Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Joel],

It’s clear that while a woman’s physical form serves an important role in determining the degree of lasting passion she generates in a guy, it doesn’t tell the whole story.  Indeed, when the right feelings occur, oddities in a lady’s physical form don’t seem to matter as much.  I don’t fully understand the psychology, though I believe strongly in the idea.  Surely the cosmetics industry would rather women not learn this because if they did, then cosmetics commerce would slow to almost no volume at all.  Imagine if the conviction became wide-spread that women only need makeup during the   first few minutes   of new relationships and that it thus plays no proven role in sustaining a love affair over the long term.  Economic calamity to be sure.  Nonetheless, in spite of the great stock people place in makeup’s perceived benefits, there’s an ineffable trait about deep attraction which appears at first to be contradictory.  But over time, whatever it is that makes us truly love someone seems unaffected by makeup, clothes, the softness of one’s skin, whether she can see, whether she can drive, Etc..  That is: Attraction in the heart of he who desires the woman seems to spawn largely from her physical form.  Yet once established, small to moderate “imperfections” in that form do not diminish the feelings initially inspired by it.  Interesting that what, in the beginning is so necessary to fan romance to life, lessens in importance later on.  Once big enough, the fire keeps burning, and no matter that the spark that started it goes out.  In fact, once the fire reaches a roaring din, the spark seems quite small and insignificant, though before ignition, that same spark was all the light there was, and was a much more prominent force.  Let’s attempt here to make that ineffable quality of true love a bit more explainable. 

The ingredients that instigate a lasting feeling of love are numerous and varied, and it appears that that “ineffable” quality of true love mentioned above is a synergy. That is: Romantic love occurs when the   lovability sum   of all these ingredients reaches a certain threshold value.  Let’s say for the sake of this discussion, that this value is 50.  But how, you might ask, can we add such items together to form a meaningful sum in the first place?  Well, let us apply a figure of merit to each.  We’ll rate each one on a scale of -10 to +10.  That is, the more desirable the particular attribute, the more positively we score it, and the less desirable, the more negative the assigned value.  Traits with positive values, when present in the prospective mate, would push us closer to falling in love with her, while those scored negatively would retard the falling.  Also, there are absolute deal-breaker traits whose appearance, no matter how infrequently, ruin any chances of falling in love.  These, I assign a value of -1000. 

Personally, I would score the ladies’ features as follows:

Now if the proposed model is true, then it has many significant implications, some of which follow:

• Rarely is a single factor responsible for producing romantic love. In my own case, it would take at least several items to produce a lovability sum of 50.  A score of 50 cannot be gotten from just one item, given the range in which each item is rated. 
• People need not be perfect to be lovable.  No human can meet in every measure the requirements of another for love.  But they don’t have to.  As long the woman offers enough desirable features, she’ll make the threshold.  Thus, we need not be perfect for another to love us. 
• Those who insist on being in love aren’t looking for someone perfect in every way.  They just want her to meet their individual lovability threshold.
• Undesirable traits do not necessary make someone fall out of love.  But if the object of desire acquires too many features that have high negative scores, her lovability sum will indeed fall too low to sustain feelings of love.  But lasting love is guaranteed as long as her lovability sum remains above the threshold value.  In this way, numerous negative qualities will not deter the love lust so long as enough positive traits remain to keep the lovability score high enough.
• Conversely, desirable traits may not induce love feelings.  This model implies that a lady may have many positive traits. And though this indeed increases her chances of being loved by more men, not all men will consider her particular good points as good enough. 
• It’s futile to try to _make_ someone fall in love.  Looking at the list above, the number of traits that the lady can create in herself by taking voluntary action is small.   Such uncontrollable traits include items 1, 13, 17, and 20.  Others she can manipulate, but only with great and sustained effort, including items 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 41.  Then, there are those which are widely believed to be highly controllable, such as items 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, and 16.  But these voluntarily acquired attributes may not be so voluntary, particularly when you look underneath to what drives them.  What motivates a person, for example, to maintain a healthy body or to be humble?  My impression is that we don’t choose what we   want   to do, but rather, we choose what we’re   going   to do.  So while we might rightly honor a person for the things they choose to pursue, the most important component of that choice process (the actual desire for one pursuit over another) is largely beyond the person’s control. So we should be careful not to pedestal them too high.   After all, if you accept that heartfelt desire is what fuels the greatest achievements, and also that desire itself is a gift from the universe and does not culminate from willful acts, then it follows that we have no business worshipping most successes.  Nor should we feel self-conscious around successful people since they’re only partly responsible for it.  When a person chooses in accordance with her truest desires, she’ll likely be more happy and successful than she who pretentiously pursues the thin body or fakes the desire to work for example.  She may go though the motions just fine and in fact, may raise her lovability sum for a time.  But she won’t be sincere and she’ll likely lose interest in faking rather quickly, and thus, any illusions she created in her lovers will fall away.  When you drill down to the root of the matter, much more of who we are and what we do derives from forces that are way beyond our control than it does from sheer, willful, brute-force effort.  To attempt to buck nature by pretending that we’re something that we’re not encourages short-lived romance.  It cannot succeed.  Now the act of   trying  to make someone love us, particularly when it involves deviation from our natural proclivities, won’t work either. 

This model has limited applicability due to the following:

• People have varied tastes.  Each person would score each item differently to be sure, because features have differing levels of importance to different people. Different people are seeking different things in differing degrees in their mates.
• Some fall easier than others.  Further, that threshold value to be crossed varies from person to person.  People who have lower self-esteem or are inexperienced at dating for example may set the bar lower than a perfectionist, whose self opinion is overly high.  They might settle for a [lovability sum] value of 20, in which case if a woman had wonderful legs and was thin, that’s all they’d need to fall in love. 
• The ratings of each item do not remain constant over time.  That is, as a young adult, a person tends to consider as more important the features that can directly and immediately be perceived by their senses, such as items 1 through 7 above.  They don’t care so much about how moral she is (item 30) or her education level.  But as they get older, and more dating experience comes their way, items 1 through 7 tend to diminish in importance, while the items that directly derive from her character become more desirable.  This creates the problem that one who is lovable today may not be so tomorrow.  This one’s probably not so much a limitation of the model as it is a reflection of human nature in general.  People change constantly. 
• Difficult to articulate the entire list of love-inducing factors.  Obviously, this list is by no means complete.  I could actually think of several hundred items but included only these to preserve what little brevity is left in this letter.  Also, the items on one person’s list would in all likelihood not match those on another’s.   

So until we can more objectively quantify these importance ratings, this model couldn’t be used in all situations to accurately predict who we might fall in love with.  Until then, finding true love will remain a gambling process in which the odds of it are exceptionally low.  I offer the description here only to illustrate and promote further discussion of my ideas about true love, what brings it about, and what limits it in terms of degree of intensity and duration.  And now, let’s move onward. 

Tom Hesley

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Acceptance, Attraction, Concepts, Heightism, Honesty, Letters, Lust, Physical Attraction, Self Esteem. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.