![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Two weeks ago I have accidentally heard that Valentine's Day is near and, after checking Wikipedia, found out it’s celebrated on February 14. The holiday is associated in my mind with couples, hearts, sickly cute puppies, presents and MSN articles "How to survive Valentine's Day without a sweetie." (Amanda tears one of them apart in “How to feel slightly less pathetic”. Just change “winter holidays” for “Valentine’s day” and enjoy. I couldn’t stop laughing!) No doubt, articles on those topics were present in abundance everywhere you looked on Internet, some of them even pretty good.
For my post I tried to do something (at least slightly) different and offer you the best links I have stumbled upon during the last year, dealing in funny, sweet (in a good, not sickly-sweet way, don’t worry), scientific and, most important, original way with different kinds of love.
I want to start with my most favorite quote about love by Leo Tolstoy (not sure about that, I only saw it in one place on Internet):
"It always seems to us that we're loved for our goodness. And we don't understand that we're loved since the people, who love us, are good".
Making you smile.
Love according to 4-8 year olds! - A group of professional people posed the question "What does love mean?” to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds. The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined.
My favorites include:
"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen," Bobby - age 5
"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth." Billy - age 4
"I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones." Lauren - age 4
Do you remember love? (Mainly for dog lovers) James Jacobson wrote this poem and put it in a downloadable PDF as a tribute to
Scientific
Wildly in love is a very nice PowerPoint presentation about love in the animal world. I specially liked and was surprised by the example of Burying Beetles.
Young Love is an article in Time magazine, talking about how we develop the ability to love and the style in which we do it.
Hug the Monkey is “a blog about oxytocin, the hormone that makes us love, trust and mate -- and how we can learn to harness it for happiness. As I write my book about oxytocin, I publish interesting snippets from my research.”
I specially liked the part of her post How Much Does Breaking Up Hurt?, in which she touched on the chemical difference between romantic passion and committed, long-term love.
Following one of the links from this blog, I found a link to one research, Adding Insult to Injury [PDF], in which "Geoff MacDonald, Rachall Kingsbury and Stephanie Shaw of the
And showing you the way we're bombarded by the pseudo-scientific:
I heard about Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus on Internet, took it from the library's shelf and, after reading a couple of pages from the middle, quickly put it back. Imo, nowadays too many horribly inadequate "self-help" books get promoted as The Biological Truth. Thesaurus even defines "self-help" as "psychobabble"!
In John Gray's Interview in Yahoo! Internet Life and The Rebuttal From Uranus (isn't the name great?) he critically reviews "the enormously popular (as puzzling as that may be)" book by HarperCollins.
And finally I want to give my flist a virtual present. To find your flowers, just click on the black screen.
