What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
So I don’t know about you all, but I’m no closer to understanding love than before I started my research. Is it situational insanity — a folie à deux? Is it just chemistry àla pheromones? (Ooo, baby you smell goooood… I want you.) Is it a biological imperative intended to delude and paralyze us long enough to mate and propagate the species?
Who the hell knows?
My rational, practical side just goes into spasms over this unquantifiable, almost indescribable feeling. It doesn’t make sense. I like things to make sense. And when I’m in love, I hate the sensation of knowing I’m not thinking just with my brain.
But maybe love is meant to unify the brain and the body. Most emotions have a primary director/processor that begins with the brain. For example, if I’m pissed, the feeling usually springs directly from an action that my brain interprets as hostile and then attempts to resolve. My body may have a response (headaches, rise in blood pressure, etc.) but that response is secondary to what I’m thinking.
Love, on the other hand, probably doesn’t require half as much thought. It’s an emotion of the body, and the brain gets to come along and enhance the ride, if you only let it. That’s no doubt hard on the brain, which is used to processing cause and effect to arrive at a solution. As near as I can tell, there’s no solution for love — and why would you want one?
Seems to me the Universe always functions in pairs: light & dark, pleasure & pain, chocolate & peanut butter. Maybe love is supposed to teach us to balance the body & the brain, to unify their purpose to create something more than the sum of its parts.
Then again, maybe I’m just insane.
Who the hell knows?
My rational, practical side just goes into spasms over this unquantifiable, almost indescribable feeling. It doesn’t make sense. I like things to make sense. And when I’m in love, I hate the sensation of knowing I’m not thinking just with my brain.
But maybe love is meant to unify the brain and the body. Most emotions have a primary director/processor that begins with the brain. For example, if I’m pissed, the feeling usually springs directly from an action that my brain interprets as hostile and then attempts to resolve. My body may have a response (headaches, rise in blood pressure, etc.) but that response is secondary to what I’m thinking.
Love, on the other hand, probably doesn’t require half as much thought. It’s an emotion of the body, and the brain gets to come along and enhance the ride, if you only let it. That’s no doubt hard on the brain, which is used to processing cause and effect to arrive at a solution. As near as I can tell, there’s no solution for love — and why would you want one?
Seems to me the Universe always functions in pairs: light & dark, pleasure & pain, chocolate & peanut butter. Maybe love is supposed to teach us to balance the body & the brain, to unify their purpose to create something more than the sum of its parts.
Then again, maybe I’m just insane.
posted by Delhui at 10:39 PM
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