Love, According to Your Professors

What love is, according to your…

Advertising Professor: Love is a cash cow. Remember this: if you can associate something with love, sex, or violence you’re creating an association between your product and happiness or excitement. Why do you think Valentine’s Day was so successful that it got a sequel?

Algebra Professor: Love is the sum of it’s parts, any unknown in which can be found by comparing multiple formulae in order to solve for two or more variables.

Biology Professor: Love is a natural desire tofind a mate which manifests in the form of joy. This motivates partial monogamy in nature to ensure the well-being of offspring.

Chemistry Professor: Love is the influence of many chemicals being released within the body. As hormones like Oxytocin and Vasopressin are released inside the body, the brain creates a feeling of euphoria. Significant others, sex, and maternal instincts involve the release of these chemicals.

Computer Programming Professor: 01001100011011110111011001100101. Of course, it changes if you want to change the capitalization.

English Professor: “But love is blind and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit;for if they could, Cupid himself would blush to see me thus transformed to a boy.” William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps you’d prefer Frost’s, “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”

History Professor: Love is a force which creates careers, empires, wars, and nations. I mean, love and greed. You know what? That’s mostly just greed.

Neuropsychology Professor: Love is an addictive emotion created by releasing certain neurotransmitters as a form of reinforcement. The brain is identical when feeling the elation of love as when under the influenceof cocaine.

Packaging Professor: Listen, kid. It’s our job to know how to put shit in a box and get it from A to B. If you want me to tell you how to ship love from New Hampshire to India in the cheapest, most effective way possible, we can talk.

Philosophy Professor: An understanding of love must go above any single discipline to connect all central theories of human life, though some believe love to be an discharge of emotions which defy rational examination. There are multiple types of love, Eros, Philia, Agape, and each has various metaphysical and epistemological arguments attached, while some cultures don’t even have a word for love…(continue until you think of an excuse to leave).

Physics Professor: Love is the opposite reaction of the force of a significant person. Since Love = Interaction x Significance, and Interaction x Significance is a person’s interpersonal value or “weight,” that would make love the normal force of a person.

Political Science Professor: Irrelevant. What’s important is whether or not the public thinks you’re in love—that’s what the polls say.

Psychology Professor: Love isn’t really nailed down yet. It’s a cognitive and social phenomenon, but there are a lot of theories. Maybe in twenty or thirty years we’ll know more for sure—you know, you could write your thesis on it.

Spanish Professor: Amor. It’s masculine.

TA: Well…uh…it says here, in the lecture notes that…uh, you know it’s not here. Let me ask the professor and get back to you next week. Is that okay?