Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.

　　如果你爱一个人，随遇而安，让她自由的飞，让她找到自己的真爱，你也不会有遗憾．至少你曾经努力过．你可以在心里默默的祝福她们．如果最后她还是回到你身边，那缘分就是天注定。 

The internal chemical tempest that draws us together hits Category 5 when sex gets involved. If it's easy for a glance to become a kiss and a kiss to become much more, that's because your system is trip-wired to make it hard to turn back once you're aroused. That the kiss is the first snare is no accident.

Kissing magnifies certain attraction signals--if only as a result of proximity. Scent is amplified up close, as are sounds and breaths and other cues. And none of that begins to touch the tactile experience that was entirely lacking until intimate contact was made. "At the moment of a kiss, there's a rich and complicated exchange of postural, physical and chemical information," says Gallup. "There are hardwired mechanisms that process all this."

What's more, every kiss may also carry [certain chemical reactions], slipped in by the male. Though testosterone is found in higher concentrations in men than in women, it is present in both genders and is critical in maintaining arousal states. Traces of testosterone make it into men's saliva, particularly among men who have high blood levels of the hormone to start with, and it's possible that a lot of kissing over a long period may be a way to pass some of that natural aphrodisiac to the woman, increasing her arousal and making her more receptive to even greater intimacy.

If we've succeeded in becoming such efficient reproductive machines--equipped with both a generous appetite for mates and a cool ability to screen them for genetic qualities--why muddy things up with romance? For one thing, we may not be able to help it. Just being attracted to someone doesn't mean that that person is attracted back, and few things drive us crazier than wanting something we may not get.

The problem with romance is that it doesn't always deliver the goods. For all the joy it promises, it can also play us for fools, particularly when it convinces us that we've found the right person, only to upend our expectations later. Adrenaline is one way of [deceiving us into thinking we have found the right mate]. Any overwhelming emotional experience that ratchets up your sensory system can distort your perceptions, persuading you to take a chance on someone you should avoid.

Psychologist Arthur Aron of the State University of New York at Stony Brook says people who meet during a crisis--an emergency landing of their airplane, say--may be much more inclined to believe they've found the person meant for them. "It's not that we fall in love with such people because they're immensely attractive," he says. "It's that they seem immensely attractive because we've fallen in love with them."

Happily, romance needn't come to ruin. Even irrational animals like ourselves would have quit trying if the bet didn't pay off sometimes. The eventual goal of any couple is to pass beyond the thrill of early love--and into what's known as companionate love. That's the coffee-and-Sunday-paper phase, the board-games-when-it's-raining phase, and the fact is, there's not a lick of excitement about it. But that, for better or worse, is adaptive too. If partners are going to stay together for the years of care that children require, they need a love that bonds them to each other but without the passion that would be a distraction. As early humans relied more on their brainpower to survive--and the dependency period of babies lengthened to allow for the necessary learning--companionate bonding probably became more pronounced.

That's not to say that people can't stay in love or that those couples who say they still feel romantic after years of being together are imagining things. Aron has conducted studies of some of those stubbornly loving pairs, and initial results show that their brains indeed look very much like those of people newly in love, with all the right regions lighting up in all the right ways. "We wondered if they were really feeling these things," Aron says. "But it looks like this is really happening."

These people, however, are the exceptions, and nearly all relationships must settle and cool. That's a hard truth, but it's a comforting one too. Long for the heat of early love if you want, but you'd have to pay for it with the solidity you've built over the years. "You've got to make a transition to a stabler state," says Barry McCarthy, a psychologist and sex therapist based in Washington. If love can be mundane, that's because sometimes it's meant to be.

Calling something like love mundane, of course, is true only as far as it goes. Survival of a species is a ruthless and reductionist matter, but if staying alive were truly all it was about, might we not have arrived at ways to do it without joy--as we could have developed language without literature, rhythm without song, movement without dance? Romance may be nothing more than reproductive filigree, a bit of decoration that makes us want to perpetuate the species and ensures that we do it right. But nothing could convince a person in love that there isn't something more at work--and the fact is, none of us would want to be convinced. That's a nut science may never fully crack.

                

Life without love is a broken-hearted melody. Not a bouncy tune at all.
Then again, perhaps it is just a low Adversity Quotient.
Research shows that under stress, we often distort our current reality by such habits as judgmental self-talk, pessimistic explanations, a victim stance, and "poor me" stories.  So maybe I am really not a loser and a sociopath after all. Maybe I simply need to develop better resilience to the cruel tricks of fate... Is it too late?

"Attention is the most basic form of love; through it we bless and are blessed." - John Tarrant

"We love because it's the only true adventure." - Nikki Giovanni

"Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away." - Dorothy Parker

"Love is friendship set on fire." - unknown

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." - Goethe

"To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia." - H.L. Mencken

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." - Erica Jong

"Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Maybe love is like luck. You have to go all the way to find it." - Robert Mitchum

"Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside." - Margaret Walker

"Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale... Love loves; this is its nature." - Howard Thurman

"Love is like war: Easy to begin but hard to end." - Anonymous

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"Where love is, no room is too small." - Talmud

"Loves makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." - Zora Neale Hurston

"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." - Mark Twain

"To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." - Karen Sunde

"A love song is just a caress set to music." - Sigmund Romberg

"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." - Peter Ustinov

"Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever." - unknown

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." - Erich Fromm

"In the final analysis, love is the only reflection of man's worth." - Bill Wundram, Iowa Quad Cities Times

"Love doesn't make the world go round, love is what makes the ride worthwhile." - Elizabeth Browning

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down."
- Woody Allen