I've never been one to wax poetic about the powers of love. Among the flowery language and the boxes of chocolates, I've always been the one that thinks "too many syllables and refined sugar". Maybe it's the mom in me, but I mean, come on, kissing in the rain doesn't even look fun! It looks like you'll catch your death of cold! (Seriously, bring a sweater or an umbrella or some sturdy galoshes.)
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of things), my upbringing has driven me to become hyper-logical, and when you are hyper-logical, you don't really find yourself wanting to hypothesize on how love can overcome all or how love is all you need. My mind is much more logistically focused than that-- love is nice but what about health? Rent? The status of your DVR? Love may be all you want but may be not what you need. (And let's be honest, we all know that one person who is savagely looking for someone to be with, when they are deeply unready to be themselves-- in my mind, these people in particular, really need to differentiate the ones and needs. But I digress.)
I read a couple of interesting articles recently. Neither is very straightforwardly about love. In fact, one if about quantum mechanics, and the other is about quite the opposite as its about those extracurricular affairs that we group under the big umbrella term of "cheating". Depending on what you'd like to read I'll let you decide whether you want to read the article that made me believe that crazy notion of "true love" -- that crazy "love at first sight" or if you want to read quite possibly the most well written yet deeply depressing article about love, quite possibly ever written. If you feel like having a balanced view-- go ahead-- read both, and then decide for yourself. Bad news first.
In "Why We Cheat" by Lisa Taddeo, she outlines the justifications of a cheater-- being a cheater herself. She interviews multiple men who plainly (and sometimes painfully) lay bare the reasons why they cheat and their feelings afterward ("You don't want to be found out, he says. Guys who will tell you they feel bad, I think that's bullshit. For the most part, you don't want to rock the boat. You've got a house and a kid and a new home-entertainment center and you don't want to saw that world in half."). Potentially the most honest article that I've ever read, it quite openly documents the author's (and others') mixed feelings-- guilt, excitement, justification and disassociation--around their sins. The one emotion that is blatantly missing is remorse, which is probably the most honest part of the article overall.
The second article, "Einstein's 'Spooky Action at a Distance' Paradox Older Than Thought", I feel like I need to give a little context to. It's not so much the article's goal-- entanglement is an older theory than originally thought-- but the meaning of entanglement itself. My protest against the traditional, flowery, overly sentimental and seemingly illogical view of fairy tale love is that it's (in my opinion) an almost magical notion. Everything is perfect-- perfect boy, perfect girl, perfect overlap of time and space, perfectly matched--soul mates. The impossibility, no, the improbability of this perfect confluence of space, time, attributes, things, etc. seems magical-- a once in a never opportunity. And magic isn't real. But every now and then, science shows me I'm wrong-- that there are things out there that can't be explained and that there are things out there that, dare I say it, are dangerously close to being magic. One of these things is quantum entanglement. From this, you get entangled particles. Originally called "spooky action at a distance" by Einstein, "Entanglement occurs when two particles are so deeply linked that they share the same existence....Entangled particles can become widely separated in space. But even so, the mathematics implies that a measurement on one immediately influences the other, regardless of the distance between them". It travels faster than light, showing an apparent flaw in his theory of relativity. Unexplainable in why it happens. But in my mind, if science on a subatomic level can create two entities that are somehow inextricably linked, two things that fundamentally complement each other to exist--maybe soul mates are possible.
Enjoy.
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