Romantic Passion

Rating:
Summary: Excellent food for thought (maybe chocolate?)
Review: Many people would never even think of trying to understand romantic love from a scientific perspective, much less a cross-cultural one. This is one that makes you think about something we take for granted, which is a mark of a great book. It is made for the academic reader, but the subject matter is something that most people could really get into. I wish I had read this when I was young and impressionable. But because it is charting new ground, the authors had very little to work from. As a consequence, they had to fall back on psychological studies that are flawed in their assumptions. But nonetheless, even the two articles written by psychologists were fascinating, if speculative in places. I have penciled-in comments on almost every page! It points directions for new ways of thinking about not only romantic love but other human experiences, and makes you wonder about your assumptions. Hopefully anthropologists will be inspired by this book to examine this aspect of the human condition they have mostly neglected. And more important, hopefully others will read this and see that all is not as we think. I came away from this book with a better understanding of my own feelings, as well as how they fit in with the rest of the human race.