Ka Leo Interview

by Alex

The school newspaper asked me to answer some questions about Valentine’s Day. Please find the transcript attached:

Aloha Dr. Golub,

Thank you for taking time to answer these brief questions, as well as providing any additional insight you think might be of interest to our readers.

My questions are:

Is there an anthropological basis for the emotion of love?
No. You can easily fall in love without having taken any classes in our department.

Does love serve a useful purpose or is it extraneous?
Falling in love is one of the most wonderful, life-affirming experiences that can happen to you, so if you think ‘having wonderful, life-affirming experiences’ counts as ‘useful’, then there you go. Additionally, when you fall out of love you feel absolutely terrible, a feeling which serves the useful purpose of giving blues musicians more to sing about than just racism and alcohol abuse.

Are certain societies or cultures more predisposed toward feelings of love?
Love is a Western concept, although obviously you don’t have to be Western to come to care deeply for another person. Still, I think your standard haole American has got to be particularly predisposed to fall in love. American culture imagines the entire world as if it were a business, worrying constantly about the ‘useful purpose’ of everything, and Americans are obsessed with sharing their feelings for others. As a result they carve out a very small niche in their lives — romantic love — in which ‘love’, ‘feeling’ and ‘caring’ are carefully separated from ‘economics’, ‘buying’, and ‘selling’. Thus Americans believe prostitution to be wrong because it combines love and intimacy with spending lots of money. Which thus makes it completely and totally different from Valentine’s day.

What difference, if any, are there between the way people express love in Hawaii and New York?
People in New York are often much colder than we are when they fall in love.

If you are married/involved, how do you plan to spend your Valentine’s Day?
My wife and I are going to get totally baked and watch ’300′ like seven times in a row. No just kidding. We are planning to do all the “Love Is In The Air” achievements in World of Warcraft together, though. We might even try to farm the Big Love Rocket that drops off of Apothecary Hummel.