

Changes in our beliefs about love would not only affect our behavior but it would drastically affect our institution of marriage. Marriage would be obsolete – why get married if biology dictates our lives and biology tells us to have many partners? Living in a world without marriage is a hard concept to wrap my brain around and it almost seems like a scary though. The institution of marriage is so deep-seeded in to our culture and is one the strongest traditions in the United States. Without marriage, our current beliefs about love and relationships would become naïve.

Our culture would observe a drastic change if love and relationships were matters of chemistry and biology. We are a culture that values love – so much so that almost every single song ever made has to do with some type of love (and of those, mostly romantic love). My generation values love as the one thing that can make you truly happy; we’re seeing more and more younger couples getting married without having a set career or plan in life because “love it all that matters”. If our beliefs about love changed, our entire culture would change.

         I believe it would a sad world if we believed that love was biologically based. Everything would be very black and white or right and wrong. If everyone gave up on finding their true love, I think a lot of us would feel empty and that is something that science cannot explain.