The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Why Romantic Love is essential to human experience.

What a post on romantic love? Has this gone soft?

No, I promise you'll find no hallmark material here.

I'm the same empirically minded, rational guy you've come to know over the years.

That said, the marketing forces of this week have inspired something in me. Not the desire to buy

milk chocolate, but the drive to apply a primal perspective to the topic of romantic love. As with

most cultural phenomena, Valentine's Day is part commercial hoopla and part genuine human inclination.

So how do we honor the substance of the holiday while separating out the marketing static? Maybe a primal lens, at least in the anthropological

sense, doesn't make for the most sentimental post about romantic love, but there's plenty of

authentic awe, and maybe some thought-provoking sense to be had

from the exercise. See if you agree. The evolutionary dance. First, when talking about romantic love

from a primal perspective, it makes sense to ask about its evolutionary payoff. Sure, we can all

understand the need for propagation

of the species. If men and women didn't reproduce, Grog and his kin would have died out long ago,

and we wouldn't be around to listen to this. But isn't there a difference between mating and

romance? Clearly, but like all things in evolutionary terms, let's be honest

about what romance is, a means to an end. That shouldn't, however, lead us to incorrectly

characterize the kinds of experiences our primal ancestors had when it came to romance.

People may assume Stone Age relationships contained none of the feeling or fidelity

modern culture prides itself on today.

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