Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science — John Shaqi
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men,
as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Dark
pairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after the
original. People have long noticed that this attraction towards one's
opposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not,
perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly the
existence in either individual of a desire for its own natural
complement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, but
everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there
are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which
strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with
ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out
and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than
that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how
trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do
so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest
promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest
and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.
How very subtle this intuition is, we can only guess in part by the
apparent capriciousness and incomprehensibility of its occasional
action. We know that some men and women fall in love easily, while
others are only moved to love by some very special and singular
combination of peculiarities. We know that one man is readily stirred by
every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by
intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we
meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for
some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love
with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't,
of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and
women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has
somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or
later meet or else die unsatisfied. Almost every healthy normal man or
woman has probably fallen in love over and over again in the course of a
lifetime (except in case of very early marriage), and could easily find
dozens of persons with whom they would be capable of falling in love
again if due occasion offered. We are not all created in pairs, like the
Exchequer tallies, exactly intended to fit into one another's minor
idiosyncrasies. Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with
one another in the particular places and the particular societies they
happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the
world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at
Denver, Colorado. But among the women he actually meets, a vast number
are purely indifferent to him; only one or two, here and there, strike
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account