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Limerence at first sight

     This is an excerpt from Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness , by Frank Tallis. Also see incurable romantics .      In literature, examples of love at first sight abound. When Romeo sees Juliet for the first time, he cries: "O! She doth teach the torches to burn bright ... Did my heart love till now?" When Werther sees Lotte, he declares: "My entire soul was transfixed by her figure, her tone, her manner ... I delighted in her dark eyes ... how my entire soul was drawn to her young lips and fresh, bright cheeks ..." Nearly a hundred years later, the very same impressions are repeated by Turgenev, when the young protagonist of First Love , Vladimir, stumbles across the coquette, Zinaida: "I forgot everything; my eyes devoured the graceful figure, the lovely neck, the beautiful arms, the slightly disheveled fair hair under the white kerchief - and the half closed, perceptive eye, the lashes, the soft cheek beneath them ..."      Love at fir...

Complexity of Romantic Love

     This is an excerpt from Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts , by Victor Karandashev.      Romantic love is the complex phenomenon consisting of biological, psychological, and social-cultural components. The love includes physiological stimulation, perceptual mechanisms, and interpretative processes and is situated at the connection where the body, the cognitive, and the cultural converge. Personal experience and social regulation both play their important role. Romantic love is a combination of beliefs, ideals, attitudes, and expectations, which coexist in our conscious and unconscious minds.      Discussions of romantic love in scholarly literature over recent decades (Berscheid 1985, 1988; Brehm 1988; Buss 1988; Caraway 1987; Davis 1985; Hatfield 1988; Hatfield and Rapson 1993; Knox 1970; Liebowitz 1983; Levinger 1988; Lindholm 1988; Money 1980; Murstein 1988; Orlinsky 1977; Shaver et al. 1988; Sternberg 1988; Tennov 1979) allowed resea...