Do We Need Love as Much as Sex and Food?

Feb. 14 -- Birds do it. Bees do it. But what exactly is it that we humans do? Do we choose to fall in love? The latest research asserts romantic love is not so much a swelling of emotions, but a physical drive as powerful as hunger.

One study had people who said they were in love look at pictures of their beloved as they were given brain scans. Activity in the brain's "reward system" leads researchers to conclude romantic love creates a physical drive, very different from sexual urges, that perseveres until it receives its prize, compelling lovers to yearn for one another for as long as it takes until they can be together.

The lead researcher of the study, and author of a new book, Why We Love, says scientifically, sex and romance are two different things. And what is commonly thought as the drive for love, explains anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., is actually three different desires.

"One is the sex drive that gets you out there looking for anything remotely appropriate," says Fisher. The next is "romantic love, that giddiness of first love that enables you to focus that mating energy and conserve your courtship time. And the third mating system in the brain is attachment."

Inside the Brains of Men and Women

The most powerful of the three desires may not be sex but romance, Fisher adds.

"People don't die for sex," she says. "I've at looked at poetry all over the world, even as much as 4,000 years ago. People live for love, they die for love, they sing for love, they dance for love."

While many women may be convinced men's brains are wired more powerfully for sex, Fisher says there's evidence men are also powerfully wired for romance.

"Men fall in love faster than women do, because men are so visual," she notes. "And three out of four people who kill themselves over love are men, not women."