Why do we fall in love

Why do we fall in love

Taken from “When all women in the world” by Simone de Beauvoir – “Love often takes us by surprise. Only when we meet the man, the woman who satisfies our expectation does that expectation reveal itself to us. Love is not born when life fills your desires, nor when it crushes you, but only appears to those who, openly or secretly, desire a change … And here I return to the starting point. Why does he fall in love with us? Nothing more complex: because it is winter, because it is summer; for excess of work or for too much free time; out of weakness, out of strength, out of need for security, out of love for danger; out of desperation, out of hope; because someone doesn’t love you, because someone loves you. “
An old song by Luigi Tenco said: “I fell in love with you because I had nothing to do”. A sentence that somehow has become one of those timeless memes with which we tend to complete the sentence “I fell in love with you because …”

Hard question

Think about it is one of the hardest sentences ever to complete, and it doesn’t matter if you ask a newly formed couple or two elderly grandparents who have been sharing life together for 60 years or more. It will always be difficult for them to find a justification for falling in love. Over the centuries, many have wondered about the subject. Philosophers, for example Plato, gave birth to falling in love starting from the soul. Doctors, always very practical, believe instead that everything arises from chemical reactions that develop in our brain when we meet some people (and with some we don’t).
But, to date, annus domini 2022, still no one has been able to give a definitive answer to this question, and I’m sure, that if I had to ask each of you who came to this blog to read my words, well each of you would give me a different answer, but all equally valid. There is no right or wrong when there is a justification for falling in love.
Everyone finds the answers in their own way, and many, to be honest, don’t even find them, and that’s okay too. because in fact we should persist in justifying and motivating an innate feeling, so close to the primordial instincts that we have preserved over millennia of evolution of the human species.

A book

Lately I happened to read the aforementioned book. The words struck me very much because the author, in a few lines, managed to “catalog” billions of possible causes of falling in love into a few simple categories. A reading that, I will not hide from you, has been very useful for me to understand even those falls in love that concern me closely, mine or those of those women who have shared or share pieces of the road with me.
In fact, understanding why a love was born is very useful. It is useful when we are still together because, if we know the reasons for approaching our partner we will be better able to meet their needs, keeping them so close to us for as long as possible. But, it seems strange to say, understanding the reasons for falling in love can often be useful for understanding when and why a love has ended. Yes, because when no history dies we are often led to an excess of self-criticism, we feel guilty, unsuitable. Sometimes it even falls into deep depressive crises. Yet many times a story ends up with dynamics external to the couple, perhaps inherent in one of the two, inherited from childhood or from past stories, but still terribly current.
Now, I cannot conclude this post without answering a fundamental question that perhaps you too are indirectly asking me: and I, Roberto Maggio, why do I fall in love?

And me?

Well, a premise that must absolutely be made before answering this question is that the reasons that can push me today are different from those I could have at 20, 30 or 40 years old. There were several reasons why today’s Roberto is a completely different person from yesterday’s, and probably from tomorrow’s. Therefore, there are no standard answers, ad personam, but rather “per aetate”.
Today my answer would be this, “I fall in love because I still want to be amazed”. I don’t do it out of a need for company, or to avoid loneliness. I don’t do it to appear or to please. I don’t do it because otherwise I would look like a loser. I fall in love because after a life so full of experiences and satisfactions on all possible fronts, today I feel that love is still that front capable of clearing the cards of my certainties, of my convictions. Love manages to scratch my atavistic calm, giving me rich doses of anxiety, alternating with oceans of pleasure. It could almost be summed up that falling in love helps me feel alive again, but that would be entirely correct. The reasoning is finer and relates precisely to an innate need of mine, that of the child who later became an adult who, however, kept within himself that longing for amazement, the one that as a child made me remain open-mouthed in front of a new game, that which now keeps me awake late into the night in endless chats.
Falling in love for me is a daily source of amazement capable of giving my days a different meaning each time, a brand capable of differentiating today from tomorrow, always. I have an incredible need for that amazement that falling in love and I would not have been able to imagine my life without. I spent my years traveling the world photographing, behind my mirrorless, the most incredible works of nature and art on 5 continents, and often feeling the presence, behind these works, of something bigger than us, but able to make sense of the little things in us.
And when I fell in love, I did nothing but host that presence, that greatness within me. In falling in love, I made sense of time, I made sense of what I was doing and, strangest thing, I also made sense of boredom. Today, looking back, they can say that I would be able to write the rest of my life without the money, work, wealth and property that I have accumulated so far. I would be able to see myself without so many faithful travel companions who have always been close to me. I might be able to see myself even without them. But I would not be able to imagine a single day of my future without, at least, the prospect of that love that has so far pushed me, sometimes with anger, sometimes with sweetness, but always with great strength, a fire that is always burning. , endless.