A neurochemical con job
by
u/QuirkyBug26 in
aaaaaaaarrrrro

I used to laugh at the meme with the little girl saying, “Love is a neurochemical con job!”

It resonated with the cynic in me. I realized I spent so much time with clients designing their lives that I hadn’t even built a real, working definition of love myself.

Why was I so quick to laugh and hit up the science angle, to rush to the sadness and pain that follows many relationships?

Maybe because a real definition felt too vulnerable, too exposed. Cynicism feels safer for me. More rational. That’s the stance modern culture rewards. Detachment as power. Jokes as defenses. And I am guilty of it too.

But what if mocking love was just another way of avoiding the harder question: what is love, actually?

Maybe we’re all just a little lost with this love stuff.

The Myths We Inherited

We didn’t arrive at our confusion about love independently. We absorbed it: from religion, from philosophy, from a film industry that built its entire economy on a specific story about what love feels like.

1 Corinthians 13 gave Western culture its most repeated definition: “love is patient, love is kind, it bears all things, endures all things.” The language is beautiful. But notice what it measures—endurance. Tolerance. A love defined almost entirely by what you’re willing to absorb. I instantly shriek thinking about this now.

Plato gave us the other half: that love is longing, that somewhere out there exists the person who completes you. Sweet for sure. But it positions every person as arriving at a relationship already incomplete, already searching for something missing in themselves. This is such a powerful hook that it gets us to believe one person is out there. We just gotta work harder to find them.

Hollywood took Plato and ran with it. Love is the lightning bolt, striking us with the impulse. The feeling that overrides everything else. The relationship that’s so intense it must be destiny. We watched that story ten thousand times before we were old enough to date, but did it subconsciously become our definition?

But when love hurts us—when the passion turned chaos named as chemistry—do we swing to the other extreme, like the meme suggests? Love is just hormones. Just attachment patterns. Just a neurochemical con job.

Ultimately, these stories leave us in the same place: without a functional definition, and yet we call it insight.

And it’s not only love. We move through our entire lives measuring ourselves against definitions we never chose and never examined—success, loyalty, worth, rest, enoughness.

Love is just one of most costly to get wrong.

What These Definitions Have in Common

Notice what every inherited definition shares: a hierarchy and/or a role.

Someone submits, someone leads. Someone pursues, someone receives. Someone loves more, someone loves less.

Every definition falls into one of three categories:

>> Role-based: what you do, not who you are to each other.

>> Feeling-based: how it feels, not what it builds.

>> Hierarchy-based: who has power over whom.

And look at the language we use to talk about love. We win arguments. We lose partners. We meet in the middle. We give 50/50—or 100 percent—all the time, which sounds generous but is just a different kind of scorekeeping. We fight for relationships. We negotiate needs.

War language. Transaction language. Contract language.

And before that, role language. He leads. She submits. He provides. She nurtures. He protects. She supports. Husband. Wife. Defined in advance, assigned at the altar, performed for a lifetime.

None of it describes two people actually meeting each other. It describes two people managing an arrangement and calling it love.

Real dialogue—two equals, actually talking—was never part of the script.

But there is a spiritual growth component I think that we are trying to add to these definitions today.

And while people of faith will rightly point out that their traditions include spiritual growth, it’s growth toward a predetermined destination—a godly woman, a virtuous wife, a man who leads well. The structure is fixed. The role is defined in advance. This leads to a limited-end destination.

That cuts off the part of me that loves the satisfaction of just being in flow, of becoming something we couldn’t have predicted alongside someone who is doing the same. It doesn’t sit well with me.

But there’s another way to think about it entirely that moves beyond these ideas.

It talks of love as growth not toward a role but toward yourself. No predetermined role. No fixed destination. The question isn’t are you becoming a better wife/husband—it’s are you becoming more yourself.

The first definition measures you against a role. The second measures you against yourself. I think that is beautiful.

Yet, recognizing this requires something most of us were never taught: intuitive self-awareness and courageous self-honesty.

Losing ourselves to a role or relationship usually happens gradually. You don’t shrink all at once. You just slowly stop bringing certain things up. Stop asking for what you need. Stop expecting to be fully known. And one day you look up and don’t quite recognize yourself, but you can’t pinpoint when it started.

I see that commonly happening with my clients and within my own previous marriage.

A Definition Built to Actually Work

In The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm made an argument that remains vital here: love is not a feeling that happens to you. It is a skill. An action. Something practiced, developed, and refined—like any other craft worth working on.

That reframe alone dismantles most of what we were taught. If love is a skill, then the intensity you feel is not evidence of love. The longing is not evidence. The inability to leave is not evidence.

None of the feelings that convinced you this was love are, by themselves, evidence of anything except a nervous system responding to what it learned early.

What matters is what the relationship is building. Whether it is growing both people. Whether it is sustainable, chosen, and mutual or consuming, compulsive, and one-sided.

Psychologist Polly Young-Eisendrath takes this further in Love Between Equals, arguing that real love requires what she calls the three C’s:

>> Commitment: chosen actively, not defaulted into. An acknowledgment of the deep human reality of pair-bonding, including paying attention to the powerful role separation anxiety plays once a bond has formed.

>> Constraint: the acceptance that we are human. That your partner will disappoint you. That your wounds will surface inside the relationship—not despite the closeness, but because of it. That the perfect partner you’ve been holding out for doesn’t exist and never did. Young-Eisendrath asks us to stop seeing our limitations as problems to solve before love can begin and start seeing them as the ground love is actually built on. Real people. Real life.

>> Containment: your ability to keep harmful or hostile impulses under control. To pause before acting. To reflect on consequences before they become damage. To distinguish between what you are responsible for and what simply happens. This is emotional literacy in action.

Without all three, she argues, you don’t have a container for love. You have something that feels like love but cannot hold you.

Why the Definition Matters

Think about the last time you bought something you really cared about. You researched. You read reviews. You compared. You deep-dived until you felt confident you were making the right choice.

But love? That luscious, consuming, all-encompassing feeling of being in love?

We just fall. (Or maybe we brace and fall simultaneously!)

We’ve got the love versus lust distinction down. We know chemistry isn’t the same as compatibility. But even those are just feelings measured against other feelings—and none of them give us a working definition of what love actually is or what it requires of us.

Honestly, that feeling is real. It’s worth having. Let yourself have it.

But if we want to stop the cycle—if we want to disrupt the pattern of ending up in the same painful place—the feeling alone can’t be the whole story.

We need a measuring stick.

Not to kill the magic. Not to geek out on science. But because a feeling without a definition leaves us completely blind to what we’re actually building or what’s being built around us.

We are the most researched, most information-saturated generation in history. And yet when it comes to the one thing that shapes almost everything else—who we love, how we love, what we accept in the name of love—most of us are working completely blind or simply working with fantasies.

Because we were never given a psychological standard to measure against. We don’t have an agreed upon cultural definition of love and that absence is costing us.

But we are getting there. I am hopeful. I love the idea of personalizing your love definition, not defaulting to one.

We should build one that actually fits our life, our values, our nervous system, our deep souls.

I am optimistic lately. When people encounter these newer frameworks for the first time, something shifts. The question changes from do they love me to is this relationship actually good for me, and then they add what are we committed to building together? Wow!

For many people, it’s the first time they’ve had something real to measure against and look forward to designing.

And that changes everything.

What To Do With This

So start here. Not with a feeling. Not with a role. Not with a storyline. Not with a meme.

Start with a question: by what definition am I measuring love?

This helps us reframe love as a skill, not a fate. It shifts us from focusing on finding the right person to expanding our developing our capacity to love.

Young-Eisendrath gives us the structure: commitment, constraint, containment. It helps us learn what space to operate in.

Together, they offer what most of us were never given—a working definition of love that actually helps us recognize when it’s there and when it isn’t.

And the cynic in you? Maybe don’t abandon her.

Cynicism is funny. And when it’s pointing us to examine something real—a culture that handed us incomplete definitions and called it romance—it’s doing important work. It helps us know where to look.

The deeper invitation here is this: give yourself a new definition of love, one that you choose on your own.

Because when we do—when we stop measuring love against a feeling, a role, a hierarchy,  a story, or a just a witty meme—something else becomes possible.

As Young-Eisendrath writes in Love Between Equals:

“When we share this kind of love with an equal partner in a reciprocal relationship, we enter into the deepest kind of inquiry—the development of an interactive field of consciousness that does not belong to either individual but instead is shared in a profound and entirely mysterious way.”

That’s not a neurochemical con job. That’s promising. That’s the real deal.

~

If you enjoyed this, check out another thoughtful article from Emily: