Why do we fall in love? What is the passion? There are many reasons why we fall in love. The first and most important is that love is a fact of life. As well as physical attraction, most people are drawn to someone who shares the same interests, and personal qualities that they recognize and admire. But what about the chemistry, about that inexplicable feeling of wholeness people have when they are with each other? Or that instinctive sense of knowing man and woman are right for each other? This is what Henry Dicks, a guru in relationship psychotherapy, called the 'Unconscious Fit'.
All of us carry with us a psychological blueprint. That blueprint holds details about our life experiences and the marks they have left. It contains information that we often haven't acknowledged to ourselves about our fears and anxieties, our desires and dreams, our coping mechanisms and our defenses. Each of us has an unconscious capacity to scan each other's blueprint. The people we are most attracted to, are those who have blueprints that complement or fit with ours. We are looking for similarities of experience but more importantly, we're looking for differences. The purpose of this unconscious fit is to find someone who can complement our experience. That may be found in someone who is the same as us, but most commonly we are looking for someone from whom we can learn, someone who has developed coping mechanisms that our different from our own.
When a boy and a girl fall in love, it is often said that the chemistry between them is good. This common use of the word chemistry in human relations comes close to the subtlety of what actually happens in the more mundane coupling of molecules. In a chemical reaction between two "consenting" molecules, bonds form between some of the atoms in what is usually a complex dance involving motion in multiple dimensions. Gazing into a loved one's eyes across a candlelit table-for-two, the human being may think that he or she has risen above a survival of the fittest mode of existence; but, in truth, this rising higher is just nature's way of packaging that drive.
