Sometimes All You Need Is Love; sometimes Love Is a Battlefield. Whether Love Hurts, Bites, Will Keep Us Together, Will Tear Us Apart, or Is a Four-Letter Word, it seems we Want To Know What Love Is.

Love—in both the abstract and the up-close-and-personal—has always provided limitless inspiration for artists, writers, and musicians, but scientists are just as fascinated by these affairs of the heart, though they seldom sing about it. In Love, Sex, and Science, our editors take a step back, analyzing romance using tools like fMRI studies instead of a paint brush or guitar. The writers examine a variety of topics, starting with the perceived sex differences between men and women discussed in Section 1—are we really as different as Mars and Venus?

We also don’t shy away from darker aspects of love, such as the psychology of prostitution and sex appeal of narcissists, because to ignore these aspects of love is to trivialize it. Besides, love’s paradoxes are one of the reasons why it is the topic for cultural discourse. As Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” Hopefully this audiobook will change the “nothing” to “at least something.”