What Love Is; An Essay on the Logic of Love

Love can best be described as a folder; a filing folder that is kept throughout the entirety of everyone’s life. While not everyone is capable of love, for the sake of argument we’ll say that everyone on earth has a folder. Much like when starting some home improvement project, little clippings of things get placed into the folder so that when it comes time to start building, we know the things that we like. This folder is begun at birth and from that point forward is never empty again. That is to say, from the day we are born we never go into a relationship with a completely blank slate. We begin placing little tidbits of things into the folder right from the beginning. These “tidbits” are really more like qualities, feelings, emotions, and other characteristics that have been experienced throughout life and make up one’s idea about what love is. Sometimes these characteristics aren’t even so much thing liked as things not liked. That is to say it is possible to have a relationship or interaction and decide that the trait experienced is definitely not one that will be included in the overall picture of what love is, thusly, a tidbit of what not to do is placed in the folder. Interestingly, though unexpectedly, this folder is subject to change (though rarely ever radical change) throughout the course of life. Things are always being added and taken out of the folder. Every time a new person enters one’s life or a new situation arises involving human interaction we decided that we like or dislike what has happened, decide why we liked or disliked it, and then stow that little “tidbit” away in the folder.
The question then arises, when is the folder complete? At any given moment the folder is complete. To go back to the analogy, any time the contractor is ready to start building there is a folder full of clippings to pull out which, together, paint a complete picture of what is appealing. At any time someone could walk into our life and at any time we have a complete idea of what we want love to be and thus what we want our lover to be.

So, every time someone walks into our lives there are only a couple (three to be exact) different things that can happen. The first and least likely by a long shot is what we have euphemistically entitled “love at first sight.” This is the equivalent of spending years and years compiling an extensive folder of everything you want and don’t want in your remodel project and then walking into a kitchen you’ve never seen before and realizing almost instantly that that kitchen is exactly what is in your folder. Every do and don’t has been followed to a “T,” nothing need be changed, and it is exactly what you want. If your folder of clippings were given to an artist with the instructions “paint me the perfect kitchen using all of the likes and dislikes in this folder,” this kitchen he would paint just so happens to be the kitchen you are standing in. This is the unlikely event that would need to transpire for the illusive “love at first sight” to occur. A person would need to walk into one’s life and possess every trait that was in the folder at that very moment in time as well as not possess every negative trait contained therein. Being as though, as previously mentioned, the folder is constantly changing, it is next to impossible for this to happen.

The next possible course of action one can take with a new person in their life is the most common. They are a partial match. They possess some of the qualities liked and some of the qualities disliked. From this we do a couple of things. First, we take away from the encounter/interaction/relationship new clipping to add to the folder. Second, depending on the ratio of good qualities possessed to bad qualities possessed we make friends, acquaintances, business partners, lab partners, and even boyfriends and girlfriends. We even decide who we dislike from such interactions. The majority of all the people that come in and out of our lives pass through this option. Transitioning nicely to the third and final option is the note that people can change statuses. This is possible for two reasons. First, because our folder is constantly changing thus the ratio between good qualities possessed and bad is always changing. Someone who comes into our live simply as an acquaintance can, theoretically, change into a good friend simply because the criteria they were being judged on changes in their favor. The second way it can change is similar to the first. Because the folder is always changing, and because the folder changes with many of the interactions we have, it is possible for one person, or rather one person’s quality traits to affect one’s folder such that they change their own status. We often call this, growing on someone.

The third and final option is simply just the change in statuses just discussed, taken to the extreme. This is the one option that gives hopeless romantics everywhere hope. In this option someone who initially did not meet all of the qualifications in the folder, because of their own influence on the folder, becomes the epitome of what one is looking for. This can happen in all varying degrees; obviously some more likely than others. The most often way this happens is someone is almost there to begin with. That is, they enter one’s life meeting almost all of the qualifications we have in our folder at the time in our life. These usually end up our boyfriends and girlfriends to begin with. Then, because of their influence on our folder, we then come to realize that we love them. This scenario becomes more and more unlikely, however, as the person’s starting ratio gets lower and lower. For example, if someone enters our life and we can simply tolerate them, no more and no less, we rarely end up in love with this person. It would be very unlikely for this person to influence our folders so much that they end up becoming the physical representation of what we know love to be. Even more unlikely (bordering on impossible) is to fall in love with an enemy. This brings up an unfortunate observation. In almost all cases, our folders can only be influenced be one person to a point. Our folders almost never change radically at one time or by one person. Because of this, we must conclude that it is not possible to love just anyone. Some people simply will never be compatible because our folder of qualifications will never be in line with their qualities.

Alright, so now we know how we fall in love and how unlikely it is that we not only meet someone who meets all of our qualifications that we have assembled over our entire lives but that we meet them at the exact moment in our lives when those qualities match up with the qualities they possess. The part of this equation we are now missing is that this has to happen twice. However unlikely it is that we meet Mr. or Ms. Right at exactly the right time, they have to experience the exact same phenomenon for there to be mutual love. You have to also have walked into their life at the exact right moment and possess all of the things they are looking for at that moment. If and only if these two things happen to coexist can there ever be two people in love with each other. If we accept this to be true, than it is truly a miracle that anyone falls in love with anyone that loves them back.

A final point that need be addressed in this discussion is the point of rationality and logic. Many claims are made about love such as that it is blind or that it is mysterious or that it follows no rules and is irrational and illogical. This is simply not true. For love to be illogical and irrational it would have to be random and random it most certainly is not. I pretend to make no assumptions about the way we meet people or the fait that causes people to come in and out of our lives when they do. I simply observe about the reasons we make the decisions we do. Everyone’s folder isn't different; that’s how people fall in love; they have the same folder at the same time, but everyone’s rationale for the things they put in their folder are unique and further, are rational regardless of whether or not the tidbit placed in the folder is rational. For example, a person who grows up in a home where their father abused their mother may look for abusive people when they are older. While it is not rational or logical to want to be with someone who is abusive, the reason they put that tidbit into their folder is perfectly logical. We can follow why they put it there and where it came from. Thusly, if everyone’s folder is based on logic and rationality and the only way to fall in love is via the folder, we can conclude that love is rational and logical. Further, because we know that everyone’s folder was reached though different circumstances, no two the same, it is impossible to predict what someone’s folder contains. In fact, the claim could be easily made and argued that almost no one knows what is in their own folder at any given moment. We often find ourselves looking back at past relationships and interactions wondering why we ever liked or disliked a certain person. This is proof that we didn’t know what was in our folder at the time, and still don’t know. All we know now is that it has changed such that if that person were to reenter our lives we would not categorize them the same way we did when we met them the first time.

In summary, it is not possible to know what love is specifically though we can see quite clearly where it comes from and how it came to be. It can be fallen into and out of because of many different factors though there are a few things for certain. Once someone has found another person who has the same folder as them at the exact same time, in other words, when someone finds their soul mate, often their folder stops growing, or, rather, doesn’t grow as fast and often grows along with the other person’s. It is so rare and so improbable for two people to catch each other at the exact right moment in life to fall in love that when it happens people try to hold onto it forever (known as marriage). And while it is possible to get confused and think we are in love when we are not, more often than not we find ourselves settling for something that is not love—for someone who meets some fraction of the tidbits in our folder, but not all of them. This common occurrence ends mostly in divorce as it is very hard to live with someone knowing that they aren't right. They don’t meet all of your qualifications and thus don’t make you happy—don’t complete us.

I don’t pretend to offer advice because I am in no position to give it. All I have is insight gained through much debate, thought, input and desire to understand. My opinion on this subject, much like my folder itself, is still evolving and changing; though for now I believe I am content with my understanding of what love is.

Addendum
When two people are married their folders don’t stop growing, rather, they continue to grow, however, the main contributing factors to the folder are coming from the person they are in love with. That is, as we get to know the one’s we love better, and as they change, their new qualities need be added to our folder for us to continue loving them. This seemingly happens naturally.
Because of this, we can then conclude that when we fall in love, we are falling in love with all of the qualities that we know about. Because of this, it is possible to actually be in love with someone or, sometimes, the idea of someone, until we know all of their qualities (who they really are). Unfortunately it seems that it is possible to whole heartedly believe that we are in love, and actually be in love, though upon finding out about a quality we were previously unaware of, we realize that the person we thought we were in love with actually does not meet all the requirements in our folder…and then we don’t so much fall out of love as realize that we are not in love with the person that we thought we were in love with.

Addendum II
The claim is made that you never know what’s in your own folder however the claim is also made that a person has to meet all of the qualifications in one’s folder. This raises the questions, how can you know if someone meets all of the qualifications if you don’t know what all of those qualifications are. Well, the easy answer is, you just know. While this doesn’t sound very satisfying, it makes sense. When someone annoys you, you know it. When someone is compatible with you, you also just know. When I say you don’t know what’s in your folder, what I really mean is that it is difficult to say or actually verbalize all of the things. There are a lot of them and they are of varying levels of importance and, as mentioned, are constantly changing. Because of this, is can be said that we don’t really know but when it comes down to figuring out if someone meets or doesn’t meet certain requirements, it will be rather easy.