Chemistry of Love

Translated from the Persian original.

Chemistry of Love

I dedicate this piece to all those who deserved, and still deserve, something better than what has been sold to them in the name of love. Right at the start I'd like to say honestly that love, as I see it, is nothing more than those few well-known hormones in the mechanism that urges humankind to reproduce and then to protect mate and child, for the survival of the species and the raising of humanity's average lifespan. But what does it matter toward what trivial end in human evolution this transcendence came about? Love is transcendent, and it's short-sighted for anyone to say that, because it came about along the path of evolution and the survival of the species, as a genetic mutation, it may be regarded as just as meaningless.

In love, as I see it, there are three components, which I'll turn to below, but before that I'll point once more to the reason for writing this text. In my opinion, the way this subject of love is so pervasive and so contested in the world, and people's poetic and popular stampede toward it, and the short-sighted, nonsensical theories about this instinct, have instilled in people a view of love that is immeasurably far from reality, wrong and sickly, which has made people at times pitifully vulnerable to it, or unable to touch and enjoy it, or even, out of sheer pessimism, afraid of it.

1. Chemistry
In the course of human evolution, to protect society and, following from it, the family, and to give man and woman the motivation to support the slow-growing human child, a series of hormones was added to their brain mechanism through genetic mutations, to attach couples to each other and make them dependent on one another. Nature's aim in this was to raise the average length of survival, but its side effect for humans, which was never in nature's plan at all, is a transcendence called love, and over the years, after this transcendence, civilization realized its value and began to promote and praise it, mostly through art. Given all this, we have to accept that love, before anything else, is nothing but chemistry. Now I say, if love is merely chemistry, we might as well call it reproduction software. On the other hand, if you don't accept this chemistry-and-evolution option at all and believe it is a purely divine gift that was simply there from the beginning, then I won't call the next two options love either; I'll call it, say, orange. Because, as I said above, in my view it is all three of these together that make up what is called love. Continuing with the chemistry component, I should say that if we accept it, you can only consider yourself in love with someone you definitely have chemistry with, that is, you like their smell, you like their looks and everything about them that has to do with physical contact, from touch to its more advanced stages; otherwise you are not loving them, you are oranging them.

2. Infatuation
If we accept that we have chemistry with someone, and that this part is entirely earthly, as with all other living creatures, we surely know that a powerful part of infatuation is chemical as well, and it was human civilization that recognized it as transcendent. One question comes before all the others: what is it in someone that you become infatuated with, and are there stages and growth in the kind and quality of this infatuation? My answer is that as long as everything in your relationship is fine, it doesn't matter at all what earthly, instinctive or superficial thing in someone you've become infatuated with, but all the deceptions begin right here: the moment one person loses their reasons for staying in the relationship, the other begins to suffer a torture-like torment and doesn't even know where this pain comes from, and this is where the profession of poets and the duty of broken-hearted lovers demand that they start putting forward illusory, imaginary reasons and baseless analyses. But the reality, as I see it, is that one fraction of this pain is certainly the chemical pain of withdrawal from the hormone oxytocin, and phenylethylamine, and the dopamine they produce, which no longer reaches the brain; which, well, takes time to withdraw from, and sometimes replacing people brings people local relief, and of course this is just like quitting an addiction to one drug by getting addicted to other, weaker drugs. Believe me, even if you quit exercising, your brain and body have become dependent on it and you'll go through a period of depression afterward. But the other, larger fraction of infatuation is the pain of withdrawal from perfection; that is, you experience a degree of perfection and growth in someone, and when they leave you, you are no longer aroused by anything less than that, and this may torment you for a long time, and naturally you are no longer satisfied with anything less, nor can it be replaced. In short, nothing but our own growth can help us overcome the pain of losing a person more complete than ourselves. And again this is where the poets and engineers of love invite you to seclusion and waiting, advice that leads you from where you are toward no perfection at all. But let's go back to civilization and accept that, after all the adventures and thrills, what people want from love is peace. So how does a person with healthy emotions and enough growth experience this component of infatuation? The answer is affection, something both civilization and nature invite you to. We can pass through the stage of infatuation by giving and receiving affection, that is, from the start, make ourselves slaves to our partner's affection and make them our slave with our affection, and then it makes no difference whether this whole process lasts a week and ends for some reason or goes on for a long time. In fact, what I mean is that we become slaves to nothing in people but affection, and this seems to be a healthy way of being in love, one that both tempers nature's wildlife definition of love and increases what people gain from however long they stay in a relationship; and above all, affection is a quality every kind soul in the world knows, and you have never lost anything from twenty days of being exposed to affection, even after it has ended. In other kinds of infatuation you have taken part in a game and probably feel you've lost it, but if you've received affection from anyone, even for an hour, it bears no resemblance to losing.

3. Commitment
It's strange to learn that commitment, too, was added in nature, over the course of evolution, toward increasing the quantity, not the quality, of survival, and stranger still to learn that humans are among the handful of animals on earth in whose evolution and nature monogamy has not been ingrained, and once again it was human civilization's proposal that people choose or take a single spouse. So when we talk about commitment we should be well aware that we're talking about a contract, and if someone so-called cheats in a relationship, they have done exactly as bad a thing as dumping trash on a city street. But come and see what a booming trade poets do in betrayal in their works. Once again, one question comes first: what are you committed to? To a person, to a relationship? And doesn't this mean you are promising someone that your feelings won't slip? That is, you are making a promise to someone on behalf of someone else? Or perhaps you are promising your partner that if your feelings do slip, you'll hold yourself back and stay committed? In that case too, it doesn't seem that if at night you honestly describe this stirring of your feelings to your partner and tell them that despite it you did nothing, they will be proud of you; naturally, by telling this truth you will only dishearten them. So why shouldn't we watch over our feelings, and stay committed to our own feelings instead of to our partner?

In closing, I'll say that these are merely my personal views on the subject of love, and their only merit was that they approached it responsibly, carefully, and without any poeticizing.

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