The Anatomy of Attraction

(preceded by The Great Game)

There’s nothing quite like “that first glance”, is there? It can happen anywhere- across the street, in a library, at a bar, in a bus, at the mall, in the class, at a wedding or a party. It can happen anytime- you may know as much as the person’s favorite F.R.I.E.N.D.S character or may have never even seen him/her outside the jpeg format. It is independent of space and time. People even say it is beyond the concept of space-time. The time-warped incidental turn, the momentary meet of the eyes, the treacherous, beguiling smile and the instinctive dismissive shirk away followed by the heart-stopping, mind-numbing, soul-sucking realization that he/she is the one. Right? 

Wrong! That’s just common sense leaving your body.

Let me explain.

The world, and I mean particularly the movies and the media, has fed us such spruced up, mesmerizing, idyllic and fascinating versions of romance that we all, invariably at some point or another, have felt like (or fancied being) characters from a YRF movie or a Nicholas Sparks book. Practically however, the entire notion of “the one” is farce, a dumb façade and a statistical fraud that we fool ourselves into believing merely for the sake of convention.

Consider the fact that there are over 7 billion people on the earth. Even if you were to count every face that has ever come across your field of vision, right from your birth to this point in time, it would still be a ridiculously little percentage of humanity on the planet! Factor in the enormous gene pool, genetic diversities, personality types, behaviors, inclinations, fetishes, passions and preferences, and if you still believe that only one utterly random person can be your “soul-mate”, then you are even more mistaken than the guy who thinks Hawkeye is the coolest Avenger.

In reality however- and as heart-breaking as it may sound- much of what we perceive as the poetic exhilaration of first love is nothing more than an increased flush of dopamine, norepinephrine, adrenaline or testosterone to different organs depending merely on where one’s libido resides. The feeling is eerily similar to the euphoria experienced by gamblers, adventure sportsmen and psychedelics, with almost similar or neighboring neural centers being activated in all cases.

But why the hormone surge in the first place? And what’s so special about that one face (see what I did there)? The answer, as Sherlock quite flamboyantly puts across, is “Human Error”.

As capricious, cunning and conniving creatures, human beings are hard wired to crave for more and better, especially in matters of penny, power and pleasure. There’s an inherent bug that compels us to always lock our aim a little higher in the pegging order. This means 2s and 3s can look up to an 8 but never seriously vie for someone beyond 5, 7s only go for 8s or 9s which makes 10s the enviable jerks and bitches. The higher up you stand in this pegging order, the more exclusive you feel. Consequently, for any given number, there is a vast de facto sample space of potential ‘Wanted’ and ‘Rejects’, the two sets being mutually exclusive.

The fortunate upside to this is the fact that although the scale is fairly universal and rigid when it comes to the basic instinct (a.k.a the first glance) but it is extremely variable and flexible in matters of trust and relationship. Speaking from an evolutionary perspective, that’s precisely the reason nature didn’t just rid itself of the 1s, 2s and 3s over several centuries via natural selection.

Be that as it may, we still hate to settle or compromise, which is why once in a while, we will violate the number game and seek someone beyond our range. Luckily, there is room for that too. Or else how would there be love stories? This leads to an even more exciting turn of events, an interesting sequence of causality which- contrived and pretentious as it may seem- is fundamentally governed by The Principles of Pursuit.

(to be contd...)