By Dennis Nealon, Harvard Medical School, Image: Benjavisa/Getty Images, February 10, 2025
What research has gleaned about the most elusive of human experiences
Love has been the source of ceaseless fascination since antiquity. Artists have tried to capture its beauty and darkness in books, paintings, and songs. Behavioral scientists have explored love as a social ritual, psychologists have studied its pathological manifestations, and evolutionary biologists have sought to define it as a drive linked to the very survival of our species.
What are some of the most tantalizing insights that science has gleaned about a behavior that so intensely captivates our collective imagination but continues to defy understanding?
For starters, both romantic and nonromantic love appear to be essential to our overall well-being and, indeed, survival, according to Richard S. Schwartz, HMS associate professor of psychiatry, part-time, at McLean Hospital, and Jacqueline Olds, HMS associate professor of psychiatry, part-time, at Massachusetts General Hospital. Schwartz and Olds, who have been married to each other for nearly five decades, study how love evolves and how it can fall apart.
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