I Could Be Wrong, But…

Why do people fall in love?

And for that matter, why do we say that people fall in love?

Why don’t people climb into love? They climb into bed, why not climb into love? Why don’t we romp into love? Skate into love? Slide into love? Or just plain arrive at love?

How we describe the movement from Point A, (not being in love) to Point B, (being in love) may say something important about living in a state of love.

Falling is a downward movement. I’ve fallen down stairs, fallen into despair, fallen into debt, fallen off the wagon, fallen in with a bad crowd and have even fallen from grace. All of those falls hurt, left physiological and psychological scars, and cost money. Ah, ha! Is that why we call it falling into love?

Language matters. America is the New World, and it is different from Europe, the Old World. That difference is evident in language. In America, we make decisions. In Europe and elsewhere (usually former colonies of European nations) they take decisions. No one in the New or Old or Third Worlds ever admits they fall into decisions, do they? But when it comes to love, it seems universal, common to all cultures, all languages, to describe the journey from not loving to loving, as one of falling—of being out of control.

I could be wrong, but after four decades of wandering on this planet and watching the inhabitants, I am convinced that there is nothing here, organic or inorganic, that is more complex than I am. (With the possible exception of the instruction booklet that came with my VCR.)

I am also convinced that each and every person on this planet is just as complex I am.

Will Rogers claimed to be a simple man. He also claimed that he never met a man he did not like. Will Rogers was a humorist. Humorists play with the truth to find meaning, unlike philosophers who play with truth for fun. My point is, even the people who claim to be simple, as Will Rogers did, are in fact, outrageously complex.

You cannot figure out anyone.

Try it. Pick someone at random, or pick yourself, for that matter. Pick that buxom brunette in the checkout line at Victoria’s Secret and spend your life trying to figure out that one person. You won’t.

The best you’ll do is arrive at a vague, sporadically insightful misunderstanding of them. But you won’t know that one person from Adam. Or Eve.

For once, Man is not responsible for and did not create this mess.

Nature is to blame. This universal equality of human complexity is no more than Nature, once again, using its tricks—like evolution, competition, and quantum leaps of dumb luck—to look out for itself. Nature takes care of Numero Uno, first, last and all the time between.

Why would Nature do this to us—make us so diverse and complex? Simple: to ensure that we would last a very long time, perhaps all the way until the next huge meteor smashes into this planet—so Nature could take a break before having to devise a new vehicle for it’s propagation.

What?

All I’m saying is this: Nature, not Madison Avenue, coined the supreme phrase of understatement, "Some assembly required." I would prefer that everyone, including me, were a hell of a lot simpler. At the very least, I think we should each come into this world with written instructions, a manual of some sort we can refer to. (But if the English-German-Japanese madman who wrote the manual for my VCR writes it, forget about it.)

No one ever reads instructions anyhow.

Take sex. Two people making love, i.e., having sexual intercourse—that’s a snap, piece of cake, easy as pi. That’s why we say they "make" love. Making love is a choice, and it has a beginning, middle and end, each stage of which presents both (all?) participants with a wealth of other choices.

We can take love, too. Or give it. We can even give it in a variety of styles, from free love to tough love to unrequited love.

Sex is straightforward. Sure, we’re all equally complex, but when push comes to shove, bump comes to grind, we all want to get laid.

Sex happens a lot. Love doesn’t. For good reasons.

Getting off together is easy; being in love with someone is like so totally more difficult!

Given every individual’s intense, insular, integral complexity, consider the odds against any two people simultaneously achieving mutual love.

If the people in Vegas could stage a race to see which would happen first: any two humans becoming mutually in love, or an infinite number of monkeys banging on typewriters knocking out Shakespeare’s Hamlet—to the letter—I’d put my money on the monkeys.

Except for one thing. The race is fixed. Nature slipped a Mickey into each and every one of us. Nature invented the first and most powerful Date Rape drug. It’s called love. That’s why the monkeys typing Hamlet haven’t a chance.

Recently, after failing to get my new VCR to work, I gave up and turned on the television to watch what is called "the news". All five stations I flipped across (I don’t buy cable) did stories on recent scientific reports (too complex for ordinary folk to decipher without the aid of brilliant television journalists) wherein scientists claim there is mounting evidence that when a person is in love—they are in fact in a definite state of dementia, temporarily but factually insane, or at the very least, suffering the effects of a neurological chemical imbalance.

Which makes me wonder, don’t these people ever read poetry? They could have reached the same conclusion faster and cheaper and spent the saved money on AIDS research.

We are all predisposed toward that whacked out state of being we call "in love". This is why we "fall" in love— without that chemical anomaly, that temporary insanity, that urge to be inebriated, to be flooded with massive releases of endorphins that Nature builds into each of us, no two people would ever choose to be in love with each other. It’s way too complex. And it hurts, leaves physiological and psychological bruises, and costs money.

But we’re addicts. Nature addicted us to love because if we weren’t men would watch televised sports until they turned to dust on their sofas; women would shop until they dropped; kids would stay outside on summer nights playing tag and spin the bottle so long that they wouldn’t go home until they were grownups and felt an urge to watch televised sports or go shopping...

What?

Better wrap this up.

Love only comes to us when we lose control of ourselves.

I wish this were not so. Being in love, unlike being happy, content, relaxed, sleepy, silly or sated is uncomfortable, often irritating, sometimes down right maddening.

And this covers all the kinds of being in love: romantic love, a parent’s love for a child, a child’s love for a parent; any kind of love between two of these equally, extremely, complex beings we call humans. (And for those of you who think that age matters, and that children are simple, you must never have had an argument with a four year old, or had a six-year-old fall out of his bed first thing in the morning, land on the cold wood floor and look up at you and say, "I dreamed my life was in fast-forward!")

Is this built-in propensity to lose self-control in certain biologically predetermined situations our real "tragic flaw"? Would we be gods—Nietzsche’s supermen—Rand’s rational capitalist geniuses—if we strolled into love, or did a rumba into love—eyes wide open and rational faculty purring confidently—rather than fell into it?

With love, as with its twin sister, comedy—timing is everything.

Unrequited love? Messy; even dangerous. One person "falling" out of love before the other has? Messy, dangerous, and almost always expensive.

While it’s true that much of our planet has been traveled to, explored, mapped, colonized and exploited by heartbroken men and women in search of release from their misery, over all, the damage done by ill-timed fallings in or out of love far exceeds the empires built and wonderful travel memoirs written by the love-lorn.

What a military-industrial complex we have built from the conflicts caused by two people falling in and out of love!


While I have no suggestions to prevent the chaos of falling in love, I do have a suggestion for handling the mess caused by falling out of love. If implemented, my plan would lead to a better world, a world without divorce courts, pre-nuptial agreements, divorce lawyers, marital therapists and Cosmopolitan magazine.

It’s really quite simple. All we do is to handle falling out of love in the same fail-safe way we now handle the launching of nuclear missiles.

Like this:

A man and woman seeking the dissolution of their romantic union stand ten feet apart. Each inserts a unique key into a security lock beneath a flashing red light. Warning horns blare, just to make them pause, make certain they know what they are about to do.

She calls out, "On my mark...One...Two.... Turn!"

He and she turn their keys simultaneously.

There is a sharp sound of air escaping a vacuum.

"Ah," she says. "Good. That’s done."

"Yup. And so cheap! Can I give you a lift to the airport?" he asks.

"Thanks, but I’ve got a taxi waiting outside. See you around."

Waving as he leaves, he calls to her, "Have a good rest of your life."

"You too," she answers, checking her watch, wondering if she has enough time to run back to the apartment, steal his CD of Louis Prima’s Greatest Hits, and make it to the airport before the plane to her future leaves...

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