What is this thing called love? This simple question begs for an answer. Love is ecstasy and torment, freedom and slavery. Love makes the world go round. The reason being that love is life’s most intense feeling and love is mushy. Love cannot be charted or measured. Anger and fear have a definite roll in human survival: fighting or running. Love does not. We have always been influenced by love in our culture. It is a dominant theme in music, television, films, novels and magazines. It is a commercial bliss. Love is still in the air. Among the things that anthropologists tended to do in the past was ask questions about the courtship and marriage rituals. This turned out to be the wrong way of going about things. In many cultures, love and marriage do not go together. Weddings can have all the romance of corporate mergers, signed and sealed for the family or territorial interests. That we are all scientifically fated to love by our genes and chemicals. A lot of people would just as soon to not want to know. No one knows exactly how to place this mysterious emotion. It comes in many shapes and forms and different people and cultures celebrate it in different ways. The more we try to delve into the puzzling depths of love, the more mysterious it is bound to appear.

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