What's love got to do with it?

Professor Rose Morgan to English Lit students at Columbia University:

"...As I stood at the altar, beside my sister and her husband to be, it struck me that this ritual called a wedding ceremony is really just the final scene of a fairy tale. They never tell you what happens after. They never tell you that Cinderella drove the prince crazy with her obsessive need to clean the castle... cause she missed her day job, right? No. They don't tell us what happens after, because there is no after. The be all and end all of romantic love was?... marriage. But, it wasn't always like that. Around the 12th century there was a notion known as courtly love. Where a love had nothing to do with marriage and nothing to do with sex. In most cases, it was defined as a passionate relationship between a knight and a lady of the court who was already married. And so they could never consummate their love. In this way, they would have to rise above your ordinary, you know, going-to-the-bathroom-in-front-of-each-other-kind-of-love, and they would go after something more... divine. They took sex out of the equation, and what was left was a union of souls. Now, think of this... sex was always the fatal love potion... look at the literature of the time: Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde.. all consummation could lead to was madness, dispair, or death. Clinical experts, scholars, and my Aunt Esther are united in the belief that true love has spiritual dimensions... while romantic love is nothing but a lie, an illusion, a modern myth.. a soul-less manipulation. Speaking of manipulation, it's like going to the movies, and we see the lovers on screen kiss, and the music swells, and we buy it, right? So, when my date takes me home and kisses me goodnight if I dont hear the philharmonic in my head, I dump him!? Now, the question is... why do we buy it? We buy it because whether its a myth or manipulation... let's face it... we all want to fall in love. Right? Why? Because that experience makes us feel completely alive, where every sense is heightened, every emotion is magnified, our everyday reality is shattered, and we are flung into the heavens! It may only last a moment, an hour, an afternoon.. but that doesn't diminish it's value. Because we are left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives. I read an article a while ago that said "When we fall in love we hear Puccini in our head."... I love that. I think its because his music fully expresses our longing for passion in our lives and for romantic love. And while we are listening to La Boheme or Turandot, or reading Wuthering Heights or watching Casablanca... a little of that love lives in us too. So, the final question is.. why do people want to fall in love when it can have such a short shelf life, and be devastatingly painful? What do you think..? ... Stacy?"
"It leads to propagation of the species?"
"mmmhmmm... Randy?"
"Psychologically we need to connect with somebody..."
"could be... Jill?"
"Because we are culturally pre-conditioned?"
"Good answers... but all too intellectual for me... I think it's because, while it does last...
It... feels... fucking... great!"

-The Mirror Has Two Faces