Will O'Hargan
There is a serious problem, and my cell phone goes off. I am being summoned to a meeting of delegates from around the area.
The summit I am being called to is at the International House of Pancakes, and the issue is serious. One of my friends has fallen in love with a girl we know will only result in a broken heart for him.
And, because we care about this friend, we summon him, on the invite of food, to IHOP to try to convince him to change his mind. Change his heart.
The problem, of course, is that my friend, like most people, does not take other people telling him that he is wrong.
"He's already in," one ambassador says before the subject arrives. "Deep."
"And getting played like a pinball machine," another intelligently adds.
This, sadly, is a result of human physiology. The human brain in an interesting thing. According to an article by Helen Fisher in a New Scientist article, Neuroscientist have mapped brain activity in regards to love, and the findings are interesting.
The part of the brain that is active when a being is feeling love has been identified, and they have found that when the subject is dumped or otherwise detatched from their love, activity in these portions of the brain increases.
So, in other words, distance and being dumped makes the heart grow fonder.
Love, of course, is not the only emotion that shows up on the brain scans following a dumping. Hate and anger show up as well.
So, basically, hate and love are interwoven in these conditions. I suppose it makes sense as both require a great deal of energy and commitment just to complete the emotion.
"When he gets dumped," the representative from the Village says, "he is going to flip out."
Everything changes. The world around us changes every day. The weather, the sky, the clouds, our friends, our enemies and the time all change nearly every day. Newspapers record the daily changes, and looking at a stack of the Daily News papers from the past years, which merely records the changes on campus, there's quite a bit of change.
But one thing we cannot accept changing is love. For some reason, the human mind is unable to detach itself from the feeling of love, is unwilling to accept the smallest change.
And when it does, we yell. We scream.
And we blame.
"Maybe, once this all happens, he'll learn. Just maybe, maybe, this time he will learn and will not expect everyone to learn."
But he won't, and he never will.
Because our brains won't let us.
Because that's the way the world is, baby.
But why do we react to rejection in this way? It's certainly not to woo them back, as anger won't help do that.
Perhaps it is to help us move on, get over our past loves. But then why do the feelings of love still linger?
I suppose our human bodies do not follow the rules of logic.
I guess, sometimes we love too much. And sometimes the things we love don't love us back. And yet, we will still love these things, be it an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend, a dead-end hobby or our favorite stuffed animal.
Write to Will at
wjohargan@bsu.edu
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