What is romance?

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You never know. Romance might just be able to be quantified. Imagine one day when you can simply take a pill, and have the feeling of being in love with the world. Like being on amphetamines, with no side effects what so ever.

Food for thought.

But yes, as of right now, romance is a mystery. I went on a tangent there, didnt I

Kalister1, that would make an awesome idea for a dystopian SF novel. Has it already been done? I've only read ones that have pills that dull people.

I don't think it's very off-topic at all, the idea of a pill that produces feelings of being in love. It makes one think harder about the definition.

Yes. Chocolate. Well, actually that story looks more like an urban myth. Searching for chocolate and oxytocin on the web, I get lots of hits, but none of those I looked at referred back to original research. Putting the same search terms into a scientific data base, I got no hits. So the following joke may reflect an urban myth after all: "Scientists say chocolate contains some of the same chemicals as are released when you fall in love. That is wrong. The truth is that falling in love releases some of the same chemicals as chocolate."

Note that my skepticism about the link between chocolate and oxytocin is based on a failure to find something persuasive during a total of 5 minutes searching for relevant sources. That is not a thorough search, so my skepticism may be unfounded, and the common perception of a link may have a basis in reality. I leave more thorough research as an exercise for the reader.

Here is a link to some real research on Neural correlates of trust

Scientific, experiential, or in a pill, it doesn't matter. I've come to the conclusion that the whole matter is so far beyond my comprehension that I'm never going to begin to understand it. Either it is all nonsense, or else I'm missing some large pieces in my emotional makeup. I can understand friendship just fine, but anything else is not even possible to imagine. That is ok. I'm not going on any more dates.

As an aside, I never really liked chocolate...

I was thinking the exact same thing! Didn't Soma make you feel like you were in love? Also, in the Sprawl Trilogy they develop "designer drugs" that can make you feel like your in love, though they sound very similar to speed. Ian Banks wrote The Culture series, where people develop little organs near their brains that secrete different drugs, drugs that make them smart, happy, up, down, psychedelics, anything! Its really utopian though, but I like it .

Love is like a drug, you feel really good when your on it, but afterwards you feel worse than before.