What Is Love? (I)

On Love:
Love is a word defining a person's emotional attraction towards another. I say emotional, but let's break it down a little further than that.
What are emotions? They can be considered as the effects experienced of chemical reactions within the body, usually triggered by the brain. When a person's brain detects a threat, (whether the threat is against the body itself, or something the brain cares about such as family or its beliefs), it triggers the release of certain hormones and chemicals including epinephrine (adrenaline). These chemicals cause a rise in blood pressure, and grumpy or hostile behavior.
That is all anger is.
Likewise, love is a side-effect of chemical reactions within our bodies. When a man and a woman are close as friends or even in the boyfriend-girlfriend stage, they may already feel attraction towards each other. At this point, it will be mostly physical attraction (even if thought otherwise) from the initial rush of exposure to a single human's hormones. Mostly, this occurs in the body, not the brain. As more and more time is spent together, however, the brain begins to recognize the presence of that single person's hormones, and actually begins to get addicted to them as it becomes accustomed to their presence. This is what causes the feelings of loneliness and longing for that person when they are absent. So, this chemical reaction in our bodies causes emotionally felt effects: happiness in the loved one's presence when one can indulge in his/her hormones, sadness and longing when they're gone and the body begins to experience withdrawls from those hormones, excitement when going to meet them as the body anticipates the intake of the chemicals. Those are the things that lead a person to classify their emotions towards another as "love". Think about it, though... aren't those the same thing a drug addict would feel for their fix? So, there you go; love is a chemical addiction.
For the sake of those of us who prefer to back up ideas such as this one with deeper meaning, I have a second theory pertaining to the PURPOSE of love.
Isn't love cute? Pleasant? I don't think anybody hates being in love. But, why does it exist? What purpose does it serve? It can be claimed that love's purpose in this realm is to ensure that creatures mate and their species don't go extinct. Usually, sex comes with love. However, it is already ensured in the human race that we will mate because sexual intercourse is extremely physically pleasureful. According to my definition of love, sex ties into the equation nicely: two lovers have sex because of the hormonal, chemical addiction to each other in order to experience those hormones in higher doses as they are released throughout intercourse. But wouldn't it be nice to think there's some deeper, more meaningful reason that love exists besides to make us have sex?
There might be. My following theory is much less thought-through and is entirely based on personal opinion and spiritual beliefs, but it might be interesting to read nonetheless. Humans come in all shapes and sizes, all colors. Studies show that humans are naturally attracted to races besides their own as a basic instinct. The purpose of this instinct is to prevent inbreeding. Inbreeding, or even mating within a single race for many generations, can lead to the faults of the race’s genes becoming stronger, eventually to the point that it becomes a threat to the race’s survival. Interracial mating ensures that this doesn’t happen, so that bad genes (like those for disorders or illnesses) can recede far enough that they are no longer an issue.
But what happens when thousands and thousands of generations have passed, and the people on Earth have been mixing and mating for so long that our genes are nearly all identical, and we all look nearly the same?
I believe that the chemical reactions of love are designed to prevent not only overpopulation caused by too much sex too fast, but also to slow the process of our genes combining to the point of likeness. I think that love exists so that we might find one mate and procreate with them only instead of mating with numerous other people and spreading our genes unnecessarily, and be able to enjoy the variance between races for as long as possible. Love is here so that, for a little while longer, we can enjoy the beauty of different combinations of races and genes, as well as glorious, exotic races that we don’t come into contact with often.
It’s nice to think that the kind of love experienced between a man and a woman could indirectly be related to our natural love of fellow human beings of any race; and, how we, as sentient beings, are meant to adore each other not only despite our differences, but BECAUSE of them.