I think your commentary beats the tar out of the article. Whenever I see someone writing about a complex emotion as if it were a simple, monolithic thing I wonder what difficulty they went through that caused them to write the article. In this case, you don't even need to go that far - the author just self-published a book on Amazon two weeks ago. It's fundamentally silly to suggest that "love" is a concrete thing that always has the same characteristics and strikes everyone in the same way. Whenever someone says "our idealized notion" they really mean "my idealized notion" unless they've got backup; Mark Vernon does not. Scrimetime's post has science behind it; Mr. Vernon is certainly entitled to his opinion but I certainly don't find it relevant to my life.