Anthropologist Helen Fisher devoted many years to studying the phenomenon of love and came to the conclusion that regardless of nationality, culture, gender, the way we love unites us.
Love is a strange feeling. If it is, then we simply cannot imagine how to live without it. Because life without love has neither taste nor smell — like distilled water. If it is not there, we can hardly imagine what it is about and why all these senseless tears, expectations and other nonsense. Love separates people. The lover is so focused on the object of his feelings that he simply drops out of society. He keeps in mind the smallest nuances of the behavior of his beloved, he cannot help but think about her. She is irreplaceable, she is the only one … And this strange feeling has been researched by anthropologist Helen Fisher for many years. She analyzed a lot of information about lovers: she made tomograms of their brains and conducted in-depth questionnaires; measured levels of dopamine and other chemicals that make us feel aroused and pleased. And Helen Fisher came to the conclusion that the feeling of love in people of different ages, gender, nationality and sexual orientation is very similar. (It turns out that even animals experience something similar.) And therefore, someone else’s experience — reflected, for example, in poetry — is able to awaken a deeply personal experience in each of us. We can share it and relive it. Talking about the chemistry of love, Fischer gives us a reason to be surprised, then to smile — and he does it with all the generosity of a brilliant expert and a charming woman.
Translation from English by Ekaterina Militskaya.
Alpina non-fiction, 320 p.