chemistry needs contact

predicting love, calculating commitment

It seems perfectly natural to deliberate decisions of commitment. Should you commit to a PhD? Should you marry him? Should you start a blog? After all, once you commit, it better be something you like.

A commitment is both the promise and the following action. But why do we assume that order? Isn't it weird that we make most important life choices before knowing if we'll enjoy the consequences? We sign a job offer with the ignorance-stained ink, we gift our hearts based on what could be instead of what is. It makes sense to start giving after you fall in love, but by then it’s too late - you’re in it, whether it’s a good idea or not.

We deliberate these commitments like children pondering and prodding at an unfamiliar dish before us. Agonising and analysing what it'll taste like, we forget that a thousand years of looking at something won't help us taste it. We forget that we can just spit it out if we don't like it.

nyc, 2022

By doing before promising, decisions turn from trapdoors into soft rolling hills¹. The trek back up might suck, but it's always an option.

I think I secretly prefer treating decisions like irreversible trapdoors. There's a deep relief in having no choice, an absolvement of responsibility. But the truth is that the things that define our lives - our habits, our identities, our relationships - are choices made daily, continually.

Isn't that what defines the romanticised ideal of love that lives in my head? That it's a choice? Every day, every word, every action? We forget that love is a choice because it feels more like gravity. Things fall; why shouldn’t we?

Nobody has to show up with roses, peel fruit, or sacrifice their precious time for another human being. Nobody has to suffer through the weird way you eat or the annoying jokes you make. Nobody has to wake up in the middle of the night, paralysed in fear for the heart they've given away. Yet we choose to anyway.

It's scary to realise that someone could do so for 10 years straight and simply wake up deciding not to make the same choice anymore. And people do. With friends, with lovers, with life itself.

Love is a hundred thousand little and big choices. That's what makes it special, that we can spend a lifetime with someone, across thousands of mornings and kisses and still look forward to the next one, across a thousand annoyances and struggles choose to wake up and do it again, every single time.

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I recently went through a breakup, so I know the choice exists all too well. A part of me is looking back and desperately searching for foreshadowing telling me it wasn't meant to be, some way I could've known without the pain.

When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy. How could you have known? Should you have known?

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Ava

, Bookbear Express

But chemistry only happens on contact. You couldn't have known that you'd learn to love the squeaky floorboards, nor could you have known that you'd keep jamming your toe into the kitchen counter. There are a million things I could've done, a thousand things I could've realised earlier, but the only way I could've known it wouldn't work was to go through it.

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Commitments are also chemistry in a different sense. Sodium is a highly reactive metal that explodes on contact with water. Chlorine gas is a chemical weapon that strips hydrogen from the water in your lungs to form an acid, drowning you from the inside. Yet combined they form Sodium Chloride: Salt, essential to all life.

Even if you ask all the right questions, you can't untangle every thread to the past, you can’t predict how things interact. People are iridescent, and relationships are iridescence squared. Loving is infinitely complex.

If you're dating someone you're dating the universe too. You're dating their parents who made them anxious-avoidantly attached. You're dating the movie that taught them how to love. You're dating the exes that shaped them, the ragged holes they left and the love they filled them with. You're dating the exploding supernova, the stardust that formed them, the cumulative sum of all choices made through history that brought them right here, looking into your eyes (who do you see when you read this?)

I originally wrote this in the context of someone promising something they ended up not being willing to do, but my friend experienced the opposite: where someone did things that implied a commitment they weren’t willing to make.

For the first example, the person couldn’t have known they wouldn’t be willing to fulfil their promise, they genuinely thought they could. The only way they could’ve known was by doing before promising.

But the latter problem was a communication issue. They needed to clarify that their action wasn’t a promise: “I want to give you things, but these gifts aren’t promises”. I think it’s a shame for people to shy away from doing nice things because of the message it might imply.

You should step into things even when you’re uncertain - especially when you’re uncertain, because chemistry needs contact - but you need to make that uncertainty clear to everyone around you, and especially yourself.

From the receiving end, you can only hold your breath until both the action and the promise come through. This’ll help you get hurt a lot less, but I think it’s worth it to let yourself occasionally get a little screwed in exchange for not having to live with your guard up all the time.²

nyc, 2022

My point is that people assume emotions have to precede the doing. You feel the motivation, then do the work. How can you follow a passion you don't have?

Emotions do precede action, but action spawns emotions in turn. You can smile when you're happy, but try smiling when you're not: feel your heart lift in response³.

I think we have it all backwards. Take the first step, then see if you fall in love with the road before you.

Dabble in a hobby without thinking about how far it might go. Start writing your dissertation for a month before you chain yourself to a PhD for the next 6 years. You should be married far before your wedding. You don't commit to being a writer, you don't deliberate where to publish and who it's for. You just write, and one day you call yourself a writer and don't cringe. One day you slide into bed with her and your heart clicks into place.

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Thanks for reading <3. This is a two-part essay, the next being about commitment relative to dreams and navigating society’s trapdoors. I hope you subscribe to receive that :)

Stay curious and love well,

Jesse

1. I can list truly irreversible decisions on one hand: having a kid, doing drugs (and not even most drugs - just a class of drugs like heroine and fentanyl), committing a federal crime, and suicide or some permanent bodily injury.

The second type is an opportunity cost - choosing between A or B. It’s real, but I’m always surprised by how much opportunity constantly surrounds us.

2. this is a tweet from Sam Altman - but I generally think avoiding good things because of the potential pain of losing them is a foolish decision

I also read this post, which is another thing about chemistry. Some reactions take more time than others, so lean into things and be patient

156. Your boyfriend might not love you at the pace you love him.

3. There’s a boatload of literature on this, but here’s a digestible article: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/10/posing-smiles-can-brighten-mood