The Logic Behind Falling in Love With a Stranger

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You’ve done it before. You’ve sat on a bus, or a train, or a park bench, and you’ve seen that extremely attractive stranger, and you were convinced ya’ll were meant to be. You’ve noticed details about them; about the book they’re reading, the way they push their reading glasses up in that cute but academic way, the gradient of their nail polish, the russian red lipstick stain on their poppy-seed bagel . . . you know what I mean. You know every bloody detail about your perfect stranger. You know the scent of his cologne, his dog’s name, what his mom calls him, his dentist’s phone number, the way he likes his eggs in the morning, everything. You’re planning your life together now; holding hands, kissing, cuddling, watching disgustingly cheesy movies together, coming home to one another, but before you know it . . . your perfect stranger is gone. They leave you feeling empty and wistful, like they’ve left with a part of you. The worst part is that you know you’ll never see them again . . .

. . .and you also know that this happens to you way too often. Well, it does for me at least. About once every couple of weeks I catch myself messaging my friend saying, “man, I’ve done it again.” At this point, I’ve been told to “slowly let go” after hopelessly pining for days one too many times. I am hungover with the remnants of my broken dreams, and I am getting to the bottom of this endearing but also acutely irritating phenomenon.

There are two essential forces that push you to think this way. The first, is attraction. There’s something about physical proximity and a similar circumstance that influence you to draw the similarities between you and perfect stranger. The idea is that even though they say opposites attract, we are biologically hard-wired to search for people that are complementary to us because they bring with them empathy and sensitivity, which is what all of us want in our lives. One of the most challenging things in the world is completely understanding somebody else’s exact emotions, because one hasn’t undergone the exact same experiences (past or present) as another. Thus, we are attracted to people who seem like they’ve had a couple of adventures or mishaps that match ours. Take for example, being infatuated with someone while waiting in the doctor’s office; both of you are in the same physical setting and the same circumstance, and because of this you often assume that perfect stranger understands how you’re feeling.

The second principle, though, is much more interesting because it has nothing to do with your mind’s baby boo. It’s when you’re lounging around and thinking, “Oh, she’s so smart and successful, I bet she has a 401k!” The problem here is that simply by one’s appearance, we, the hopeless romantics, assume an entirely different character to them based on our ideals by extending their attributes. We look at an expensive-looking watch and assume they’re filthy rich, we sneak a peak of a book in their tote bag and we assume that they’re aficionados of fine literature. Since we’re building our own versions of these people, we’re fundamentally falling in love with our own ideas. We know nothing about our perfect strangers, we only know our projections of them. What intensifies the gut-wrenching feeling is that we know we’re doing this, but we do it anyway because it gives us a false sense of security. We imagine them to be our flawless fit, so that we would be that for them as well. In truth, it’s a simulation of our insecurities and deep-seated yearning to be loved.

What still troubles me, however, is that if we fall in love with our own brainchildren: is it incest, narcissism, pygmalionism?