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CrowdScience

Is There a Logic to Romantic Love?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science

4.81K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Loving someone who doesn’t love you in return makes us feel wretched – can science explain why we must suffer? Parental love makes perfect evolutionary sense but romance just seems to have it in for us time after time. CrowdScience listener Leja wants to know why we fall in and out of love.

Marnie Chesterton discovers the irrational things, the impulsive things and the financially ruinous things BBC World Service listeners have done in the name of love and meet the rapper who turned herself into a science subject in an effort to flush out thoughts of her ex-boyfriend.

We delve into our ancestral past and into our brains to find out why romantic love is so central to the human experience.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Louisa Field

(Image: A loving couple hugging each other, the woman holding a rose. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and maybe it's when I had a hand in.

0:04.0

I'm Tammy Walker and I produce podcasts for the BBC.

0:08.0

My role is to give new and diverse creators a voice with the opportunity to build a career.

0:12.0

That's the thing I love about podcasts.

0:14.4

You start with just a good idea, but then you have the space to see where it goes.

0:18.4

And doing that at the BBC means we can really run with the best stories

0:21.9

while developing the most unique audio talent.

0:24.8

So if you like what you hear, why not check out the huge range of podcast we've got on BBC Sounds?

0:30.3

This is Crowd Science from the BBC World Service. I'm Marnie Chesterton.

0:35.0

They say there's good grief, but how can you tell it from the back

0:50.0

for a really long time I had been trying to date or actively dating or recovering from the most recent breakup with one of the members in my rap crew.

0:55.0

This is Dessa, writer and musician.

0:58.0

Crowd science crew met her backstage before a concert in Bristol in the UK.

1:03.6

It was a double-edged sword and that one, there was the pain of actually going through a breakup.

1:07.4

What hurts everybody?

1:08.2

That's just part of being human.

1:09.5

That's part of our lot, I get that.

1:12.3

But there was this kind of mounting embarrassment that I just

1:15.5

couldn't seem to heal at a reasonable rate when everyone else was and I wasn't

1:19.4

sure if that was like compatible with a strong feminist worldview the fact that I'm just like

1:24.5

stuck on dude even when the other parts of my life seem to be going pretty well like

1:28.1

am I allowed to feel this sad for so long and still keep my feminist membership card.

...

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