And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Chen: "I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. The night I brought you home, I watched you roll it out." He became hooked on a sleeping mat, probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain, just like with you and me. But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them. You aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, he said, "I felt like jumping in the sky." You're up all night. You're walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly. Real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, he said, "Anything she liked, I liked." Simple. Romantic love is very simple.
You become extremely sexually possessive. You know, if you're just sleeping with somebody casually, you don't really care if they're sleeping with somebody else. But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them. I think that that is a Darwinian -- there's a Darwinian purpose to this. The whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team.
But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally. You'd much rather -- it would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etc., to tell you that they love you. The other main characteristic is motivation. The motor in your brain begins to crank, and you want thi