**TL;DR: Being 'in love' is just a chemical reaction in the brain.** According to science, the feeling of 'love' is not scientifically measurable, as it is just a mixture of hormones. • According to [Science In the News] (https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/), romantic love can be broken down into three categories: lust, attraction and attachment. Out of these three categories, a mixture of hormones are released to create these feelings. • Lust is caused by testosterone and estrogen, attraction is caused by dopamine, norepinephrine and sereotonin, and attachment is caused by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. • Therefore, the emotional state of being in love does exist, but it is actually scientifically explained through the chemicals in our brains!

**TL;DR - Love may be a chemical reaction in the brain, but without the higher cognitive functionalities of thinking and reflection, I don't think the "love" we mean when we talk about "loving" someone--at least romantically-- would exist.** - Lust, attraction, and attachment may all be chemically derived, but the idea of loving someone deeply in the sense that we tend to mean requires more than just purely/distinctly chemical processes in the brain; it requires cognitive reflection, thinking about our own states of thinking, and feeling something _about_ what we feel rather than just the single level of feeling created directly by a chemical process. - Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of love gives us an interesting example. In [_Being and Nothingness_](https://www.routledge.com/Being-and-Nothingness-An-Essay-in-Phenomenological-Ontology/Sartre/p/book/9780367461409), Sartre manifests two major components towards his existential theories: "Being-in-itself" and "being-for-itself". A preliminary definition of "being-in-itself" could be the notion of being without the prospect of freedom to choose and assess; and a preliminary definition of "being-for-itself" could be the idea of being _with_ the prospect of freedom to choose and assess. The latter creates an "us" that is conscious and has the ability to choose, the freedom to continually remake and reassess, and the capacity to look at things and more or less freely interpret what they are. In doing these things, "we" become something that can bring Nothingness into the world, thereby negating what we are _not_ and seeing what we are in comparison to _others_. - Sartre then dedicates time to the existential facets of what he calls "concrete relations with others," which includes love. For him, love is a continual struggle between two beings-for-themselves, each attempting to regain their own sense of self (more accurately, to regain their Being, a term Sartre uses to mean a distinctly objective, rather than subjective, state of existence) when the other negates that selfhood by making them into an object. - Even though love is, for Sartre, a struggle against an objectification of sorts (which might make it seem that the "reflection" I've argued to be required for love is slightly more absent than increasingly present, if anything), there is still necessary in all of this the continual rising of new dimensions of Being that can reflexively _reflect_ on their states, that can start to see themselves as objects _outside of themselves_, in another's eyes. This is enough to convince me that a lot of processing and reflection is required for "love" to exist, at least in the most romantic of senses.

**Essentially - yes, love is biological. It is a feeling, produced by hormones in the body.** - Human beings are essentially social animals. The way we navigate social relationships is largely down to [cognitive and physiological processes in the body] (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537144/). - Scientists say that 'love' can be divided into [3 elements] (https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/) that correspond to the release of different hormones. 1. Lust - testosterone and estrogen 2. Attraction - dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin 3. Attachment - oxytocin and vasopressin - As you might assume, the attachment reaction is the most central factor in a love connection/long term relationship. Unlike the other two factors, the release of attachment hormones also occurs in situations like [parent-child relationships] (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230500/). - The release of hormones like dopamine and their withdrawal also occurs in compulsive gambling or shopping. In this way, [love on a chemical level] (https://www.sapiens.org/biology/biological-anthropology-love/) is a kind of addiction to another human being. - Of course, the [cultural context] (https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-12/does-west-have-monopoly-romantic-love) in which humans operate also has its impact. But that is more to do with how the 'love' experience is expressed. The actual feeling itself is purely biological.