WHAT IS LOVE ?

Artists, writers, philosophers, and psychologists have been attempting to understand love for as long as people have been feeling it. And while the debate over its precise definition continues to rage on, like art, most people seem able to recognize it when they see it (feeling it themselves). What's most interesting about love, however, is that how it feels seems to vary not just with the phase of the relationship in which it's felt, but with the phase of life in which the feeler finds themselves when they feel it...
    Most of us currently involved in long-term romantic relationships remember the obsessive nature of what we felt during our relationship's early stages, a love that caused all other concerns to recede (sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically) into the background of our lives. We remember just how fun, pleasurable, intoxicating, and all the other good things the songs all say love is quite vividly. But most of us involved in stable romantic relationships now have also experienced romantic relationships in the past that failed and remember too how much embarrassment, heartbreak, angst, and every other bad thing the other songs say love is, too. To have love yanked out from under us in the early stages of a relationship is dramatic and devastating, often leading to suffering far out of proportion to the actual event. For all sorts of reasons, when we lose a love that's freshly minted we often feel like our lives are falling apart and that we'll never be happy again...