What could make you fall in love again?

Home - Quora Link

A2A, I’ve been trying to work out the underlying structure of love for a little while now.

Now I’m fairly sure that love is an act of faith. Something you do in the hopes that it will turn out the way you want it to, and keep turning out that way in the future.

Some people believe in love, some people don’t. For people that believe in love, they naturally find it easy to fall in love.

Who someone chooses to fall in love with has two components, physical and mental. Love requires both components to work out. Physical is easy, mental is tougher. Falling in love is having faith that the person you fell in love with either already has, or can eventually be persuaded to have, a compatible mindset.

When a breakup happens, the severity of said breakup is precisely how bad your faith in love has been broken. People believe in love because the alternative, a life conducted on pure economic terms, treating sex and emotions as bargaining chips, is too awful to contemplate. So after a heartbreak, your mind slowly licks its wounds until it’s ready to love again.

Once it’s ready, your mind will pick someone to fall in love with and you’ll suddenly be in love again. I don’t think conscious choice plays much role in it.

Once you fall in love, you start making emotional investments, the goal being for those investments to pay off at some point in the future. You allow yourself to get taken advantage of, today, in hopes of having the feelings eventually returned. It’s a fundamentally irrational thing to do, the likelihood of it working out is never all that great. But the alternative is worse, so we delude ourselves into continuing to invest until the other person makes it clear that they are not worthy targets of your ardor.

At present, I’d say my faith in love is being tested. It hasn’t been broken, but it’s being tested about as hard as it’s ever been. I think maybe if my current faith initiative doesn’t work out, I might consider switching religions, and take a look at polyamory. Everything I’ve read about polyamory seems to indicate that if you try to do it with ‘squares’, you’ll wind up either breaking people’s hearts or sneak around behind their backs. Otherwise you have to stick to the polyamorous ‘tribe’. That’s not a tradeoff I’m eager to make, but maybe I’m making more out of it than it is.