I added my 2 cents worth to a post in relationships by a member who feels like she has taken on the roll of mother, instead of caregiver. The passion they once shared is now gone since he became a survivor.

Interesting enough, Love is mostly in the brain. Atleast that's what Lauren Slater writes in National Geographic Magazine in a fascinating February cover piece, simply titled, "Love."

For the first time, new research has begun to illuminate where love lies in the brain, the particulars of its chemical components, according to Slater. Scientists say that the brain chemistry of infatuation is akin to mental illness...Which gives new meaning to the term 'madly in love'.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher has spent years looking for love, only not in bars or with want ads, but with an MRI machine. She and her colleagues found couples who had been wildly in love for about seven months. They put each person into a brain scanner and showed each half of the couple a picture, one neutral, the other of their beloved.

Watch out, in the latter case, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasure, lit up. What Fisher found, and what most amazed her, was that the chemical pathways to the part of the brain where love resided, so to speak, ignited a dense spread of receptors for a powful neurotransmitter known as dopamine, or, better put, the brain released its very own "love potion no. 9."

So then there's a reason why, Slater reports, when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill... And that feeling is wonderful. Physically that rush of love can't be maintained over time. Imagine if it could. What would have happen to civilization? Who would have had time to build it?

One theory is that we simply build up a resistance to the high of dopamine. So, then true love goes into a different form. In a way it settles down, and is based more on connections, like mirriage, children, and commitments. And so the science seems to back up what has been intuitively known for ages. Then there is all the old adages, like love is patient, love is kind, love don't die, it just fades away. So, just maybe, thats why we have Valentines Day. A chance to say, I love you. Regardless, the brain has a role in how we respond in love.