It’s neurology and anatomy and hormones, inside the skull and below the belt. It’s soaring music and glowing art. It’s intimately personal and cosmically spiritual. It’s sensual pleasure. It’s high-minded sacrifice. It’s the survival of our species. And it’ll be the death of ya.
In 1929, the great American songwriter Cole Porter was only the latest to pose the riddle: “What is this thing called love?”
Seems like it’s everything. Who isn’t yearning for it, seeking it, maintaining or repairing it, missing it or mourning it? Whose life hasn’t been raised to glory or dropped to despair and twisted into a pretzel by it?
Much of the world has dedicated Valentine’s Day to celebrating the infinite permutations of one little four-letter word. The Columbian asked the experts: What is love?
Does love make a marriage? Historically, not so much. Whether you were an aristocrat with an estate or a peasant with a hut, tying the knot has long been a mostly strategic matter of combining assets and managing inheritance.
“Marriage was for the purpose of producing heirs, so that property could be smoothly transferred from one generation to the next,” said Sue Peabody, professor of history at Washington State University Vancouver. “Among the aristocracy then, it was more or less normal for a marriage to be ‘loveless’ and for men, and even some women, to take lovers outside the marriage.”