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I don’t think love is innate. Feelings towards a certain person cannot, however, be defined by any sort of logical process. The very fact that you ‘define love as that thing you know you are in when you are in it’ points to the fact that you like to define things.

Love cannot be defined as love is not a definite thing. It is an ephemeral, intangible ‘something’ that you can feel, but not touch. Something that can hurt you without leaving so much as a scratch, that can make you laugh and cry at the same time, that can give you a higher feeling of euphoria than any drug (at least any I’ve tried).

You are not unable (forgive the double negative) to fall in love. No-one is. But you may want to leave your left brain behind where love is concerned.

All that said, I dunno like, just coz someone is able to do something doesn’t mean they will ever actually do it. But you’re an alright guy so I hope you do someday.

I think love is probably a bit like faith- most atheists I know find true believers to be a little bit silly and wonder why anyone would believe in all that mumbo-jumbo. Likewise, many logicians try to quantify love with a rational explanation, a combination of hormones and biological imperatives and psychological needs. This is like trying to quantify humour: once you break a joke into its constituent parts, it ceases to be funny.

Poets have spent two millennia trying to define love, and still haven’t got it pinned down. Much like God and morality, it’s something each person has to define for themself.

One of my best friends, Joe, is a love atheist. He just sees the world in a very cool, calculating way. He thinks people in love are suffering from temporary insanity. It can’t happen to him because he holds the entire concept in contempt. At least you’re open to the possibility, but you often try to break things down into rational, digestible parts, and if that’s the way your brain works, then it may be that is incompatible with the irrationality that often comes with being in love.

Try to look at the bright side- if you never fall in love with anyone, they’ll never tear your heart out and stomp on it while laughing at how pathetic you are for thinking they might care about you.

It’s all good, baby!

I think you nailed it yourself. When you do, you’ll know. That to me says that you are capable OF it just might not understand how it happens.

But then the entire point is that you don’t understand how it happens, it just does.

Someone once asked me how I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Louise, my response: Because I can’t think of NOT, was the closest I think I’ve come to trying to define how I feel.

I think some people are more likely to fall in love than others but I don’t think anyone CAN’T. They just might not meet the right person.

Or you could meet that person tomorrow in the supermarket.

Love is whatever you define it as being. If you say that you care for people deeply, why isn’t that the definition of love for you? It almost seems like you’ve got an expecation of what you should feel or experience.

I don’t buy the theory that logic is the antithesis to love. It implies that love is an emotion that logically-minded people cannot experience; that somehow you need to be irrational to feel it. Psychopaths don’t feel love (or any other emotions related to other people for that matter). I’m pretty sure you’re not a psychopath - there’s hope for you yet. ;)

Logic is not the anthesis to love, and logically-minded people can feel love as much as the rest of us, but you cannot explain love using logic, as much of it is illogical. And I don’t know any psychopaths, but I’m pretty sure they can fall in love too. Have you not seen ‘Natural Born Killers’?!

I have had to delete my comment on the grounds that it was simply nauseating.

Who says that caring deeply about someone isn’t love?

Everyone has a different experience of love, and that feeling can change depending on the other person involved and the status of that relationship.

There are also different kinds of love. The love that you have for a family member or a friend is (and should be, in the majority of cases) different from the kind that you have for a (sexual) partner.

Love may well be fairly easily defined as “that thing you know you are in when you are in it” but for me that doesn’t quite cover it.

So if you want to be logical about it, what is it that you’re expecting to feel when you fall “in love” with someone?

To find them attractive/beautiful? To want to have a sexual relationship with them? To enjoy their company/want to spend a significant amount of time with them? To “miss” them if you’re not able to spend some time with them for a while? To feel the urge to contact them whenever something good/bad happens/you miss them/just because? To feel better/happier/smile when you think about/see/talk to them? To want to protect/care for/be there for that person? To want them to be happy? To do whatever you can to achieve that?

What else other than the above are you looking for from “love”?

Or are you just expecting some sort of fairy tale thunderbolt from the blue where you catch the eye of someone across the room and instantly know that they’re the one you want to spend the rest of your life with?

Don’t get me wrong, that stuff can and does happen, but the fact that it hasn’t happened that way for you doesn’t mean that you’re not in/haven’t been in love. It’s a sneaky fucker. It creeps up on you in unexpected ways, and can and does pretend to be other stuff just to throw you off the track.

Sure, the whole Romeo and Juliet “I’ll die if I’m not with you” kind of love is seen as the ultimate thing to aim for, but that’s not necessarily a healthy thing. Love is rarely fatal, even though it might feel like it when things go wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with shooting for the moon, but it’d be a shame to focus so much on that, that you miss/don’t appreciate what you actually have.

Some languages have a shedload of words to cope with the many and varied things that ‘love’ has to mean in English.

Leaving aside love not connected to a ‘partner’ relationship (such as maternal love, etc), there are two distinct phenomena.

You have to bear in mind that we are the product of evolution. As remarkably complex creatures mentally, compared to our very-near genetic relatives, evolution required/requires a mechanism to get us to procreate - or our genes die out. The ‘falling in love’ phenomenon is evolution’s mechanism for prompting a sexual encounter - and more than that, increasing the chance that a bond will form creating a familial environment most likely to support and protect our offspring up until they are able to pass the genes on themselves.

I’ve been in love. I know it feels like a meeting of souls, that you’ve found that one true person who’s right for you, but it’s not. It’s sexually based. Before anyone rushes to disagree, the proof is in the simple fact that (mature, mentally healthy) humans do not ‘fall in love’ with people of a gender they aren’t sexually oriented towards (even if, as sometimes happens, the falling accompanies a revelation about one’s sexuality).

Similarly, it’s possible to fall in love repeatedly, with different people. So falling in love absolutely cannot be the mark of finding the one person, the ‘soul-mate’ who is ‘right’ for you.

Interesting aside, the neurochemical changes (and they are documented and measurable) involved in falling in love can be as potent as, and have as great an impact on rationality as some illegal drugs. And this can be going on in your brain for months.

And ultimately, this sort of love is a feeling. And as such, it’s morally neutral. Feelings aren’t good or bad, it is only choices and behaviour that are. I’ve mentioned this once before here, but it’s on topic: treating someone with love when you feel loving towards them is a no-brainer - it’s following the path of least resistance, like throwing a punch at them when you’re angry. Far more difficult, and IMHO therefore noble, is treating them in a loving manner regardless of feeling, like when you’re hurt, or angry.

This is the second sort of love - one that is nothing to do with feeling - but about how you choose to treat someone. In that respect, the word ‘love’ is like the word ‘trust’ - saying you trust someone can mean you feel that they are trustworthy - or you can choose to treat someone with trust contrary to your instincts on how they will behave. Love can either be an expression of a feeling (which we cannot control) or a choice - which we can.

Adrian, falling in love is a remarkably potent experience, and part of the human condition, so you may want to experience it… but on the other hand, it’s just an evolutionary-based characteristic, like sexual jealousy or territoriality. Human rationality is the one thing of any real value in our existence - in fact you can argue that our rational consciousness is the same thing as our existence. So evolution’s attempts to undermine or overcome your choices to make you breed can be viewed as just that.

Conversations with couples who are in a relationship that has survived and prospered long term have a common thread that it’s not being ‘in love’ any more that has kept them going - it’s the more mature, choice-based love.

Oh, and romantic, falling-in love can be addictive. It’s a brain-chemistry altering thing.

All in all, there’s not that much going for it… If you never fall in love, that doesn’t stop you at all from having a genuine, successful, long-term loving relationship, and one that starts out without the handicap of choosing a partner while in a euphoric, almost hallucinating state…

are you worried that you haven’t fallen in love yet (or at least, don’t think you have)? because i see that as your question/worry/problem and believe me, it either happens - or it doesn’t.

i’m married and divorced twice and only realised at the age of 38 that i’d never loved a man before and that realisation only came about when i met Q at euston station.

great place for falling in love.

your friend is wrong.

love isn’t logical, it’s chemical.

First, that’s not only a truly harsh but also a very blinkered thing to say.

I must admit, though, that I have thought along these lines. I’ve been in love twice - or at least that’s what I used to think before people began to put doubts in my mind that love had been the emotion I was feeling during those times.

However, as previous commenters have said, no one can tell you about love, because it’s an experience that’s individual and unique to each one of us, and therefore only we can know when it happens. Part of the problem is that love and relationships have become too much of a currency in our lives - highly idealised in just about everything we see, hear and read. We end up not thinking we’re in love because we’re not all hearts and flowers and a permanent glow 24 hours a day. Well, I’m jaded and cynical, so even love didn’t make me feel like that. Go figure.

This doesn’t make me any more decisive, however. I’m still not certain whether I’ve been in love or whether I ever will be, but at least I’m pretty sure that when I experience the emotions that do strange things to my brain, that’ll be it.

Thank you Pix, that was what I was aiming for. Deep caring seems like a laudable start. I should imagine that if marriages were based on deep caring rather than mad passionate love, they would probably be a bit more stable. I imagine that people who get married after having been together for years, rather than after falling madly in love and rushing into marriage, are generally built on a deeper foundation. My own experience of the latter certainly suggests that this is probably true.

Then again, Adrian, you’re not even 30 yet - what could you possibly know about love?!

i love apple crumble.

After re-reading that a few times and finally getting over how mean it is and wondering whether that was sent by a “friend” or just an online person, I thought of this: maybe mean person just didn’t use their words properly. Maybe mean person actually meant to say, “You can’t deny that you are a THINKER. Love is the antithesis of THINKING.”

That would make a bit of sense and would hold true for how you approach it; you think too much. You think that you should be able to know by the sum of factors x, y and z that what you are experiencing = love. But love is not thinking, love if feeling, as frustratingly early 80’s cock rock that is.

Also perhaps they meant Thinking’s brother, RATIONAL. Being rational has no place in deciding love = true.

I don’t know. Just a theory.

If there’s one thing worse than a friend who is ‘mean’, it’s one who shirks from being honest while discussing things such as love, money and music. Adrian admits he’s not fallen in love in his thirty years of life. Is it mean for me to muse, along with him, about the reasons for that? Sure, I could have said you haven’t met the right person or some other soothing platitude, but that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth is, Adrian may never fall in love. I hope he does, but he might not, and if I had to avoid saying that because that’s mean, then I think I’d lose value as a friend to Adrian.

Besides, from my perspective, you and I just said pretty much the same thing: Overly rational people may not be able to fall in love because it’s not a rational state of mind. That doesn’t mean I think Adrian CAN’T, in fact in many ways he’s a very emotional guy. We were just chatting. I’m sure he’d tell me if he thought I was being mean.