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Valentine's Day Blog Hop: Is It Love? Welcome to the Swept Away Valentine's Day Blog Hop. As a lifelong romantic, I decided to celebrate the holiday and the hop with a couple of fun prizes:

To enter, leave a comment on this post and (optional) an answer to this question: What are your plans for Valentine's day? You must include your email address so I can contact you if you win. If I cannot get in touch with a winner, I will pick another winner for that prize.

So here are my thoughts on Valentine's Day.

Love is such a crazy thing. The part about skyrockets and hot fevered dreams isn't even love at all, it's infatuation. It's sex. It's true...we're hardwired for sex. The continuation of the species is written into our genes and we fall easily, madly, and continually in...lust.

It goes like this. We see another member of the species and our brains send a signal down the reproductive superhighway to our genitals. Straight or gay is all in the wiring, but the signal is old as the ages:

"Jump on that!"

Yep. Mother Nature has no patience. Our brains, which have evolved so as to be not completely under the control of our gonads, often try to put on the brakes. Why? Because it's the brain's job to do complex calculations like risk-reward or cost-benefit analysis. The gonads don't care about benefits and costs. They're completely on board with "Jump that!"

The signal to the gonads takes microseconds. Often the brain has no chance in hell of completing its analysis of the prospective partner, our complex needs and assets situation, and predictions for success or failure. It simply cannot meet the demand for information fast enough, with the result that we find ourselves hopelessly confused and being controlled by our gonads and a pair of endocrine glands with which the gonads are in cahoots.

We fall hard.

Take an example from my own admittedly sheltered and boring life. One day I'm minding my business in high school, contemplating geometry...when Alan Brown talks to me. He's tall, cute, genuinely nice and a senior! He plays football! He never even knew I existed and now, for the first time in my hormone-flushed life, I exist. My gonads get the signal to jump that. My breathing gets faster in tandem with my heartbeat and I'm feeling all flushed and excited, and, well...it has to be love!

No. That's confusion. But the flush in my genitals and on my cheeks is very real and I'm a goner if Alan isn't a nice guy in better control of his gonads than I am. As it turned out, we were both kind of new at the whole thing and never did much other than kiss and touch. My father got a new job and we moved away the next month, darn it.


My brain, on the other hand, wasn't nearly as disappointed, because its cost-benefit analysis predicted disaster. Let's look at the many things against us:

Gonads have tunnel vision and care about none of those things.

Which brings me to love. Alan and I didn't have a chance to find out if love was in the cards. Which is too bad because, you see, love changes the whole cost-benefit thing. We start to consider the other person's well-being, for example, as well as what we want. We make plans to address the risks and bring about higher reward outcomes. We truly care for the other person, as a person and not an object. But we still want to roll around in the nude and do undignified things with each other.

It took some mistakes, and a lot of pooh-poohing my brain's clamorous warnings (having a creative brain has its drawbacks), but I finally did find my true love. Having found him, I would never want to live without, not ever. Especially the lust part. Even my brain is on board with that now.

Tonight, for Valentine's Day, my husband and I are going out to eat. Every year he surprises me with where...and I surprise him with what I wear. Today's a great day to celebrate lust and love.

So...What are your plans for Valentine's Day? For a chance to win one of the prizes above, all you need to do is comment with your email address. My pretty poodle Cate and I will pick a winner on the morning of Monday, February 18th.

Thanks for stopping by! And you can go to the Blog Hop link [HERE] for more blogs and prizes. Labels: book giveaway, Swept Away Valentine's Day Blog Hop
