Evolutionary basis

Wall of Love on Montmartre in Paris: "I love you" in 250 languages, by calligraphist Fédéric Baron and
artist Claire Kito (2000)

Evolutionary psychology has attempted to provide various reasons for love as a survival tool.
Humans are dependent on parental help for a large portion of their lifespans compared to other
mammals. Love has therefore been seen as a mechanism to promote parental support of children
for this extended time period. Furthermore, researchers as early as Charles Darwin himself
identified unique features of human love compared to other mammals and credit love as a major
factor for creating social support systems that enabled the development and expansion of the
human species.[31] Another factor may be that sexually transmitted diseases can cause, among
other effects, permanently reduced fertility, injury to the fetus, and increase complications during
childbirth. This would favor monogamous relationships over polygamy.[32]

Adaptive benefit

Interpersonal love between a male and a female is considered to provide an evolutionary

adaptive benefit since it facilitates mating and sexual reproduction.[33] However, some organisms
can reproduce asexually without mating. Thus understanding the adaptive benefit of
interpersonal love depends on understanding the adaptive benefit of sexual reproduction as
opposed to asexual reproduction. Michod[33] has reviewed evidence that love, and consequently
sexual reproduction, provides two major adaptive advantages. First, love leading to sexual
reproduction facilitates repair of damages in the DNA that is passed from parent to progeny
(during meiosis, a key stage of the sexual process). Second, a gene in either parent may contain a
harmful mutation, but in the progeny produced by sex reproduction, expression of a harmful
mutation introduced by one parent is likely to be masked by expression of the unaffected
homologous gene from the other parent.[33]