Falling In Love Rationally

Note: All the ideas presented in this post are not ideas I strongly believe in or endorse, because I am currently not knowledgeable enough to say anything with confidence, nor have I consulted anyone who is an expert on these topics, so please do not adopt any of these ideas as your own, because they are almost certainly incorrect. Read them just as a starting point for further enquiry, perhaps as an introduction that could make you more curious or interested in it, and always keep in mind the principles of Rationality, Scientific Skepticism, Critical Thinking and Open-Mindedness. Or just read it for fun, because I'm just playing with ideas here, everyone is most welcome to correct me wherever they think I'm wrong, and I'd be more than happy to change my mind in light of convincing logical reasons or empirical evidence.

https://psyche.co/ideas/love-shouldnt-be-blind-or-mad-instead-fall-rationally-in-love

I created this post to share my thoughts and comments on this essay. The bold lines are excerpts from the essay. This is one of my more important ideas, not as dense and insightful as, say, ideas in my posts 'Veganism' and 'Schopenhauer', which have some of my original ideas which are higher in information density, but this one is my commenting on an essay about a topic that I myself had a bit to say about, and it's by no means unimportant, if you're someone who has been in love or intends to fall in love, which I ironically also consider a waste of time and energy, but it's not about me, it's about people being irrational and causing harm to themselves and others in the process, which results in suffering, which is the primary reason I'm interested in love.

I am more interested in a form of platonic love which I believe every human should try to cultivate, along with virtues such as kindness, compassion and empathy, but this post is more focused on romantic love, which is a more common and widespread form of love which is also why people are prone to being irrational by blindly following their feelings and emotions without thinking straight. I have tried to not let my own subjective bias and personal preferences influence my thoughts and comments and cloud my judgments, trying to be as objective as I could be, but I'm a human, probably, and hence not perfect, so I'd like you to point out any flawed arguments you might come across. If you like it, check out my related post 'Unconditional Love is a Myth.'

Staying with your abuser out of love, as Steiner did, is irrational because it vitiates prudential – or ‘self-regarding’ – concerns, which are the hallmark of practical rationality.

Your interests are those states of affairs that further your overall flourishing, or wellbeing. Performing an unpleasant activity might be in your best interest if it promotes your overall wellbeing.

Dr. Brogaard puts it really well. That is something I had understood intuitively over the last few months yet unable to fully articulate yet, and I was planning to create a blog post about it soon, so this piece happens to be released and catch my attention at a very fortunate time. It is also consistent with my effort to incorporate rationality in every domain of my life, so even though love isn’t a part of it, it’d be an interesting exercise applying it to a practical domain of life.

I have thought about this topic several times, and it’s something that my subconscious mind keeps working on somewhere in the back of my mind, because recently I realized this this is a serious issue and one of the most mysterious and important topics that we know very little about, and that appears in several of my own research questions and projects. It’s the basis and causes of intuition and feeling; Kahneman’s system-1 from ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’.

I admit that I currently haven’t tried reading too many serious research papers on this topic too deeply, but from my understanding of the field and talking to researchers who have, I know that we haven’t, which is why psychology is not like physics, and psychiatry not like other fields of medicine, something I also created a post about.

This discipline is recently new, and so even though it’s urgent and there is a lot of potentially preventable suffering taking places all the time that we- or at least I, because my brain makes me feel responsible for it and I have a desire to help such people- don’t spend on trying to understand, manipulate and cure disorders related to these phenomena, we are- or rather I am- morally responsible for all the suffering that I could have prevented had we worked faster and harder to understand these topics and disorders. This is related to an idea building upon Dr. Peter Singer’s ideas I shall discuss in another post.

What Dr. Brogaard describes in this post with the example of the lady who could not separate herself from her abusive lover might seem like an extreme example to many, who may think that they would never be so irrational, but for such people it would be helpful to remember that the lady who was victimized would also never have thought that she would act so irrationally before her brain and whatever circumstances led to her falling in love so deeply with such an abusive person would wreak havoc on her personal life and mental and emotional well-being.

Despite whatever delusions you might harbour, you are never free, because you could never break out of this intuitive desire and overcome the compulsion to act in a certain manner, which is also the case with several sociopaths and serial-killers who feel the compulsion to murder, the compulsion to confess to your crush, the inevitable heartbreak that would result from rejection; the kid who feels like eating another chocolate despite knowing that it’s bad for them.

The desire to connect which if not fulfilled makes any person feel lonely, even those who deny having such needs, as we know from modern social psychology experiments; the artist who cannot survive without working on something they intuitively feel drawn towards, the extreme manifestation of which we can see in individuals with savant syndrome and those with autism having very specific interests. There are several more examples that would take a whole another blog post or maybe even a book- all your preferences, desires, mannerisms, compulsions, interests. I discuss topics with a similar theme in my posts titled ‘Genetics, Evolution, Significance of Desires’ and ‘Thinking Fast and Slow, a Call for Empathy’.

The point is: even if you somehow rationally know what’s the best course of action, which is very rarely the case, unless you deliberately try to be aware of your thoughts and consciously figure out the most rational course of action, which very few people do, you would never be able to overcome the intuitive compulsions and mysterious desires that draw you towards one thing or another, and even distort your perception of reality by- as I discuss in the next paragraph- making your logical brain work for it.

Instead, she rationalised the beatings and hid her bruises.

This is a problem I have noticed people falling for very often. Our brains are pretty good at coming up with clever rationalizations to justify what we intuitively prefer or desire, especially mine, so I have come up with some meta-cognitive strategies to keep it under check, like asking if I have any intuitive preference or desire in favour of the solution, or any cognitive bias that might be playing a role, and I am slowly improving. Rationalization is something that’s useful in many circumstances when your brain tries to prevent you from falling for analysis-paralysis, something I discuss in another blog post.

What I do to be aware of such things is trying to be more mindful of my own thoughts- noticing them as they come and go and being able to evaluate then and rigorously scrutinize them with logic and reason- meditation helps a lot in this, but it’s been a while since I stopped due to health problems, so it’s definitely not a perquisite or necessary, neither is it sufficient by itself. It just makes it easier with repeated practice.

You also can’t analyze every single idea and thought in your mind, unless you happen to be a lunatic like me who derives pleasure from doing trying to be as close to perfectly rational as possible and overusing logic in ways that actually makes it counterproductive, yet this is something I’m working on improving. So you use heuristics in most cases, but it’s better to be aware of the heuristics that you use and if there are better ones, and, more importantly, the situations in which you must be careful to not use heuristics and carefully and deliberately think about it and try to make a rational decision.

The important point to keep in mind in this case is that you might not even be aware that you’re rationalizing stuff; in fact you would think that you made the decision yourself in your right mind, because that’s what everyone believe, it’s the human brain that’s build like that, but you must remember that you have to test it, which is very similar to the scientific method.

Here is what I do, and what you could try: You try to emotionally detach yourself from the belief, thought or idea, and try to figure out if you there is anything that you have an intuitive preference for that you might be trying to justify your actions just as a means towards achieving that end. That might not be possible in all cases, so you write down all the sides or alternatives, list all the pros and cons, associated probabilities if applicable, as well as the best and worst case scenarios.

And by pros and cons I actually mean both pros and cons for every side of the argument or alternative available to you for the decision you have to make; you try to come up with reasons in favour of and against, arguments and counter-arguments, evidence and counter-evidence, and that’s how you could be more confident that you’re making a good decision, or at least trying your best, which is all you can do.

Love fuelled by a projection of a saint-like idealisation on to the beloved is bound to dwindle once the image of unbending perfection disintegrates and the real person, with her unsaintly flaws, is left in its place.

This reminds me of something I see in my everyday life - not how people have an ideal image of one whom they love, that’s obviously not a daily occurrence – but how people get emotionally attached to certain celebrities or actors and start thinking they’re perfect and the embodiment of all virtues that exist, the epitome of all things good.

That might seem to be dramatized and exaggerated, and maybe it is, but you would agree with me if you noticed people who seem to be so emotionally motivated and attached to certain sports teams representing their city or country in sports like football or cricket.

I also had a conversation with another person a few days ago on this topic, in which I talked about how everyone around me is so interested in sports and so emotionally attached to the outcome, certain teams and sportspersons, and how it is able to elicit strong emotional reactions and seem to produce strong emotional affect in them, while I am not interested and completely indifferent to it all, because I am able to see it for what it is- a game. Nothing more, nothing less.

I also talked about how I believe that this same phenomenon might be responsible for how many people have a biased perception of their own culture or nation and believe that their culture or nation is superior to the others. I thought that it might be the case that nationalism and patriotism could have an evolutionary basis such as when we needed to strongly identify with and stick to our groups, but how too much of it is making it harder for many people to empathize with other cultures and understand how we all are humans and at the end of the day have the same needs and desires at the core.

I talked about how solving this issue might help promote greater unity among all of human civilization, remove some borders and cultural barriers and help us build a more peaceful society, but after the conversation I got curious- is there any actually any correlation between such things; are the people who demonstrate strong emotional investment in sport the same people who are also predisposed to or inclined in a way that makes them strongly nationalist or patriotic? That’s a question I need to investigate, and it has been added to my list of research questions.

Another point is that there are no perfect people, and this is also the reason I am find it very puzzling when people idolize some humans as if they have no flaws, and there are also a few cognitive biases which don't make it any easier, but I have realized that even someone who seems to be virtuous with no apparent flaws would have some flaws, and someone who seems to not have any virtue could have some hidden talents or traits that we could learn something from, and every person is interesting once we get to know them deeply enough, and it's all about being compassionate and understanding towards everyone and accepting them with all their flaws, because we all have flaws and that's what makes us human.

Check out the Halo effect, for instance, where good people are attributed more positive and desirable values, and we might even deny it but experimental observations using tests such as eye tracking and psychological evaluations show that we are. Same for different races; Harvard even has an online psychological test for it.

This might be the case because good people are more intuitively attractive and we wish to associate with them and so think of them in a positive light so we are more likely to act in a manner that maximizes the probability of them reciprocating or liking us, regardless of whether or not this is conscious and the fact that attractive people usually know that they are attractive, despite its subjective nature and individual differences, and so leverage their attractiveness to achieve success and attain great heights in the social hierarchy and society.

I read that in a social psychology textbook by Baron and Branscombe. I used to think that such people are shallow and can’t see the person beyond the body, the real person in the machine, behind the mask and all other superficial aspects. But now I realize how mistaken I was. Even though I still believe that these factors are superficial and ought not to hold much importance in judgment formation and our attitude towards them, I have realized that it’s much more confusing what is not superficial, something I discuss in greater detail in my blog post ‘Unconditional Love is a Myth’.

People would feel awkward complementing someone for their physical traits if they think that's superficial, and that includes me, but I have realized that mental and personal traits are superficial too, just at a deeper level, so it's irrational to feel comfortable with giving out complements and praising someone for their mental abilities or personality traits, even if they associate those things more closely with what they perceive to be their 'self'.

Another point is that the people who are leveraging their attractiveness to get ahead in life are acting rationally; they’re making use of what they happen to have to achieve the goals they desire, and they’re acting in their best self-interest just like the rest of us, and we can’t blame them for doing this because it makes perfect sense for them to do this, at least in my opinion. As always, I’m open to changing my mind in case anyone has any good reasons for an opinion that differs from my own.

Ultimately, it involves subjective value judgments and so is fuzzy and unclear, depends on ones values, which brings us back to where we started from- intuition, the mysterious and intuitive thoughts and desires that many times make us susceptible to irrationality, yet we so poorly understand and that determine in a significant way traits we associate with the idea of the ‘self’.

Good looking political leaders are more likely to be elected. The there's all the actors and singers. And even attractive serial killers; Bundy was just one of many. It's baffling how many people fall for it, not trying to scrutinize their intuitions with logic and reason, and blindly following their first impulse, like mindless automatons.

But we can’t blame them, and we also can’t leave them at the mercy of external factors that are not under their control and people with evil intentions, at least in my opinion. It reminds me of how after I learned about this and mistakenly had the wrong ideas I describe above, I kind of overcompensated by completely ignoring any person I found attractive, which didn’t help given my social skills and introversion.

For the same reason, I don’t have any single role model I look up to, but several people who are working in disciplines I wish to research in the future or people who have some trait or quality I wish to emulate because it’s the rational thing to do keeping in mind my values and goals or I just happen to have a preference for them. I’m not saying if someone thinks a person is their idol, they’re necessarily wrong, just that the person should not try to attribute too many positive qualities to them and look at them for who they are, so they don’t set unachievable high standards for themselves and everyone or overlook the person’s flaws and similarly the flaws of other people.

To understand the point I’m trying to make, check out the logical fallacies of appeal to authority and ad hominem. And for the same reason I give apt weight and same consideration to the opinion of every person I talk to. I listen to everyone, even someone who knows nothing at all about research- and I think you know a lot, so I make sure not to fall for the trap or cognitive bias or logical fallacy of appeal to authority, where you measure and idea by the person's age or credentials or other irrelevant factors.

So basically what I'm saying is that, I'd listen and try to understand your opinion, and see what you mean and how that would change my plans- without actually changing my plans- and then if I think I should, then making the right modifications accordingly, but not before rigorously scrutinizing your opinion and testing it with logic and evidence, of course. So I'll hear you out and make a more informed decision and calculated risk, but at the end do what I feel is the right thing to do. That seems like the rational thing to do.

Even after years of battery, she puts him on a pedestal, emphasising how brilliant, funny and fascinating he is, convinced in her naivety that he is her ‘soul mate’.

Even if, after doing everything I mentioned above, I happen to fall into such a trap, at least I could learn from my past mistakes and see where I went wrong. Analyze my behaviour and feelings, my actions and thoughts, question why I’m doing what I’m doing, and as Dr. Brogaard mentions earlier, what compels me to repeatedly do something that is not conducive to my well-being and in fact causing me great suffering which I’m accepting for not good reason. Unless the person happens to find pleasure in suffering itself, which would be a serious mental problem of its own, I don’t believe that they would continue to do this if they ask themselves such questions.

I have realized that this is also one of the reasons it helps to have a journal of personal diary to document your personal experiences and decisions you have made, everything that you could reflect on in the future, if nothing then at least to look back on what sort of person you were, how you have grown and changed over time, document your own life journey and unique experiences, capture every joy and sorry you experiences, put into words all the moments of happiness and suffering, sharing them with the world if you feel like it so others can experience a different worldview and learn from the life experiences of another person, and if there is something your current self could learn from your past self.

I need to take my own advice and start journaling and filling diary entries more frequently. But if you are able to analyze your past actions and decisions and learn something from it, you could avoid making bad decisions in similar situations in the future. That’s what’s learning is all about, and that’s the reason I believe that failures are just opportunities to learn and improve, and there is something to learn, some important lesson to extract, from every experience.

And so have as many novel experiences as you can, take calculated risks, and never be afraid to make mistakes and grow, so you never regret not doing something you always wanted to do, or about what could have been the case if you had done it. Reminds me of how a video I had seen a few years ago showed old people regretting things they never did, and also a TED talk about a person who studied regrets and identified some common types of regrets across all cultures; I’d encourage you to check them out.

To love someone is to have a strong desire to promote their interests. But when you hate someone, you don’t want to promote their interests, and probably want to impede them.

This is another point that I had intuitively understood and that Dr. Brogaard is able to articulate very well. I used to wonder how people after getting rejected sometimes stalk and cause harm to the person they once loved, even doing things like blackmailing and sending suicide threats. This seemed very confusing and irrational to me because if they had truly loved them, they would try to keep in mind their best interests and do everything to maximize their person well-being, even if at their own personal cost.

I felt they don’t truly love them, they’re being selfish, and that after they realized that their love would not be reciprocated, they should try to remove themselves from their lives and even help them find someone whom they actually love so they can be happy, maybe be their friends instead, but it seemed to illogical and counterintuitive that they would do things that would not just make them unhappy, but even make themselves suffer- after all, who likes threatening people and blackmailing them, especially someone they love?

But now I realize why this is the case. People don’t think rationally. The rational part of the brain, which is responsible for everything I just said, is simply not the reason they so strongly love the person, it’s just their intuition, and by now I think we know better than to act upon our intuitions and trying to question them and test them with logic and the scientific method.

Scientists do that, and we do that for all our important decisions, so why not for love? Love is also such an important aspect of our lives, perhaps one of the most important, and still we have not learned to test our intuitions before acting on them. If not testing them when falling in love and confessing, at least we could before enter into social contracts such as marriage or doing anything after a break-up, so even if we can’t avoid being disappointed and feel anger and disappointment, we could at least be aware of it and try to counter it without rational and logical mind.

If I understood the essay correctly, that is what Dr. Brogaard is trying to advocate for, and I completely agree and understand why this is important and something everyone must try to understand, because the stakes are too high. Human relationships and social situations are already so confusing, at least for me, so adding in some logic and rationality could greatly help clear misunderstandings and reduce suffering for all the parties involved, and make the process more likely to result in outcomes more favourable and desirable for everyone who is involved.

It’s a kind of defence mechanism, where you often suppress your hatred to avoid the uncomfortable realisation that your relationship is dysfunctional.

Rationalization strikes again.

all-consuming love is coupled with a brain chemistry similar to that of people addicted to cocaine or methamphetamine.

It’s like something I had myself written in my blog post ‘Genetics, Evolution, Significant of Desires’ about the desire for social connection and love being as if someone who has never even tried drugs is craving more of it and can’t live peacefully until their desires and needs are fulfilled. They never chose to do those drugs, but now they can’t live peacefully until they do. Though unlike the drugs the need doesn’t increase in intensity and you never get desensitized to it, but it’s still undesirable for people who are unable to fulfil such desires and causes them great suffering.

However hard it is for them, anything like having social anxiety or depression for instance, would create a negative feedback loop or vicious cycle of them feeling even more lonely and end up more mentally unwell than if they had never experienced such desires, or in this case had they been approached more rationally. As always, it’s not their fault for what they feel, but this is preventable and its effects could be minimized if we are able to help them.

How masterfully he manipulates her. How quickly the idyllic relationship turned nightmarish.

Almost certainly a psychopath or sociopath; I use the terms interchangeably. I have written about this group of people in my other blog posts, and I’d just say that everyone should be aware of such people and how to detect them in their real lives before it’s too late. Here are some books I really enjoyed on this topic: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, Without Conscience by Bob Hare, The Psychopath Inside by James Fallon and Wisdom of the Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton.

The American philosopher Laurence Thomas, for example, has argued in his essay ‘Reasons for Loving’ (1991) that: ‘There are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational.’

We cannot lay claim to another’s love because, according to Thomas: ‘There is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.’

I think that Mr. Thomas and I have different definitions of rationality here. For me- and more generally most of the rationalist community would probably agree- rationality is not like being cold and logical neglecting the romantic and intuitive part of love, it’s just being aware of it and trying to maximize your well-being and probability of achieving your desired goals, in this case find an ideal partner to give you most happiness and satisfaction, and preferable to the partner too.

Rationality takes into account your values and preferences, and so even though I agree with Mr. Thomas that no one can force anyone to change their mind and make them believe that their love is irrational- because after all we expect people who fall in love to be good-decision maker themselves and know what’s good for them and what’s the right thing to do, and assumption that seldom holds true in reality, which is why I think this essay is so important in the first place.

As Mr. Thomas says, you might feel an intuitive desire to fall in love with someone, but I’m still not able to grasp how Mr. Thomas knows that these mysterious intuitive feelings that so frequently misguide us and turn out to be unreliable in our daily lives while making important decisions- cause of most cognitive biases and fallacies- could help us guide in this domain; why this area would be an exception.

We can not say if intuition is a reliable indicator of how well suited a person is to be our partner till me understand the processes associated with it and it’s underlying causes; every factor that influences it and our perception and preferences, and how to control them and whether or not we should, but even just being aware how they affect our preferences and intuitions would also help us make more informed decisions.

I shall not criticize his ideas too much, as I myself believe in open-mindedness and I’m aware of the possibility that it might turn out- however improbably it might sound to me at the moment- that intuitions are a very reliable indicator fine-tuned to detect love, even though evidence indicates it’s not. But I’m open to changing my mind in light of new evidence and convincing logical arguments, and I understand that at the time Mr. Thomas wrote this we knew very less about the fast and slow thinking parts of the brain that Dr. Kahneman later popularized and a distinction that I still see in my everyday life.

Rationality concerns your interests, not the interests of others. If you have fallen out of love with your partner, it is – all things being equal – in your best interest to end the relationship. That’s the logical thing to do.

Exactly the point I was trying to make, thank you.

What duties we have to others is a question of morality, not rationality.

I have been wondering this for weeks now- could rationality be applied to morality? Could we find ethical reasons to be moral- I made a separate blog post with this exact title, something that still makes me think how we could justify being ethical to someone who does not have a conscience or internal moral compass and who is perfectly logical but has a desire to kill or make people suffer. In brief, I concluded that there are no such reasons, and we all act in our best self-interests, but we should be ethical, for reasons I explain more deeply in that post; I’d encourage you to check it out.

If not using logic and rationality to rigorously define values and pin down what values are related to what morals, could we at least come up with some logical framework to help us discover our true values and preferences? This way we could be less confused about our true preferences and desires, and it could be an important step in our journey to live rationally and self-actualize.

As the old saying goes, holding onto broken love is like standing on splintered glass. If you stay, you will keep hurting. If you walk, you will hurt, but eventually you will heal.

I like this quote. Could be applied to any form of irrationality and people who hold on to irrational beliefs and refuse to change their minds in light or contradictory evidence conflicting with their existing worldview, which is bound to happen if you associate any belief with your ‘self’.

I think all the ideas discussed in this essay could be applied to not just love, but also friendship and all forms of relationships, adjusted according to differing goals and needs from different types of relationships.

One domain where this would be hard to do is family, where you happen to be born in one by random chance, and you can’t just walk away from them if you wish to, or even if you strongly believe that remaining with the family would not be conducive to your mental well-being or maybe even unhealthy in that regard; this is especially the case with the more social communities and eastern cultures such as those in south and east Asia, where an individual is kept after the community, and even though it has many benefits this one seems to be a downside. At the end it seems to depend on your own values and priorities, and the trade-offs you’re willing to make.

But I believe that you should not be obligated to stick with some people you were born to in case you think they are in any way harming your emotional or mental health or being abusive towards you. Being born into the family and sharing their genes is not a good reason to do so and a very irrational one, in my opinion, because you did not choose those genes or family. That’s also why I like Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance thought experiment and creating a society where no one has to experience unnecessary suffering due to factors out of their direct control, which is almost always the case.

I’d like to thank Dr. Brogaard for writing this insightful essay and giving me confidence that my thoughts on this topic are actually valid or at least more acceptable by people who are much more knowledgeable and accomplished than me with expertise in this domain, and that this is an idea that is worthwhile to pursue because at least someone who knows much more than me thinks the same.

Let me know if you have any comments and feel free to connect!

Before ending I’ll leave some scientific and poetic lines I discovered somewhere in my notepad which may or may not be from me; I think not because I’m not so talented in creative writing and poetry. But it doesn’t matter, does it?

Holding onto broken love is like trying to hold together two atoms with the same charge. They repel each other, and the more you try to force them together, the more energy you expend and the more damage you cause.

Letting go of a toxic relationship is like breaking a chemical bond. Just as molecules that no longer serve a useful purpose can dissociate, freeing up the atoms to form new and healthier bonds, ending a harmful relationship can create space for new and positive connections to form.

Holding onto a broken relationship is like trying to reverse entropy. Just as the universe tends towards increasing disorder, trying to force a relationship that is no longer viable can lead to chaos and disorder in your own life. Letting go and moving on can allow you to embrace new possibilities and create a more ordered and fulfilling future.