One of the most fascinating inventions in the history of mankind – and holds true for the future as well – is marriage. How wonderful that two people come together and decide that for the rest of their lives they will live happily ever after. And no matter what, they would always be together – through thick and thin. People go for renewal of their marital vows to keep their love alive!
So, love and marriage seem to have the power to turnaround the lives of woebegone people. Love makes live exciting, brings in an element of excitement into life. While marriage makes the lives of people complete and fulfilling. Let’s dissect the underwritings of marriage. But because no marriage is complete without love, we start with love and then move onto marriage.
Love, as per common sense, is that feeling when an individual feels attracted towards another individual. And the feeling is very different. You feel like spending more time with each other. You start sharing interests, start accommodating your schedules, start doing sweet nothings and what not. And then later on you start feeling the need of being touchy and then things progress, and if other things fit well, you marry.
But why does love happen only after a certain age? And that age inadvertently is once adolescence kicks in. So, there is a clear connection between the biological clock and the cycle of love. Hormones responsible for development of secondary sexual characteristics start getting produced and released within the body by adolescence. And these changes influence our thoughts. It’s a classic example of the body influencing the mind. So suddenly the girl about whom you had nothing, or put differently you were not capable of having anything about her, suddenly looks attractive. You find the boy with whom you used to share all your playtime secrets behaves differently now. His accidental rub across your arm feels odd enough to be registered.
Hence, love is the body’s response to the hormones. It has got nothing to do with the ‘likable quotient’ of the other person. But then why does not everyone fall in love with everybody else? That’s where economics comes in. The more the choice of similar products a consumer has, (s)he will prefer buying the one which is the best amongst the available. Hence, as the number of attractive people around you increases, you become selective in choosing your lover. It’s like you are in a forest on a hunger trip. In the morning you find just apples around, and to kill your hunger you eat the apples. But in the evening you find apples, peaches, oranges, bananas and other fruits. Will you still pick up apples? Only if you personally find apple the best amongst the available, otherwise you will shift to some other fruit.
Hence, ‘love’ will happen to all humans. All humans will respond to the chemical changes in the body, except in the case wherein the body functions otherwise. But what about other living organisms? What about animals? Well, they also follow the same cycle.
So, here an important concept of similarities between a man and an animal is taking shape. The saying goes that ‘Man is a Social Animal’. But animals too are social. Dogs are social – they live in their own society, have families, live in groups, have territories and their societies have all characteristics similar to those of a human society. Mosquitoes have their own societies. So do cockroaches. And so do elephants. So, animals too are social. Not in the sense that they socialize like humans do, but in their own way.
Hence, Man is an Animal, without the unnecessary word ‘social’.
Now, animals have 3 basic needs:
Nutrition for existence
Security
Procreation
Nutrition includes food and water, required for sustaining life. Security includes shelter and protection from other animals and weather, required for protecting life. Procreation includes reproduction cycles, required for continuation of the life of a species. Summed up, all three are – Sustain, Protect & Continue.
Now, as already proved that Man is an Animal, he also acts in the same way. He tries to fulfill his 3 basic needs. Love, falls in the 3rd category.
As already covered, once things move ahead in love, people become touchy. And express love in a different way. But they are ultimately engaging in an act of satisfying their 3rd desire. Now, as the human society evolved, things became complex. Lot of men would have left women after procreating with them, leaving them in the lurch with the additional responsibility of children. Because the primitive man was the one who used to go hunting around for food, it would have been difficult for a primitive woman to sustain herself without the help of a man. So ease this ‘running away’ and to help women, marriage would have been invented. To make sure that the man pays attention to his off springs as well, to ensure that he takes care of the woman as well.
Also, to give an individual the right to procreate, marriage was a license. It was a license to procreate; it was a license to satisfy the third desire.
The law of diminishing returns applies to love as well. After, say 7 years – famously labeled as the 7 year itch, a girl starts to lose interest in her partner. She would then look for a different excitement in her life. That is, she would look for a different partner. And then again the cycle starts.
Hence, marriage is nothing but a cloak under the garb of which human’s act like who they are – animals. And love is nothing but a reaction of the body to the hormones being secreted or produced.
People say that you need to be in touch with your partner for keeping alive. But actually, if you are not in regular touch – say like in a distance marriage – you are not physically present with your partner, and hence the 3rd desire does not get satisfied as frequently as you would want to, and then the sourness starts in the relationship. And you start looking at other prospective partners. So again, physical proximity is what really matters. Secondly, love always happens when there is some attraction between the two partners. Attraction in the form of physical attraction – based on looks and appearances. Hence, again, physical form presides over any other factors. In cases where two people marry without knowing each other, like in lot of backwardly traditional Indian families, the couple comes together just to start a family. And hence, the question of love does not even arise in this case.
So, Love = Chemistry + Physics+ Biology.
And, Marriage = License to engage in Love.
Love starts when the hormones kick in, takes the form of the physics of love and ends with the biological birth of an offspring.
So, love is all science.
In fact, ‘love’ is all science.
