three kinds of love

A while ago my favourite professional blogger, Sam De Brito, quoted a theory about how there are three types of love based on different sorts of brain chemicals:

http://blogs.smh.com.au/lifestyle/allmenareliars/archives/2007/09/is_prozac_killing_romantic_lov.html

Here's the relevant quote from Anthropologist Helen Fisher:

'"I believe that homo sapiens has evolved (at least) three primary, distinct yet overlapping neural systems for reproduction. The sex drive evolved to motivate ancestral men and women to seek sexual union with a range of partners; romantic love evolved to enable them to focus their courtship energy on a preferred mate, thereby conserving mating time and energy; attachment evolved to enable them to rear a child through infancy together," she said.'

I Googled Dr Fisher and found her web site and synopses of her books. Given my propensity to start any philosophical speculation by finding out the relevant neurophysiological facts, I'm willing to give her ideas a run, and I have at least one philosopher friend who says he's been using her taxonomy to understand his own experiences for a few years now, with great success.

Romanic love is supposed to be an excess of dopamine, and she describes it as more of a drive than an emotion.

So which one is this? An oceany feeling all inside. All oceany. It makes me stop and stare blankly for minutes at a time. I'm pretty sure it's some kind of opiate, and I definitely have a craving to feel it more and more the more I do, but it's not a druggy kind of opiate, doesn't have that underlying menacing buzz to it like beer or excessive tiredness or the post-operative morphine injections I've had in the hospital on occasion. I think it does impair the cognitive faculties, because I'm not even believing that my moving away could do anything to change it. And while stopping and staring I sort of don't get my taxes done, which is my main task tonight.

I'm not sure which one it is, and I don't really care. It started during the week of wanting things, and I just let it start, and that was when I was living in the now and didn't know if I'd move or not, and so it exists in the now.

Some kind of benign opiate, altering cognition but not resulting in sinister drugginess, generating cravings but hopefully not dependancy, and administered via email.