Biologists say love is just a cocktail of pheromones with a dash of hormones and endorphins.

I don’t believe it!

What would Shakespeare have done with endorphins? Luckily, he never heard of them.

World literature would be a vastly poorer, not to mention shorter canon, if love were ultimately reduced to a chemical reaction.

Would Heloise and Abelard have written their famous love letters? Would Anthony have died in Cleopatra’s arms? What about Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde? Just a bunch of hapless hormone junkies?

I invited a distinguished scientist to comment.

Here’s what the Muppets’ Dr. Bunsen Honeydew had to say:

“Ah, what is love? That is a question that we in the scientific community ask one another even more frequently than `What is your favorite episode of Star Trek?’

“After much research into the matter, I can without hesitation provide the following formula:

LOVE = XY+32x(2)+6AB(2)9

_____________________

67(a)

“Of course, according to some tennis players, the values for all variables in the love equation would equal zero.”

No thank you, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew! I’m not buying it. Go back to your lab!

I’m going to stay naive and romantic, believing that when eyes meet across a crowded room, there’s something going on that involves the heart and the soul, not just stoichiometric algebra and biochemistry.

So what is love? I asked around at Sposa HQ. I can tell they were flummoxed. The brain trust had run out of giddy-up. Requests for clarification came back: “What is what?” and “What is is?”

Going myopic over their laptops and spinning out words by the column foot, my warren of writers couldn’t come up with a column millimeter.

Therefore, dear reader, I admit that when it comes to love, I am at a loss for words. Maybe it’s one of those questions where the less you plumb the issue the better off you are.

I may not be able to say what love is, but I know it when I see it. It’s in the moments captured by our talented photographers. It’s in the passionate words from our contributors. It’s all right here in SPOSA.COM expressing something that speaks right to me.

I know it, even if I can do no more than point and say “That’s it!”