The Chemistry of Love, Pt. 2

Unrequited Love,
bronze sculpture by David Kraisler

Romantic love can be intense, irrational, and enduring, all at the same time. Love stories tend to focus on that intense and irrational period of attraction and the compelling need that leads to the commitment we expect in a romance novel.

While the happy-ever-after ending is a hallmark of the romance genre, there are treasured love stories that don't end that way. Gone with the Wind, for example, or Romeo and Juliet. But the intensity and irrationality are usually present in one form or another. They keep the pages turning.

Helen Fisher, scientist and expert in the study of romantic love, tells of a ruler (died 760 a.d. in Tikal, Guatemala) who built a temple to be his tomb and across from it, another for his beloved wife. The Mayans, like the creators of Stonehenge and so many other ancient builders, were experts in the science of astronomy.

And so it is that every year at the spring and autumn equinoxes, as the sun rises behind the ruler's temple, it casts a shadow over the tomb of his wife. And as the sun sets behind her temple, its shadow bathes his temple. In this symbolic and utterly romantic way, each lover continues, through the centuries, to touch the other.

Fisher also offers an example of passionate and unrequited love, calling this poem at least the equivalent of the most powerful poetic expressions of romantic love in history. Whatever you may think of that evaluation, there is no mistaking the cry of a broken heart for a love that is not to be. It was written in 1896 by an anonymous indigenous native of Southern Alaska at the departure of a missionary.

Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you
Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you
Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you
Consumed by fire with my love for you.

I remember what you said to me
I am thinking of your love for me
I am torn by your love for me
Pain and more pain
Where are you going with my love?

I am told you will go from here
I am told you will leave me here
My body is torn with grief
Remember what I said, my love
Goodbye, my love. Goodbye.

Fisher reports that anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They have never found a society without it.