Why Do We Fall In Love? The Scientific, Chaotic, & Evolutionary Reasons You Feel All Squishy Inside
What's the point of all these exciting feelings we have when we lock eyes with our partners?
Getty Why do we fall in love, really?
Perhaps, if the rational part of our brains evolved with more neurons and synapses then the personal matters of the heart would not be so universally distressing.
Our brains could logically reason with our hearts, providing a rational answer to that question we inevitably ask — "Why do we fall in love?"
There's an unspoken acknowledgment to the fact that we have no choice but to resign ourselves to the thrilling, reckless, and possibly life-threatening pursuit of voluptuous intimacy with that special someone.
But what's the point of it all, anyway?
Why do we fall in love?
Love makes no sense. It defies space and time. When you love someone, that feeling radiates from your heart, connecting you to unimaginable, remote corners of the universe, and draws the entire cosmos into your being.
Under love's spell, you don't just feel alive — you feel immortal and, therein, lies the horror and utter absurdity of love. You will come to your senses and find that your feet have never left the ground.
Your mortality will inevitably sink in and, having experienced death-defying sensations, you might feel foolish, as though love is playing a cruel joke on you.
Despite the painfully mortal realization, the consternation from contemplating why you fall in love will gladly take a flying leap and do it again. Clearly, love does not think.
The question, "why do we fall in love?" keeps coming up and the answers keep falling short.
Maybe we're asking the wrong question. Ultimately, the answer to "why" could easily be disappointing and unsatisfying: just "because."
Goethe suggests a better question: "How does it come to be that there is this force we call ‘love’ that seems like a form of insanity, throwing our life into chaos as it makes us willing to risk life itself for our beloved?"
The question "how" demands we dig into the building blocks of love.
The science of love, according to some very smart people.
The question "how" reveals the inseparability of love, life, and chaos. Chaos is primordial; the eternal chance interactions of opposing cosmic forces.
Although meaningless, there is the potential for chaotic interactions to become meaningful and purposeful work.
This potential is expressed in Henry Adams’ "chaos breeds life" statement. It suggests that life emerges as a means for chaos to realize its enhancement potential.
Similarly, Nietzsche defines life as a force that brings numerous chaotic forces together and explains why life always begins with turbulent, chaotic convulsions and a combination of rapture, risks, thrill, and fright.
Bringing chaotic forces together, life needs the contained space of a body capable of sustaining the initial turbulence of chaotic forces.
However, if the enhancement potential in chaos is to be realized, life and its body of chaos need and breed an accomplice, the force of love.
The concept of love as a force greater than chaos and life goes back to the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. Accordingly, love is the whole of life’s power and chaotic forces working together to be something more.
Love inspires chaotic forces to work together in the hope of becoming a system of meaningful interactions.
Love transforms life’s body of chaos into a living system.
Perhaps, you, too, have felt the enhancement potential of the chaos within you attempting to bust out of your skin upon meeting someone who strikes your fancy.
That's what falling in love feels like.
The reasons why you love someone are also present at the quantum scale.
Love in quantum physics holds protons and neutrons together, transforming them into something more, a nucleus greater than the sum of its parts.
Quantum love grows from a nuclear force to the force holding electrons and protons together in electromagnetic fields.
Despite the complexities of love, the fundamentals of love remain constant. Learning them requires our heightened sensitivity to the unbroken love that runs from the quantum nucleus to the tender nucleus of your heart.
When you truly love someone, there's work to do.
From quantum to human love, mutual commitment and caring must manifest in learning how to work together, reciprocally exchanging energy and matter vital to the unity of your love life.
When you and your beloved learn how to work together, maintaining and enhancing your unity as lovers, your love becomes a continuation and an integral part of the synergy that holds everything together.
Participating in keeping love’s enhancement winning streak alive, you will feel that connection to cosmic nebulae, nymphs, and other interstellar lovers; you will feel the whole of cosmic and biological life.
This is not cause for feeling insignificant. In contrast, the real disappointment would be to live without ever experiencing the exaltations of love.
Get busy: study, savor, and build love — your life and the life of humanity depends on it.
Stephen J Almada, Ed.D. Health Psychologist and author of Exercise, Life, & Love: The Making of a Sedentary Society. For more information, visit his website.
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