Valentine’s Day is next week. And that means love is in the air. Or maybe in the pheromones. That’s one finding of a recent Time magazine cover story, “The Science of Romance: Why We Need Love to Survive.” Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and a romance researcher, put it this way to Time: “People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms for love. They live for love, die for love, kill for love. It can be stronger than the drive to stay alive.” The question is, why? This isn’t just about reproducing. We’ve all heard that men “look” for women with hourglass figures because it signals fertility. Women “look” for men with broad shoulders for the same reason. “Every living human is a descendant of a long line of successful maters,” says David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Chicago Sun-Times
Love’s Got Plenty To Do With Living
(Feb. 8)
