What determines why people fall in love and with whom they fall in love? These questions are exceedingly complex. Some writers believe that people fall in love to overcome a sense of aloneness and separateness. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1965) suggested that union with another person is the deepest need of humans. Another psychoanalyst and writer, Rollo May, author of Love and Will (1969), also believed that as people experience their own solitariness, they long for the refuge of union with another through love. Other observers see loneliness as a by-product of our individualistic and highly mobile society rather than as an inherent part of the human condition (Seep — ersad et al., 2008). This view emphasizes the connectedness that we all have with the people around us—through all our social relationships, language, and culture. According to this view, love relationships are one aspect of a person’s social network rather than a cure for the "disease" of loneliness.
We have seen that love is a complex human emotion that can be explained, at least in part, by various psychosocial interpretations of its origins. However, the answer to why
we fall in love also encompasses, to some degree, complex neurochemical processes that occur in our brains when we are attracted to another person. We discuss findings about the chemistry of love in the next section.