Topic Battle

Love has generated more artistic output than any other single subject in human history. An estimated 87% of all popular music concerns itself with love in some form: its acquisition, its loss, or the complicated logistics of its maintenance. Literature from Romeo and Juliet to Pride and Prejudice to that novel your colleague insists you read has plumbed love's depths with varying degrees of success. The greeting card industry, worth approximately 31 billion dollars annually, exists solely because humans feel compelled to express romantic sentiments in rhyming couplets accompanied by illustrations of teddy bears.

Love has attracted considerable scientific attention, particularly from neurologists and biochemists eager to reduce humanity's most celebrated emotion to a series of chemical reactions. Research has identified the roles of oxytocin, dopamine, and vasopressin in pair bonding, whilst evolutionary biologists have constructed elaborate theories about love's reproductive advantages. The study of love has, however, produced relatively few practical applications beyond the pharmaceutical industry's ongoing efforts to monetise loneliness and the occasional TED talk about attachment styles.

Individual instances of love display wildly variable durability. Some partnerships endure seven decades; others barely survive the duration of a hen party in Ibiza. The neurochemical intensity of romantic love typically peaks within the first two years before either deepening into lasting attachment or evaporating entirely, leaving behind only joint Netflix accounts and unresolved arguments about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher. As a concept, however, love has persisted throughout human history, remaining remarkably consistent in its symptoms across cultures and centuries.

Love claims near-universal human experience, documented across every known culture from isolated Amazonian tribes to metropolitan Tokyo. The emotion appears hardwired into human neurology, emerging reliably regardless of upbringing, education, or explicit attempts at avoidance. Even those who claim immunity to romantic love typically display fierce attachment to family, friends, or pets, suggesting the underlying neurological machinery remains operational even when romantic applications are declined. To be human is, with vanishingly rare exceptions, to be capable of love.

Love's influence upon human behaviour constitutes nothing short of a complete neurological takeover. Under its sway, humans have abdicated thrones, forsaken fortunes, and written sonnets of such excruciating sincerity that their future selves would pay handsomely to destroy all copies. The condition activates dopamine pathways typically associated with addiction, explaining why the afflicted display classic dependency behaviours: obsessive thoughts, withdrawal symptoms upon separation, and a willingness to reorganise their entire existence around another person's schedule.