Love:

Steve Stewart-Williams, The ape that understood the universe:

>Sometimes romantic love matures into a distinct form of love, which psychologists call companionate love. ... [Romantic] hallucinations don't last forever. In time, we start to get to know the real person hidden beneath our mental image of them - and occasionally, if we're lucky, we come to love that person too. This next-level love is often a more genuine, less delusional form of love. One of the most powerful descriptions of it that I've come across is in Louis de Bernieres' novel, Captain Corelli's Mandolin:

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being 'in love' which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."<