London - From Plato and Shakespeare to Taylor Swift, for millenia philosophers and artists have grappled with what love is, and why the heady, all-consuming feeling is like no other.
Meanwhile, scientists have taken a more clinical approach to boiling down the feeling to a swish of chemicals in your body.
But one thing is clear: love is highly complex, be it reciprocated or unrequited.
Adding to the debate is a thread on the question website Quora, where users have been invited to explore the idea of the “most disturbing truth about love”.
Many quoted authors and thinkers, while others expressed their own thoughts. Here we explore the most interesting suggestions.
Many users took a bleak view of love, highlighting the pain it causes and while trying to understand why it withers.
User Rahul Sinha quoted Anais Nin, an erotic writer active at the turn of the 20th century, who argued that love “dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source”. “It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals.
“It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
Hemanth Venkatesh, another Quora member, borrowed from pop culture by quoting Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins: “And one day, you catch yourself wishing the person you loved had never existed... so you’d be spared your pain.”
Alejandro Cabellero simply quoted Woody Allen’s 1975 film Love and Death: “To love is to suffer.”
Continuing a similarly grey train of thought, Quora user Adam Taha surmised that love is disturbing because “it’s not a choice”.
“By that, I mean every person has a map in their mind of what they desire, what they want and then there is you.
“So the disturbing thing about love is... You can love someone, but they may not love you back. They cannot see what you see and no matter how you explain, what you do, it won’t be enough,” he said.
Quora member David Farr, however, said unconscious self-sacrifice is what troubles him the most about the feeling.
“The most disturbing truth about love, true love, is the realisation that you would willingly die to protect another person. Self preservation comes second to their protection.”
Building on the theme of sacrifice, Jean-Franc Cheusseau answered on the thread that giving up an “even minimal” portion of your freedom is what makes love disturbing. “Whether it’s worth it or not it depends on you, your partner and the background in which you’re involved.”
The Quora users are not alone in pondering the nature of love.
In a 2009 Nature journal essay, Larry Young, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre at Emory University in Atlanta, relayed how love comes down to chemical reactions.
He cited various studies that indicated how scientists may soon be able to pinpoint the feeling of “love” to a biochemical chain of events.
More recently, scientists have attempted to show how love affects the brain by using MRI scanning techniques.
A team at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei studied the brains of men and women who had said they were in love, and compared the results to those who had fallen out or had never been in love. To carry out the tests, scientists showed participants photos of romantic partners.
The study revealed that love involves a dozen areas of the brain, including those linked to reward motivation, emotion and social functioning. Researchers hope the results will “shed light on the underlying neurophysiological mechanism” of love. A treatment to cure heartbreak, however, has not yet been developed.
The Independent