For creatures who have no natural instinct forcing adherence to the laws of monogamy, we have an innate and almost unwarranted fascination with the prospect of love.
Valentine’s Day is one major product of this interest, as we have created a day solely dedicated to celebrating the idea of love. Although mammals such as beavers, gibbons and wolves demonstrate an instinctual need to choose life partners, humans do not share that trait. Despite this, the fact remains that the institution of marriage has been hardwired into almost every modern culture and is always accompanied by the idea of true love.
The begging question is why. Why do creatures with the capacity and nagging unconscious impulses towards polygamy restrain themselves to a single lover? Why do we so often chastise those who break the bonds of marriage in pursuit of a different lifestyle, or to fraternize with multiple partners?
I suppose to truly understand the logic behind this aspect of human behavior, one would have to fully dissect and comprehend love. Sadly, that is beyond any of us, for love is endlessly mysterious. We all feel it – the capacity to do so is present in every psychologically healthy individual of our species – yet its nature is so overpowering that even minds as impressive as ours cannot possibly control something of such magnitude, something with a propensity to conquer and defeat every other sensation our minds and bodies are capable of creating.
Thus, without the ability to completely understand or accurately predict love, we are forced as a species to make decisions based solely on the causality of its consequences. Perhaps marriage is humanity’s best attempt at containing the untamed emotion that is love. Perhaps by restraining it to one physical entity, its impact on our bodies is not so ravaging. This way we need not fear its bipolar nature, and can lessen the effects and frequency of its negative byproducts while enhancing the euphoria and duration of its positive ones.
It was once said that love is a drug, but the analogy that lends itself more naturally would be a comparison of love with disease. In medical terms, love is an infection that viciously attacks the body, bypassing a helpless immune system to achieve immediate effects.
Nausea, delusional thinking, sudden stoppages of the heart and the inability to speak or form coherent thoughts are all well-documented symptoms of love. Its power to quickly degenerate a person’s mental state is unrivaled and leaves a person with only one thought on their mind: being with the object of their affection. Therefore, love is among the most common and potent ailments present in our species, but what separates it from the many other degenerative diseases is that if it is contained and directed properly, love can in fact be somewhat of a steroid for us. Any two partners in love would agree that their love has given them strength beyond anything they ever experienced prior to exposure.
Why are we so invested in something as seemingly unnecessary as love? Perhaps it is because love is the one and only thing that gives each and every one of our lives meaning. We live for those we love, to protect them so that at our weakest moments, in order to survive when we are most vulnerable, we have someone to rely on, someone who can lend us strength when we have nothing more to give. We marry so that in a world as cruel as ours, we will always have at least one person we can trust, one person who gives us a reason to push on in the most perilous moments of our lives, and support us when we need some kind of structure and stability in the chaotic adventure that is living. And even when the person we love most is the source of our greatest pain, we can find solace in the fact that love is always present, that no matter our age, race or any other aspect of our reality, love will find us again, for it has no boundaries.
As Valentine’s Day approaches, we celebrate this mysterious phenomenon. Those of us who have found love, whether temporary or permanent, must be grateful for every moment shared with our partners, and those who haven’t, look forward to the love that inevitably awaits us in the future. It is wrong to assume that there is reason behind it, there is no logic in how love affects us. The only constant is that love exists, and thankfully that will never change, for a world without love would be one of pure tragedy.
