LOL.. hold on i will see if i can pull up..
EDIT: there is alot of good stuff in this chapter and this book and I would take a look anyone who has a little time.. but I pulled this for relavence.. page 124
"What the troubadours did give us is a particular myth of “true” love—the
idea that real love burns brightly and passionately, and then it just keeps on
burning until death, and then it just keeps on burning after death as the
lovers are reunited in heaven. This myth seems to have grown and diffused
in modern times into a set of interrelated ideas about love and marriage. As
I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is
passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry
that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not
true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever.
You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older
than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and
it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff
at it. (It’s not just Hollywood that perpetrates the myth; Bollywood, the Indian film industry, is even more romanticized.)"
But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible.
To see this, and to save the dignity of love, you have to understand the difference between two kinds of love: passionate and companionate. According to the love researchers Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster, passionate
love is a “wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation
and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of
feelings.”36 Passionate love is the love you fall into. It is what happens
when Cupid’s golden arrow hits your heart, and, in an instant, the world
around you is transformed. You crave union with your beloved. You want,
somehow, to crawl into each other. This is the urge that Plato captured in
The Symposium, in which Aristophanes’ toast to love is a myth about its origins. Aristophanes says that people originally had four legs, four arms, and
two faces, but one day the gods felt threatened by the power and arrogance
of human beings and decided to cut them in half. Ever since that day,
people have wandered the world searching for their other halves. (Some
people originally had two male faces, some two female, and the rest a male
and a female, thereby explaining the diversity of sexual orientation.) As
proof, Aristophanes asks us to imagine that Hephaestus (the god of fire
and hence of blacksmiths) were to come upon two lovers as they lay together in an embrace, and say to them:
What is it you human beings really want from each other? . . . Is this
your heart’s desire, then—for the two of you to become parts of the same
whole, as near as can be, and never to separate, day or night? Because if
that’s your desire, I’d like to weld you together and join you into something that is naturally whole, so that the two of you are made into one.
Then the two of you would share one life, as long as you lived, because
you would be one being, and by the same token, when you died, you
would be one and not two in Hades, having died a single death. Look at
your love, and see if this is what you desire.37
Aristophanes says that no lovers would turn down such an offer.
Berscheid and Walster define companionate love, in contrast, as “the
affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.”38
Companionate love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely upon,
care for, and trust each other. If the metaphor for passionate love is fire,
the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and
gradually binding two people together. The contrast of wild and calm forms
of love has occurred to people in many cultures. As a woman in a huntergatherer tribe in Namibia put it: “When two people come together their
hearts are on fire and their passion is very great. After a while, the fire cools
and that’s how it stays.”39
Passionate love is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy).40 It’s no wonder: Passionate love
alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine.41Any experience that feels intensely good
releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that
artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of
addiction. If you take cocaine once a month, you won’t become addicted, but
if you take it every day, you will. No drug can keep you continuously high.
The brain reacts to a chronic surplus of dopamine, develops neurochemical
reactions that oppose it, and restores its own equilibrium. At that point, tolerance has set in, and when the drug is withdrawn, the brain is unbalanced in
the opposite direction: pain, lethargy, and despair follow withdrawal from cocaine or from passionate love.
So if passionate love is a drug—literally a drug—it has to wear off eventually. Nobody can stay high forever (although if you find passionate love in
a long-distance relationship, it’s like taking cocaine once a month; the drug
can retain its potency because of your suffering between doses). If passionate love is allowed to run its joyous course, there must come a day when it
weakens. One of the lovers usually feels the change first. It’s like waking
up from a shared dream to see your sleeping partner drooling. In those moments of returning sanity, the lover may see flaws and defects to which she
was blind before. The beloved falls off the pedestal, and then, because our
minds are so sensitive to changes, her change in feeling can take on exaggerated importance. “Oh, my God,” she thinks, “the magic has worn off—
I’m not in love with him anymore.” If she subscribes to the myth of true
love, she might even consider breaking up with him. After all, if the magic
ended, it can’t be true love. But if she does end the relationship, she might
be making a mistake.