Is Love Measurable?

Lear: Meantime we shall express  our darker purpose.

Give me the map there. Know, that we have divided

In three our kingdom. And ’tis our fast intent

To shake44 all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths,while we

Unburthened crawl toward death.Our son of Cornwall,

And you,our no less loving son of Albany,

We have this hour a constant will to publish

Our daughters’several dowers, that future strife

May be prevented now. The princes, France and Burgundy,

Great rivals in our youngest daughter’s love,

Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn,

And here are to be answered.Tell me,my daughters

(Since now we will divest us both of rule,

Interest of  territory,cares of state),

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge. Goneril,

Our eldest-born,speak first.

In the first class discussion on King Lear, we talked about love; this play has plenty of love! King Lear asks their daughters to tell him how much they love him… Can we express with words when we really love someone? Well, I was thinking about that when I came up with the idea of looking for different ways in which we, people, have tried to measure love… In my searching I found this paper called “A brief history of social scientists' attempts to measure passionate love” there Elaine Hatfield, Lisamarie Bensman and Richard L. Rapson gathered different scales to measure love from 1940 to today, but What I could see was that all that measure are not really measures of love, in them you can find that they measure attitudes, behaviors, emotions towards love yet not love itself.

In this article entitled: Scientists try to measure love:They try to get to the bottom of long-term romance and how it affects our emotional and physical well-being. At first, I thought they were going to give a sort of measurement, but they online explained what happened when someone falls in love (Disappointment :c ). One phrase that I found was “The more we understand it, they say, the better our chances of making love last and of harnessing its potential to improve our emotional and physical well-being.” http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/08/health/la-he-love8-2010feb08  Do you agree with that? Personally, I don’t think that deep explanations of love really help us to make it better or to maintain a long relationship, I think that there are many components of love we cannot explain, the more we try to explain it the less we understand since it is not something rational. Maybe it has a lot of biological or chemical elements; however, we cannot know why we make a connection with an specific individual and not with another one… simply biology or more?? What do you think about that? Is King Lear right when asking their daughters to express their love for him??