Death cannot stop true love.

You had me at hello.

You complete me.

And so on.

The world’s libraries could be filled with nothing but books on love, and still the poets would think more needed to be said.

Dr Martha McClintock demonstrated what we perceive as falling in love is actually a sense of attraction manufactured by our brain because it has used a combination of visual and olfactory stimuli to gauge that union with the man or woman in question would produce offspring with optimized immune systems. Less star-crossed love, more evolutionary biology. This is true even of same-sex relationships, because the matching of immune systems is blind to prejudice and untroubled by concepts of gender.

We’ve all heard friends say, ‘I don’t know what she sees in him,’ or, ‘He loses his mind when he’s around her.’

The obsessive, infatuated lover is a staple of romantic poetry. In addition to manufacturing a powerful sense of attraction to help with evolutionary optimization, our brains increase the chances of mating by shutting down the regions of our brain associated with critical reasoning. Semir Zeki and his colleague John Paul Romaya found that people deeply in love experience temporary and specific loss of brain function whenever they think about their lover. Using brain-imaging techniques, Zeki and Romaya measured a significant deactivation of the frontal cortex. If we could see a person’s faults, we’d be less likely to mate with them, so our brains quite literally blind us with love.

Eventually the hormone rush wears off and the brain stops its tricks. Some people wake up one day and wonder what they ever saw in the person lying next to them. Others stay together, and blind love, that evolutionary trap, turns into something else, something profoundly real.

Love can make you blind. It can give you fleeting brain damage, it can cause pain, anguish, and suffering. But when all that is gone, you’re left with someone whose life you share. You hope you make each other better. You share experiences. You sacrifice, but each sacrifice must be repaid, or else there is imbalance and exploitation. The most powerful relationship (and always remember why I use the word powerful) is the one that is harmonious. A healthy relationship strikes a note of truth and brings equilibrium to the lives of the lovers. It is through that truth and balance that we find happiness, because without being true to ourselves and those around us, we manufacture an illusory self, and a gap is created between who we really are and who we’re pretending to be. If there is no harmony in the relationship, that gap is likely to grow, and it is this gap between the true self and the projection we manifest into the world that is the source of so much unhappiness.

Love should create no gap. It should not force you to manifest any illusion about who you really are. Love that is worthy of the word will be real and true. It will provide fuel for your generator. In ordinary times, love should heal you. It should bring you happiness. If you find yourself in extraordinary circumstances and your world requires sacrifice, make sure it brings you harmony, and through whatever it is you do for the one you love, you must ultimately find balance and that all-important power. A love that helps you be true to who you really are is the most powerful love of all.