I would have thought by now, from all the songs I have heard on the radio, that I would know what love is. I could at least sing along in the car, even if I didn’t truly know what it was. I could follow the story of two lovers getting together in movies I’d seen or share similar emotions while reading a love story. But when it came to actually trying to apply the concepts, I fell short in all aspects of my life. Because I was just trying to reenact the scenes and lip-synch to the songs, without understanding how to really play along.

Philosophical Engineering

I read a quote by Albert Einstein where he said, “How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?” Now, I’m not sure what type of music he was into back then, or what movies he went to see on a Friday night. But if one of the greatest scientists of all time believed love to transcend known, explainable scientific principles, then I certainly didn’t expect myself to get any closer to defining it with the same mentality of an engineer using science.

Instead of what to say in a practical sense to a woman, the only thing that raced through my mind were the theoretical considerations and specific assumptions that needed to be made before one could engage in a conversation. That is, I would quickly go through the scientific method in my mind: collect beliefs of what is known about the woman, analyze the data of what statistically has been proven before, make a hypothesis about what to say, experiment with the pickup line, and then analyze the feedback to draw a conclusion. This all had to be done in a matter of seconds to be successful. But of course, as I tried to apply this methodology, I thought back to Einstein and how he believed science couldn’t define love for you.

But that’s just it. How do you find love? Where do you find it? Is it hiding under a rock somewhere? Or waiting to be clicked on? Does the gate to love really just open up when I log in to my account for one of these sites?