LEWIS DARTNELL: And there's another brain chemical that's also involved in that process, which is dopamine, the sort of pleasure compound of the brain, which is also stimulated by psychoactive drugs like caffeine, nicotine, opiates.
So you could say quite fairly that love is an addictive drug, has a very, very similar neurochemistry behind it.
And we experience that oxytocin pair bond as romantic love.
That's a human adaptation for binding mother and father together.
And marriage is no more than a cultural construct built upon that biological foundation of pair bonding.
And the pair bonding between mother and father and between both parents, the child, is the basis of the human family.
That sort of human family unit is an oddity within mammals.
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