From reading the poems, songs, and stories of people around the world, I came to believe that the capacity for romantic love is woven firmly into the fabric of the human brain. Romantic love is a universal human experience.
85 percent of the women in my survey remembered trivial things that their beloved said and did (Appendix, #46). And 83 percent of men and 90 percent of women replayed these precious episodes in their mind’s eye as they mused about their dearest (Appendix, #52).
As Freud said, “At its height, the state of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between ego and object.”
“If they turn suddenly toward us we draw back / the skin shudders wetly, finely / will we be torn into two people?”