Episode 5: Beauty and the Geek

Welcome to the Day of Love 2013!

Also known as singles awareness day.

Now by all means I should be spending the time alone playing World of Warcraft with some cyber friends a la Sheldon Cooper.  However, I have found a young gentleman who clearly just can’t get enough of the geek. So much so in fact that he sealed the deal a few months ago with an extremely old transparent crystal of tetrahedrally bonded carbon atoms aka a diamond.

Apart from the chemical classification of a diamond, what does science have to do with valentines and love? I’ll give you a multitude of reasons;

St. Valentine’s Day – So what’s it all about? The feast of St. Valentines can be attributed to a number of early Christian saints called Valentinus. Stories range from him being jailed for marrying soldiers to their sweethearts, who were forbidden to do so, to him writing to his own sweetheart during imprisonment. It has also been linked to the Roman feast of fertility Lupercalia. The most important theme throughout all the possibilities is the Romance.  It is the traditional day on which you put all else aside to express your love to those you hold dear. Most of these expressions of love will follow the traditional pattern;

Symbols of Valentine’s day;

Red Roses – The most common rhyme to find on Valentine’s Day starts ‘Roses are red...’ The rose was strongly linked to the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite and the Egyptian goddess of fertility, Isis. Because of this we have developed a very ancient link with red roses as a symbol of eternal love. It appears constantly in romantic literature;

“O MY Luve’s like a red, red rose,

That’s newly sprung in June:

O my Luve’s like the melodie,

That’s sweetly play’d in tune.”

~ Robert Burns

The colour red is longest and warmest ray in the visible light spectrum. It is likened to fire, power, life force and survival. It is the most energising colour and as such as linked to enormous passion. So psychologically both the flower and the colour are the most symbolic representations of the expression of love. However not all expressions of love are desirable, Kissing Disease for example. Your love might be contagious but it’s also infringing upon my immune system.

 Chocolate – For a more physical embodiment of science’s role in love; Aphrodisiacs. Although many aphrodisiacs are probably effective due to the placebo effect, a few actually can be chemically attributed with affecting passion. The King of aphrodisiacs has to be chocolate. It includes anandamine and Phenylethylamine (PEA) which are a psychoactive feel-good chemical and ‘love chemical’ respectively. PEA releases dopamine in the brain and can peak feelings of excitement, attraction and euphoria. It also contains tryptophan which is required for Serotonin production, another feel-good chemical of the brain.

Other foods with apparent aphrodisiac side effects include, asparagus, almonds, avocado, bananas, basil, figs, garlic, oysters and honey. Although links to these foods are probably more due to their actual vitamin and mineral content which are necessary for healthy reproductive systems than any psychological effect. Some of them are also obviously comically shaped...

So if you really want to express your love include these in your menu, a few appropriately placed oysters and champagne wouldn’t go amiss!

I of course included none of these. I’m making my Valentine Chicken wings, Seafood Paella, Pavlova and some Kopparberg because he told me they’re his favourite. No analysis required.

 

Clothing – And not necessarily lingerie you sneaks. A common way now to express love is dressing up and going out to dinner together. Don’t underestimate the power of a LRD (Little Red Dress), as we mentioned before the colour red ignites strong feelings. And he’s not going to take you to the Ritz dressed like a hobo on holiday.

Finally, if your Valentine’s day involved all these lovely expressions of eternal love you may be feeling;

In Love – I’m not even gonna go there. Although experiments show you can base how attracted you are to males on how different their MHC complex (immune system) is to yours [see the facts here - http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/5/668.full] we all know it’s just not like that. Unless you’re a crazy person, Science is going to leave that frontier well alone.

To fall in love you need to have the perfect mix of chemical and physical conditions... with a little bit of pixie dust... take the second star to the right and... head on into infinity and beyond...

Yeah. Disney is better at describing it than Science. Go watch Beauty and the Beast.