Ah, romantic love -

beautiful and intoxicating,

heartbreaking and soul-crushing,

often all at the same time.

Why do we choose to put ourselves through its emotional wringer?

Does love make our lives meaningful,

or is it an escape from our loneliness and suffering?

Is love a disguise for our sexual desire,

or a trick of biology to make us procreate?

Is it all we need?

Do we need it at all?

If romantic love has a purpose,

neither science nor psychology has discovered it yet.

But over the course of history,

some of our most respected philosophers have put forward some intriguing theories.

Love makes us whole, again.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato

explored the idea that we love in order to become complete.

In his "Symposium", he wrote about a dinner party,

at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright,

regales the guests with the following story:

humans were once creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces.

One day, they angered the gods,

and Zeus sliced them all in two.

Since then, every person has been missing half of him or herself.

Love is the longing to find a soulmate who'll make us feel whole again,

or, at least, that's what Plato believed a drunken comedian would say at a party.

Love tricks us into having babies.

Much, much later, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer

maintained that love based in sexual desire

was a voluptuous illusion.

He suggested that we love because our desires lead us to believe

that another person will make us happy, but we are sorely mistaken.

Nature is tricking us into procreating,

and the loving fusion we seek is consummated in our children.

When our sexual desires are satisfied,

we are thrown back into our tormented existences,

and we succeed only in maintaining the species

and perpetuating the cycle of human drudgery.