How to Never Fall in (Unrequited) Love Again
A few lessons from history and neuroscience
In every language, every culture, every bucolic village or booming metropolis, humans use the same language for love — we “fall” in love. We don’t rise up to love. Love is something we capitulate to. We do not choose it.
Or so the language of love teaches us.
I blame it on those pesky Romantics. (Always blame it on the writers and artists.) In almost every romantic storyline, a character with an unfulfilled desire for someone moves the plot forward. And that plot often culminates in a tragic ending.
Unrequited love drove Madame Bovary to swig arsenic. In Great Expectations, Pip is smitten with the cold-hearted Estella, but she never returns his love. In The Age of Innocence, Olenska is so tortured by her desire for Newland that she risks ostracization from society through a scandalous divorce. And Sappho threw herself off the Leucadian cliffs after Phaon rejected her.
Sappho clearly chose the fall. These stories become our stories.
But writers are not entirely to blame. The ancient Greeks had their share of mischievous love mascots. Eros was the love child of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and Ares, the god of war. Babies armed with arrows are always up to no good…
