This is the first of a three-part series on love, sex, and marriage.

This column is the love column, the column dedicated to the study and appreciation of love, which will separate truth from fiction, myth from reality, and love from lust. In other words, IT’S WHAT THE VALENTINE CARD MANUFACTURERS AND FLORISTS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!

There are many different types of love: love between a man and a woman, love between a parent and a child, love between a woman and a woman, love between a man and a blow-up doll, etc. For the purposes of this article, we will concentrate solely on the love between a man and a woman.

What Philosophers Say About Love

Philosophers have struggled for centuries to understand love. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the great 19th-century philosopher, probably described love best when he said: “There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness, and please call me ‘Fred’.”1

Can there be love between a man and a woman without sexual attraction? This is a difficult question, because some people confuse sexual attraction with love, while others confuse love with sexual attraction, and vice versa.

Love is also sometimes confused with infatuation or crush. How can one tell the difference?

Love Versus Infatuation

Infatuation, or “limerence,” as it is known in the field of psychology, is a common emotion characterized by unrealistic expectations of blissful passion without positive relationship growth or development. In other words, it’s when you get all crawly in your underwear.

Love, on the other hand, although it closely resembles infatuation in the beginning, eventually becomes rooted in a realistic, genuine affection for someone who is not a god or goddess, but is a real-life human being who is in no way perfect. He may, in fact, have many imperfections. Why else, other than love, would you still keep him around, warts and all? He’s a freaking warthog!

Love is not obsessive like infatuation. You would never stalk someone that you’re in love with, although you might stalk someone you’re merely infatuated with.

Infatuation is fleeting, whereas love is marked by a commitment to each other for a lifetime, or at least two or three years, which in some marriages may seem like a lifetime, but in reality is only long enough to procreate.

Love Hurts

Love has physical effects on the human body that we are just beginning to understand – accelerated heartbeat; sweaty palms; nervous, uncontrollable twitching; upset stomach; diarrhea; and other flulike symptoms – thus the origin of the term “lovesick.” If love came in a package, it would come with a warning that love can cause serious bodily injury or even death.

Love Is a Drug

Brain scans of people who describe themselves as being “madly in love” show that love produces elevated levels of the brain chemical known as dopamine, nature’s most powerful stimulant, which gives the lover the euphoria, energy, and focus needed to pursue the love object. Dopamine, like most drugs, is addictive; thus, in effect, love is a drug, and love itself is addictive.

But this is not to be confused with sex addiction, the horrible diagnosis that has been used in recent years to save the philandering ass of many a celebrity husband. Sex addicts, such as Tiger Woods, love to have sex, but they are not addicted to love. They are only addicted to the sex, or possibly the chase and conquest involved in sex, along with the instinctive urge to spread one’s DNA across as wide and diverse a gene pool as possible, and if you’re a highly successful professional golfer who also happens to be very wealthy, we’re talking about a gene pool the size of an ocean.

Sex addicts, when caught, will often admit themselves into sex rehab clinics, where they will undergo intensive sex detox treatments by being forced to watch continuous reruns of the The View.

Sex addicts are also commonly referred to as philanderers or womanizers. For every womanizer, there are several women desiring to be womanized. Once the womanizer meets up with the woman desiring to be womanized, womanization is said to have taken place.

Love Is Crazy

“One is very crazy when in love, and when two people are in love, it gets even crazier!” – Sigmund Freud2

Brain scans show that Freud was right. Love causes increased activity in the part of the brain called the caudate nucleus, the most primitive part of the brain, often called the “reptilian brain” because it evolved in reptiles more than 65 million years ago.

These scans also demonstrate that love-crazed brains exhibit many of the same characteristics as brains suffering from major psychiatric disorders: Our perception is altered, our judgment becomes cloudy – we are, in effect, “madly in love,” and nothing can stop our doped-up, reptilianlike brains from the tantalizing urge to slither off and mate with the objects of our devotion, like the crazed buck darting across the busy highway in the middle of the night to mate with the doe in heat on the other side, who then ends up as roadkill du jour on some redneck’s dinner table.

Words of Love

Love can have many different connotations, depending on how it is used. Consider phrases like “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” (Ali MacGraw, Love Story) and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now). How can we reconcile these two conflicting usages of the word “love,” other than napalm means never having to say you’re sorry?

Love in Literature

There have been many examples of star-crossed lovers in literature, the most famous of which was Romeo and Juliet.

Many are not aware that, in Shakespeare’s original draft, the lovers were actually cross-eyed lovers who, in the end, lived happily ever after. It was Shakespeare’s wife who came up with the idea to make the lovers star-crossed. “Uncross their eyes and have them both dead at the end. Then you’ve got something!”

So the play was rewritten, the happy ending eliminated, and the lovers’ eyes straightened out, which was a tremendous relief to the stars of the play, who feared their eyes might become permanently crooked from performing, night after night, in a cross-eyed play.

Next month: SEX!

1 Nietzsche was best known for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the theme song of the 1968 hit movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.