Cloudscape

This entry in a few words: being love is often seen as merely hormonal because it lasts only for a few months once we are in a relationship. However, exactly the same is observed in friendship. This is merely because people seem more interesting when we first meet them, at least if we take to each other.

Many scientists see being love as something purely hormonal, arguing that it does not, after all, last for long. They often point at the chemicals released in our brain and compare it the effects to drugs. However, the chemicals involved in romantic love - dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, phenylethylamine - are all some of the same chemicals involved in social interaction in general, as well as in other emotions. We should not forget, however, that neurotransmitters are not our emotions; they are the paint in which our experiences and emotions are made. Sometimes, the result is just a big splotch of paint, as in the use of narcotic drugs or physical sex; sometimes, the result is a child's drawing, as in the thousandth repetition of a superficial conversation; sometimes, the result is a beautiful canvas, as in the contemplation of nature's wonders or true love.

Usually, after a few months we are no longer in love even though the person and often our relationship with them has remained the same. However, in this they make the crucial error not to take into account psychological factors.
Falling in love is an emotional reponse which comes from a deep and often subconscious need for a soulmate. Someone with whom one can connect to the roots of the soul, with whom one can share all one's feelings that lie deep within our core, someone with whom you can together discover who you really are. It's the need no no longer to be, alone, but to be, together, to find someone with whom one can live as one, someone who forms the missing part of oneself.
Often, even when we aren't fully aware of what this inner longing really means, and yet sometimes we can no longer live with it and tell ourselves that we have already found whom we were looking for. We fall in love. But we idealize the person we think the other to be, thinking that we have found our soulmate -- until a few months later, our false hopes lead to a letdown.
This becomes quite evident when one realizes that the same is observed in friendship.
When we meet someone and we take a liking to them, we're a lot more interested in them, and our hopes of our friendship are higher. We are more hopeful about the congeniality of the other's personality because we have not yet explored it in detail. At first we may seem more similar than we turn out to be later on because we broadly seem to understand each other - but it's those details which tell most of all about oneself, and only by paying attention to those details can one find out who someone really is.
Basically, friendship is a scale model of love.

I am aware this entry is in contradiction with one I've written earlier, but that's just a view from another viewpoint, and that viewpoint can be just as interesting.