Love isn’t something that just happens. It’s a choice
The concept of falling in or out of love takes away people’s agency and control
Falling in love is seen as something we don’t really have any power over. It’s simply something that happens to you, whether that’s due to chemicals or something less tangible that goes on above our realms of understanding. (It’s just chemicals.) It’s in the phrase itself — the feeling of free-falling, of losing control, of it happening to you rather than making the choice yourself. Edmund Spenser’s 16th century epic The Faerie Queen is an early example of the phrase itself:
Both Scudamor and Arthegal
Doe fight with Britomart
He sees her face; doth fall in love
And soone for her depart
It’s true that in the initial stages of loving someone, there is a sense of powerlessness over how one feels. Hence all the expressions: to fall in love, to feel crazy about someone, to be make one go wild. The expectation that love happens to us, rather than being something we decide to happen to us, is partly backed up by the chemistry. There are apparently three chemical stages of love, described by Dr. Helen Fisher and her team of scientists at Rutger University in New Jersey: lust, attraction, and attachment. (The word love, incidentally, originally stems from the Proto-Indo-European and has the triple meaning of love, care, and desire, which, when reversed, quite nicely correlate to these three stages.) In the first stage, you fall for someone initially because an increase in your testosterone levels make you want to, ahem, give the person a bit of the old ‘ow’s yer father. Once this stage has happened (assuming the sex is good, I guess), three different chemicals lead you into the attraction phase of love. These are dopamine (also activated by exercise and nicotine. Does this mean smoking’s akin to falling in love?), adrenaline, and serotonin, a chemical that can make you go a bit mental and causes the brain to get jumbled, meaning you can’t formulate your sentences properly or think straight. They’re the same chemicals which give rise to many of the cliches about love: not being able to think about anything but them, wanting to be with them all the time, losing your appetite and the ability to sleep.
And finally, after attraction, or the honeymoon phase as it’s often known, attachment kicks in. Two chemicals play a role in this phase: oxytocin, released during orgasms, which helps people bond (so have more sex, guys); and vasopressin, which plays an important part in making sure your kidney functions properly but is also released after sex and helps the bonding process. Oxytocin is also an important chemical which gets released during child birth, helping cement the bond between mother and child. Because of this dual function, it’s assumed many people, whether consciously or not, pick their partners based on whether or not they believe them to have good genetics to pass on to their children.
Obviously, there’s a couple problems with this theory. It doesn’t take into account asexuality, for a start. If there are people out there who have no desire to have sex, how can they experience the initial lustful pangs of desire which then develop into something more? How could Todd fall in love with Yolanda? Moreover, it suggests that some deeper desire to reproduce is the main factor that moves people from the attraction to the attachment stage, evidently problematic considering there are many people in long-term relationships who have no desire to have children.
I can’t solve these problems; I shan’t attempt to. My problem, though, is that stage three, attachment, is treated in our society like the first two — as something outside of your control; that all one has to do is wait around until Mx Right comes along and everything just works. (Maybe it’s common knowledge that this isn’t how it works, but I have the feeling a lot of people still think this way because of what films and sitcoms have taught us, and anyway, it’s my blog, so piss off.) But this isn’t true. There is no one person that fits. Love is a choice, as I read in a brilliant article on marriage recently. So much of relationships is choosing to make it work, rather than simply waiting around for it to get better; wanting it to get better is obviously important, but making the decision to make it better is more important. The French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, AKA Stendhal, had a similar love timeline, beginning with an initial period of idealisation of the other person, a second period of doubt, and then the final ‘crystallisation’ of love. Moving beyond the doubt period, and making the decision to love someone, presumably leads to this crystallisation.
And this is a much nicer thought, actually. Stuff that gets given to you on a platter is never as satisfying as stuff you’ve worked really hard to preserve, to improve. There is of course something romantic about the image of seeing someone across the bar, or in the street, or [insert your perfect location here], meeting and getting to know them, and having the feeling that it just functions, that they are the person for you. But there’s something much, much more romantic — not to mention much more realistic —a bout making the decision to be together. Even if the initial stages of lust and attraction are decided for you by hormones, there is a decision to be made in the final, and most rewarding stage. Choosing someone, and sticking at it; every day choosing once again to be with them, to make those compromises, to be better; to adapt to a totally different person who has their own desires, inconsistencies, flaws and feelings — that’s more impressive, and a better love story, too.
To some extent, you decide to fall out of love, too. I read an extremely wise Quora answer recently about a married couple who had the feeling they were falling out of love. Rather than let this feeling destroy their relationship, rather than throwing in the towel, they made a conscious effort to fall back in love. They made time to do things just the two of them, even if it was only once a month; they consciously started telling each other they loved each other more frequently. At the end of the post, the author wrote ‘When you just keep acting like you feel in love eventually you will again.’ I love this thought: that everything is a choice, and that feelings we can’t control — like not having such a strong feeling of love for your partner as you did before — can be mitigated, even reversed, by our actions.
In the end, if you believe in free will (of which more later), everything comes down to choices. We obviously don’t control what comes after we make those choices, but feeling like we can take control of our lives, particularly of our love lives, means that the cliches of love are dispelled and something more beautiful takes their place. The notion of choosing someone, and choosing them over and over, all the time, is much more satisfying than thinking it was all down to fate. And the knowledge that someone does it for you, that they make a decision not just to be with you, but to love you, is humbling, and far more romantic than the idea that love simply comes and goes on a whim. Someone needs to make a sitcom about that.
