Love really makes the world go round
The weather is dreadful, cold, gales and more rain than the ground can cope with. Now, to top it all, a Chicago Doctor – Dr. Donna Jo Bridge of the Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, has come to the conclusion that ‘Love at First Sight’ is a figment of our imagination!
Well – it is Winter, the Season when all the killjoys come creeping out of the woodwork, just to make things more miserable.
But – just stop and think for a moment. Love really does make the world go round. Without it, in its many varying forms, there would be no point to anything so maybe we can be forgiven for being a little self delusional.
We all want what we perceive to be the ‘perfect relationship’. Sadly, all too often, reality falls short so we boost the present with warm memories of events from our past.
Often, some time down the line, we become victims of our own memory which seems to bestow a nostalgic glow on past romances and we wonder – what could have been!
Maybe we didn’t try hard enough. Maybe he/she actually was the ‘The One’. Then we wonder what that person is doing now. Are they in a relationship, do they still think of me, should I try to make contact, could we make it work the second time around?
There goes that self delusion again.
There is no point in trying to visit a past romance. That is like begging for a double helping of ‘Relationship Failure’. Rarely does time make any significant difference to why two people can’t seem to make a relationship work. I’m not saying impossible – just rare.
Anyway – back to Dr. Donna. She did some memory tests on a group of people and even though prompted with the correct answers, those who got the answers wrong still insisted that they were right, much in the same way that we can convince ourselves that we fell in love at first sight.
So, are all our memories clouded by the desire of how we would really like things to be? If we heed Dr Joel Voss, Senior Author of this study, this may be a fair assumption. He has said that our memories are designed to keep us up to date enabling us to make decisions in the moment so even though it may not have actually happened, ‘love at first sight’ is the brain’s way of making our relationships even stronger.
In conclusion – as far as I am concerned, if that is the case and ‘rosy glow memories’ make us all happier, there may be something to be said for self delusion after all.
Roll on Valentines Day!