Love and Hate
The divorce rates in Western and Eastern cultures have puzzled me. I live in India which has one of the lowest divorce rates, but marriages here are mostly arranged. The man and woman almost never really get to know each other, but some how once they are married they tend to stick together. In western nation like USA, though people fall in love and marry, but their family system is almost destroyed and they live like bastards and bitches.
I was really confused why a civilization that lets its people to select their life partners has a collapsed family system till few days ago when I could relate it with a scientific paper I read. It said love and hate feelings share the same neural pathways. In lay mans terms, if you love some one and if you start to hate that one, the hate would be as strong as the love and vice versa. Thats why we see in battles two commanders in hate, battle with desire to drink blood, but all of a sudden they shake hands (like Alexander shook hands with Porus). Thats why you see people who stood together as brothers and sisters becoming their worst enemies (take many family feuds, and the case of India and Pakistan).
Its this process in brain that I think is partly responsible for collapse of western family system. People falling love, love so much that the expectancy between them rises to a very high level, when there is some tiny crack, the switch in brain switches from love to hate and all explodes like a bomb.
It will be great if scientists investigates dogs brain. Because if dogs loves its master, it stays loyal to him even if he tortures it (quiet unlike humans). Possibly its love an hate has distinct neural paths unlike humans.