Everything comes down to science. You like to eat salty and sweet foods? It’s because they gave your body the most energy when we were wandering around gathering food, and you had to eat as much as possible, because who knows when your next meal was. You dream? Yeah, that’s to help store memories so you don’t forget everything.

When you start listing these facts, it always comes back to a single question… you love? You’ve fallen in love? It is magical, isn’t it wonderful… isn’t it so unexplainable? Or actually… no. It is explainable. It, like everything else, every other action we take, can simply be boiled down to science. You, Mr. Average, are attracted to “her,” the ideal woman because her beautiful, wide-hipped, thin waisted body screams to your instincts, “Look at me!! I am the ideal body to bear your young!” And the strong, muscular male model physique that many girls swoon over? Protection, ladies. You’re “falling for” a body that will ensure the best survival of your offspring.

“But no!” You say, “I’m in love with their personality!” Why of course you are, honey. You’re in love with someone who is kind and funny and has positive traits you’d like to see in your children, and someone who will help you raise your offspring in a caring environment.

“…But the butterflies?” Yes, the butterflies, the obsession, the dreaming and the “love”… it’s all hormones and nerve signals bouncing around your body trying to get you to mate, mate, mate NOW with this person you find HIGHLY ATTRACTIVE because survival of the fittest says that’s what you want in your kids.

It’s all for the future and it’s all for survival. So yeah, I believe in attraction, and I believe in lust. I believe in unending obsession and butterflies and crushes and wanting to be with “them” and no one else. I believe in every characteristic of what people call “love” except for the magic. There is no magic here. We’re just a species of organisms that’s born to reproduce and die, and “love” is just a glamorization of the attraction that aids us to do that most successfully.
So at the end of the day, I fundamentally can’t believe in love. I’m not saying someone can’t prove me wrong, but until I discover for myself that there is a capacity within us, something that makes us more “human” than even science can explain, I think love is just another way that we try and make ourselves feel special, make ourselves feel like there’s more to the world than can be boiled down into science and history and hormones. It lets us hold onto the hope a little longer that there’s some form of “magic”, somewhere out there, more than just a scramble for survival. But magic isn’t something i’ve experiences, and science is— and seeing is believing. I do hope, though, with all that I have in me, that one day I’ll look back on the 15 year old girl who doesn’t believe in love and laugh at her, laugh because the older I got, the more I began to believe in magic.