(Answer has been simplified) People understand "love" much better than a substitute they don´t understand and are unable to use.

It's very important to realize that Buddhism doesn't teach indifference in any way, shape or form. In fact indifference is seen as a form of aversion and thus one of the things that increases suffering. The Pali term btw is Upekkha, which means 'balance' and connotes connectedness to others and to our emotions, very very different to indifference, which cuts us off from others and from our emotions. All genuine Buddhist teachers and those who practice Buddhism make this point very clearly, as it's a dangerous delusion to fall into and certainly one that would not go unchallenged. For example: http://www.caringawareness.com/community/library/Compassion/equanimity_ss.html http://www.forestsangha.org/sucitto31.htm

Love is not an illusion. Love is more powerful than romantic or sexual relationships. Science proved it. A multidisciplinary team has found that early, intense romantic love may have more to do with motivation, lateralized reward and goal-oriented aspects of human behavior than with the emotions or sexual arousal. Their data may even be relevant to some forms of autism and have links to stalking, suicide, and clinical depression. Led by a neuroscientist, an anthropologist and a social psychologist, the team found love-related neurophysiological systems inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine. They detected quantifiable love responses in the brains of 17 young men and women who each described themselves as being newly and madly in love. The study, entitled "Reward, motivation and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love," is available online and will be in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology, published by the American Physiological Society. The research was conducted by Arthur Aron, Helen E. Fisher, Debra J. Mashek, Greg Strong, Hai-Fang Li and Lucy L. Brown. Aron, Fisher and Brown contributed equally. "Most of the participants in our study clearly showed emotional responses," noted Arthur Aron of the State University of New York-Stony Brook, "but we found no consistent emotional pattern. Instead, all of our subjects showed activity in reward and motivation regions. To emotion researchers like me, this is pretty exciting because it's the first physiological data to confirm a connection between romantic love and motivation networks in the brain." "As it turns out, romantic love is probably best characterized as a motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to various specific emotions, such as euphoria or anxiety," Aron said. "With this view, it becomes clearer why the lover expresses such an imperative to pursue his or her beloved and protect the relationship." Aron also noted that the research answered the "historic question of whether love and sex are the same, or different, or whether romantic passion is just warmed over sexual arousal." He said, "Our findings show that the brain areas activated when someone looks at a photo of their beloved only partially overlap with the brain regions associated with sexual arousal. Sex and romantic love involve quite different brain systems." "Our data even may be relevant to some forms of autism," remarked Lucy L. Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Some people with autism don't understand or experience any sort of emotional attachment or romantic love. I would speculate that autism involves an atypical development of the midbrain and basal ganglia reward systems. This makes sense, too, because other symptoms of autism include repetitive thoughts and movements, characteristics of basal ganglia function." Another important discovery, Brown said, was that "to our surprise, the activation regions associated with intense romantic love were mostly on the right side of the brain, while the activation regions associated with facial attractiveness were mostly on the left." "We didn't predict such a striking lateralization," Brown reported. "It is well known that speech is largely a left-sided cortical function. But our data indicate that lateralization also occurs in lower parts of the brain. Moreover, different kinds of rewards (in this case, the "rush" of romantic love, compared with the pleasing experience of looking at a pretty or handsome face) is also lateralized. These results give us a lot to think about how the normal human brain learns and remembers and functions in general," Brown added. "Humans have evolved three distinct but interrelated brain systems for mating and reproduction – the sex drive, romantic love, and attachment to a long term partner," said Helen E. Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, New Jersey. "and our results suggest how feelings of romantic love might change into feelings of attachment. Our results support what people have always assumed – that romantic love is one of the most powerful of all human experiences. It is definitely more powerful than the sex drive." For instance, Fisher pointed out, "If someone rejects your sexual overtures, you don't harm yourself or the other person. But rejected men and women in societies around the world sometimes kill themselves or someone else. In fact, studies indicate that some 40% of people who are rejected in love slip into clinical depression. Our study may also suggest some of the underlying physiology of stalking behavior," she added. http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050531_love_sex.html http://cognews.com/1117596248/index_html