Why do we need love?

So why are we so desperate to be loved? Is it because we've been fantasizing about our dream white wedding ever since we were eight years old and played kissing catchers with bridal Barbie and Ken? Is it because we don't feel valued until someone else can truly love us - flaws, warts, hairy legs and all? Or is it because we're afraid to be alone? And do we choose to fall in love, or is it something we're simply hardwired to do? Either way, the dating industry seems to be making a motza out of exploiting our inexplicable hunger to love and be loved.

"Ten commandments of dating!", "The Street Guide to Flirting!", "How to change a man!", "The Hookup Handbook!" "How to find love in just ten days!" Argh! And while the authors of these books occasionally do a semi-respectable job of attempting to tell us how to date (and understand) the objects of our affection, the majority don't seem to deal with the more pressing issue at hand: why we are so desperate to find love. Why do we need it? What's in it for us?

The need to be loved is a physical drive no different to hunger, and comprises of three different facets: sex (which gets you out of the house and on the hunt); romantic love (which gives you those first-love giddy emotions), and attachment (long-term fulfillment). "People don't die for sex.

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." And the most unusual part of her research? It's the men that are the big love softies after all! "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."
So back to why we need love.

Fear of loneliness
"I believe that as many women over thirty marry out of being alone someday - not necessarily now but some day, as for love of or compatibility with a particular man.
My Single Female Friend (who by the way is a blonde bombshell who recently got burnt by a bona fide bad boy), is testament to Gurley Brown's hypothesis as she recently declared that she desperately wants a man because, "I am just so damn lonely".
(I didn't have the heart to tell her that the stench of desperation is a bigger buzz-killer than unshaven legs and a text from an ex in the middle of sex.)
But as one blogger recently wrote in an email to me: "loneliness is unattractive," and the more lonely and desperate singletons come across, the more unattractive they'll seem.

Society tells us we do

As to why we're all so obsessed with finding love is because society tells us we need to."I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off!" (And I'm sure many women can attest to that.) 

We can't love ourselves until someone else does

Finally, while they say that we can't truly love another before we learn to love ourselves, what if that statement were the other way around? What if we truly couldn't love ourselves until someone else came along and stuck a "taken" sign on our forehead? Will we then feel like someone else can love us and therefore we can finally love ourselves? Now there's food for thought ...