I had an interesting exchange with a high school friend of mine about the difference between "love" (in the sense of romance) and "just friendship". In her extreme geekiness (come on, don’t act surprised, she and I did quiz bowl in high school after all!), she used a chemistry analogy about chemical bonds to try to describe the difference!
To misappropriate another scientific example, my "philosophy of love" sees love as a living reaction much like your immune system.
Your immune system is good at fighting off infection, because it responds pretty non-specifically to a wide range of general indicators of infection (like LPS or double-stranded RNA). That non-specific, general response is, in my mind, friendship: not super-strong (I don’t think most people think of their friends with the same intensity that they do their lover or crush), not super-specific (people oftentimes have many friends, but only a handful of loves), but doesn’t "click" with every thing under the sun (there are some people who, no matter how nice, you’ll just never be good friends with).
But your immune system only truly gets fired up when you have a combination of those general, non-specific/friendship-like reactions in addition to a specific response to a specific disease. In biology, that something is an antigen, but in my analogy for love it’s that extra something in romance which takes it beyond "just friends". And what it is can vary — just as your immune system can get fired up for all sorts of germs, your "romantic side" can get fired up by multiple people.
So, what happens when the love in a relationship dies? Well, some examples of “love” are nothing more than brief love affairs/crushes — those burn out quickly much as a quick infection would quickly spike an immune response, like the swelling that happens right after you get a cut. These die down pretty rapidly. Other relationship/immune responses take longer to fizzle — and those would be the harder-to-fight germs which cause illnesses that require your immune system to be working hard, non-stop for a long period of time.
And what about that special love that doesn’t die out? The kind that ends in a wedding ceremony and two kids and a picket fence? There are several ways to think about it from an immunological perspective, but I think the best description would be malaria. With certain strains of malaria, if you happen to survive the first couple of attacks, the disease forms a relationship with your body whereby you never get to fully get rid of it, and it periodically comes back (an anniversary of a first date? wedding date?) in full force.
Not exactly the most romantic analogy I’ve ever come up with (and probably not something to use on a first date), but I think it works pretty well.
Image credit (heart candy), Image Credit (birds), Image Credit (malaria)
