The Plotlines of Love

Good love requires lots of data

I once spent a first date summarizing the highlights of my failed marriage and discussing matters of the heart with an epidemiologist. I asked him, since he had a PhD in the analysis of health data, if he’d figured out how to best evaluate the potential of a new relationship based on the scientific method? I was trying to be witty, and he was possibly trying not to laugh at me, but he rose to the question by saying we could possibly predict the outcome of our attempts at love, as long as we gave it enough time.

I asked him his thoughts on the “just knowing” trope, the lust we occasionally experience for one person, for no logical reason, which sometimes results in a quick trip to a wedding chapel in Vegas. Is this kind of passion any indication of how successful that relationship will be over time? I’d had two thunderbolt beginnings since getting divorced. I would have sworn on all the world’s holy books that the last guy was The One. From the moment his puppy dog eyes met mine – and his parenthetical dimples said Just try to resist me, sweetheart, I was sunk.

But that relationship ended abruptly, despite his suggesting we grow old together a few days before he dumped me. With plenty of people claiming to “just know” when they meet their person, and feeling this myself more than once, is my love barometer mis-calibrated? Or should the paroxysms of infatuation always be met with suspicion?

Here’s how the scientist put it to me: If we plot a relationship on the XY axis with the vertical Y axis being emotional intensity and the horizontal X being time, we’re very likely to see an inverse relationship between what initially feels amazing and what will endure.

Later in an email he wrote, “The lightning bolt version has this early peak, but then there’s (usually) a downward trend as reality sets in. When you think about the derivative (the plot of slope of the original function over time — that is, how your emotional response is changing at any moment), the lightning bolt tends to have a negative slope whereas the slow build has a positive slope.”

After suffering the sobering effects of a plunging plot line, this explanation made sense. He added, “The desire to commit is all about extrapolating where the excitement will be in a while – will I still want this person in my life in a year, in a decade – which incorporates the slope at least as much as the absolute value.”

In hindsight, I see this too. Even before this fireworks relationship fell to pieces, when I imagined a future with this man, I wasn’t sure I liked what I saw. For one, he was nearly ten years older. Would I be taking care of his ailments or leaving him behind to hike and travel, things he didn’t do?

Existing within the intoxicating absolute value of passion, I felt blind to the probability that the slope of a life with him may have flat-lined very quickly, especially if I gave up doing the things I loved, besides being in bed with him.

After the epidemiologist and I determined we weren’t going to plot our own relationships, I confessed to him that I was strongly attracted to a friend of mine. So strongly I wondered if I should confess my feelings on the off chance he might be interested in dating me. The sticking point? The man I was crushing on had started seeing another woman.

The scientist told me to keep in mind that we’re only ever choosing from the options that truly exist. Identify those, and you might avoid driving yourself mad. Having imaginary conversations with the person I desired created non-existent options. Yet I often fantasized about possibilities rather than realities. I spent hours having imaginary sex with this friend. This was pleasant but essentially pointless.

When I accepted that my only option was to tell him or not tell him, my perseveration ended. I had control over the action but not the consequences of his reaction. I would not try to influence the data in order to get the result I wanted, such as flirt harder. This is anathema to the scientific method and, perhaps as well, to love. He did not choose me.

But I did have an opportunity to analyze this relational method with a man I called my Covid Boyfriend. I met him in February 2020 and was pretty sure he wasn’t a good long-term fit. But he was fun and sexy and why give that up in the middle of a pandemic because of a few incompatibilities?

We had many adventures and lots of laughs while avoiding breathing on other people. My appreciation of the kind of partner he was, rather than the one he wasn’t, increased over time. When we had a disagreement, I was able to see it as a single data point mitigated by all the positive ones we’d already accumulated. We did eventually part on good terms around the time we got our booster vaccines. It was lovely to ride an upward slope for nearly two years, without the desire for a particular outcome. The experiment was good.

If I’m taking a long view of a relationship, I try not to let the tough times detract from the overall trajectory of a scatterplot of data points. The experiences that pull the curve way down can be overcome through repair: conversations, good deeds, and warm embraces all create higher points on the graph. With enough shared experiences that lie well above the neutral line, maybe those fireworks will show up near the end of our lives together rather than the beginning. 

Love, Karin