Natural selection

Why do we meet hundreds of people throughout our lives, date many of them but only fall in love occasionally if ever? The reason is called natural selection and it's something almost all of us have experienced. We're not attracted to nor have any emotional or physical connection with most people but we do with some and we experience all those things with one.

But why? We often see couples that make no sense to us but they obviously have one or more connections with each other. Maybe our own connection doesn't even make sense to us. That's happened to me before. I fell head over heels for a woman and none of my friends could figure out why. I couldn't figure it out either except I knew how I felt and I eventually quit questioning my judgment and just accepted the facts as they were. I'm sure you've had at least one of those experiences in your life and perhaps are in one now.

Of all the strange and baffling things we encounter in our lives, falling in love is at the top of the list. We can't make ourselves fall in love with someone and we can't make them fall in love with us either. It either happens or it doesn't and even if it does, it often defies explanation. It just happens and when it does, there's no getting out of it.

Sometimes it doesn't work out and when it doesn't, that's even a bigger mystery than falling in love to begin with. One day we're king of the world and the next we're at the bottom of an abyss because the other person has decided they don't love us anymore. When that happens we don't have any answers and the loss we feel cuts to our very core. One of the biggest fallacies in the world is that time heals all wounds. When you lose someone because of rejection, the sense of loss never goes away. You think of all the good times you could have had, how you could have made their lives so much better and the realization that you're never going to have the chance to do that is poison to your soul.

That's why, after a breakup, some people build fences around their hearts and refuse to let anyone else in. The pain they experienced in losing the love of their life cut too deep and hurt too bad to ever want to risk it again. So they close the door to romance and live in the afterglow of a lost love that they believe was perfect in every way.

There are few things more devastating than to hear the person you're in love with tell you that they're not in love with you anymore because we don't understand how that can happen. When you fall in love with someone, it's supposed to be forever. That's what lives and marriages are based on. So if you can be in love with someone one day and not be the next, that destroys the whole premise. But it sometimes happens.

Being in love should be exciting. It should fill you with hope and optimism in facing tomorrow with your soulmate by your side, ready to take on anything and everything life has to throw at you because you're committed to each other. The problem is we're aware of our own commitment but are never really sure about the other person's commitment to us. One of the most hurtful things in life is to be all in only to find out that the other person isn't.

But if they are, there's nothing that can't be conquered.

A famous person from my youth, Dr. Seuss, perhaps summed it up the best:

"We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."