It’s a Saturday night and I’m alone with everybody. The place was hazy with cigarette smoke and glasses full of ice cold beer had been passed from person to person; people I barely knew. And a punk-ska band was doing a cover of early No Doubt.

Saturday nights the world over (then again, everyday of the week), people style their hair, spray on deodorant and rinse their mouths with mouthwash. They would fumble through their clothes and then check themselves in the mirror over and over again. Species of all kinds exhibit some kind of social behavior—they interact with each other in a wide variety of courtship rituals. Animals and humans who “fall in love” share more traits in common than ever believed.

If you check the articles listed in the “A” section of your encyclopedia (whether Compton’s, Book of Knowledge or the Encyclopedia Americana) you would read about Mark Anthony, how he fell in love with Cleopatra, got defeated in the naval battle at Actium in 31 B.C. and took his own life (Cleopatra also took hers), or Aphrodite, about how a sea foam raised by The Hours became a goddess who punishes those who resisted the call of love and how she helped Paris of Troy win the beautiful Helen of Greece, or Astronomy, and read about revolving chunks of rock and hot balls of gases and how their gravitational pull affects everything in the universe.

There’s also an entry about Animals--if you peruse further, you would find an interesting read--animal courtship rituals. You would be able to read how male Bowerbirds make bowers and decorate them with shiny objects (tin foils, coins etc.), feathers and other things and if a female Bowerbird likes the interior design, they would frolic and fornicate inside, or the Peacock who would try to make all those tail feathers vibrate so as to catch the attention of the Peahen. There’s also the female gypsy moth which manufactures her own kind of “perfume” to attract males and could waft as far as seven miles. The dating game could also get nasty. Female mantises are known to bite the head off of male mantises while in the act of copulation and female black widow spiders must be serenaded by males by strumming the web as not to be mistaken as a prey caught on the sticky snare.

Research shows that some animals release hormones (a string of hydrocarbons that directs body functions) like those of humans “falling in –love”. In the encyclopedia entries, we learned that most species flirt like teens overflowing with hormones: they dance, sing, offer gifts and spray perfume. Sometimes they fight (male elephant seals fight other males to claim a harem of 50 females), and die in search of a mate. Humans and animals have something in common; it’s the fact that both go on great strides to look for a mate—either for an evening or for a lifetime.

Now, what is romance then? Why does love transcend all other possible experiences and a curse to those seized by its clutches?

It was a heartbreaking moment, I wonder where she is now, and if she remembers. She waved a hand and I smiled. She smiles back (then again, it was more of a smirk). Romance is something that goes by; a fleeting moment, someone waving a hand, smiling, singing “I’m just a Girl” and “Sunday Morning” and leaves after the fifth song, someone whom you would never meet again.

--Romel Villaflor