For love is as strong as death. Its passions are as cruel as the grave And its flashes of fire are the very flame of God. The Song of Songs (c. 900–300 B.C.E.) “There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”1 This magic that Homer sang of in The Iliad has started wars, sired dynasties, toppled kingdoms, and generated some of the world’s finest literature and art. People sing for love, work for love, kill for love, live for love, and die for love. What causes this sorcery? As you know, I have come to believe that romantic love is a universal human feeling, produced by specific chemicals and networks in the brain. But exactly which ones? Determined to shed some light on this magic that can make the sanest man go mad, I launched a multipart project in 1996 to collect scientific data on the chemistry and brain circuitry of romantic love. I assumed that many chemicals must be involved in one way or another.
