What Love (Really) Is "Love enters your life pleasantly. Someone takes on a special meaning. You suddenly feel a sparkle of interest in somebody else, an interest fed by the image of returned feeling. Maybe the eyes lock. The beginning is a transformation that is sometimes so distinct that the French use the term coup de foudre, or thunderbolt - a stat of consciousness that, if experienced for the first time, is utterly unlike anything else that has ever happened."

When romantic love errupts, the signs are unmistakeable. Suddenly, you feel completely alive and whole. Life takes on a rosy magical glow. When you pause for a moment. you notice that the grass is greener, the sky is bluer. You understand when people say "I feel like I can walk on air", or "I feel as if don't need to eat."

When that special person enters the room, your eyes and heart light up, you feel a growing feeling of joy inside. … you feel irationally exhuberant . You feel as if that person is almost a part of you and "together, we can conquer the world."

At the same time, if this newfound feeling is not immediately reciprocated, you feel the pain of anxiety. If it is rejected - desolation.

Observers have consistently noticed this bipolar alteration (or potential alteration) of the stat of love. One moment can be elated, the next thoroughly depressed. among college students, for example, one survey found that fully 42% had, at one time or another, been depressed about a love affair.

What is it that errupts so suddenly, as if from nowhere, bringing both joy and pain, Elation and depression? What psycho-physical (mind-body) system inside us could act so powerfully as to uterly transform the quality of our conscious experience?

The facts about the true source of love are only now emerging. Until virtually the final years of the last century, both academic and practicing psychologists had concentrated almost exclusively on everythng that could possibly go wrong with the human psyche. This is not surprising given that clinicians earn their living by treating problems, and academic research grants depend equally on finding solutions to "illnesses". As Martin Seligman wrote, "Psyschology concentrates largely on repairing damage withn a disease model of human functioning" (American Psychologist, January 2000).

It has only been in the last few years that any credence has been given to the fact that the human psychophysical machine has a natural propensity not for disease and breakdown, but a natural capacity, in fact an overwhelming ongoing inclination to manufacture and maintain an acceptable level of happiness, wellbeing, life-satisfaction, in our daily lives.

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