You're wrong on the basics: many people on earth are arguably most of the western world until the 19th century had families out of a sense of pragmatic and religious obligation to continue their line.[1] This is not love. But worse, nobody has built a city out of love, or completed a major research project backed by love alone; these kinds of projects require an entirely different kind of force that scales.
Do you know of the "Five Whys" technique? It turns out there's a psychological version. Without going into a long thing about it, it turns out that all human motivations follow a chain of desired outcomes the eventually terminate in one of five profound states: Love, Bliss, Oneness, Okayness, and huh! I forgot the fifth one. (It's not important for the sake of discussion.) All human actions are attempts to re-engender these deep and profound states, just with more or less yak-shaving.
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As an aside, thanks for the book recommendation, that looks really interesting. I believe the ancient Greeks and Romans were not strangers to love, though, eh?
