EXTRA LISTENING – WHAT IS LOVE- KEY
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2. B
3. A
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5. B
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2. TRANSCRIPT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sY4rhvB9LE
3. What is love? Seriously, though, what is it? What is love? A verb? A noun? A universal truth? An ideal? A
common thread of all religions? A cult? A neurological phenomenon? There's no shortage of answers. Some
are all-encompassing. It conquers all. It's all you need. It's all there is. These are all comparisons, though,
ways of defining it by contrast, by saying it's more important than all other things, but is it? Sure, love
matters more than your standard turkey sandwich, but does it matter more than shelter? Or sanity? Or an
exceptional turkey sandwich? No matter your answer, you're just ranking it, not defining it.
4. Another challenge to defining love is we often try to do so while falling into it or out of it. Would you trust
someone who just won the lottery to accurately define the concept of currency? Or, I don't know, ask a guy
to define bears while he's fending them off? Or is romance not like winning the lottery? Are break ups not like
bear attacks? Bad comparisons? That's my point. I'm not thinking right because I'm in love, so ha! Taking a
step back, or taking a cold shower, whatever, love is potentially the most intensely thought about thing in all
of human history. And despite centuries upon centuries of obsession, it still overwhelms us. Some say it's a
feeling, a magical emotion, a feeling for someone like you've never felt before. But feelings are fluid, not very
concrete foundation for a definition. Sometimes you hate the person you love. Plus, come on, you've felt
feelings like it before, sort of in miniature.
5. Your relationships with your family shape your relationships with partners. And your love for your partner may
be in its own dynamic relationship, healthy or totally weird, with the love of your parents and siblings. Love is
also a set of behaviors we associate with the feeling: Holding hands, kissing, hugging, public displays of
affection, dating, marriage, having kids, or just sex. But these loving actions can be subjective or culturally
relative. You may love or be someone who can't have kids or doesn't want to, who believes in marriage but
also in divorce, who's from a culture where people don't really date the way we think of dating, or who just
doesn't want to make out on the bus. But if love is a thing that we can define, then how can it mean opposite
things for so many people? So, maybe love's just all in your head, a personal mystery winding through your
neural pathways and lighting up pleasing, natural rewards in your nervous system. Perhaps these rewards are
addictive. Perhaps love is a temporary or permanent addiction to a person, just like a person can be addicted
to a drug. I don't mean to be edgy like some pop song. Evidence shows that chemicals in your brain
stimulated by another person can make you develop a habit for that person. The person comes to satisfy a
physiological craving, and you want more. But then sometimes, slowly or suddenly, you don't. You've fallen
out of love, become unaddicted, like a spell.
6. What happened? Does one develop a tolerance or hit a limit? Why do some lovers stay addicted to each other
their entire lives? Perhaps to create new lives, to proliferate their species? Maybe love is just human DNA's
optimal method for bringing about its own replication. There are evolutionary arguments regarding every
human mating behavior, from how we display ourselves to potential mates, to how we treat each other in
relationships, to how we raise kids. Thus, some argue that the feeling you think you feel in yo