I expect it is a virtual certainty that everyone the world over has known love at some time in their life. Yet what love is remains as mysterious to explain as ever, particularly what we call romantic love. When you love, or are loved, whether you can explain it or not, you probably know it, painfully so if the love is unrequited, but how did it happen in the first place? What love is may well remain so varied and personal that we will never be able to define exact criteria. I shall not have the temerity even to try. What I shall be proposing, however, is a model or mechanism for how people "fall in love".

It is said that when people are house hunting they invariably make up their minds whether to buy within the first few minutes of seeing the property, sometimes even before going inside. There seems to be a capacity within the human mind for taking instant major decisions intuitively. "Love at first sight" applies equally often to people as to houses. One only has to listen to the romantic letters on record-request programmes to note how common it is. What do we have inside us which enables such a rapid response? If one can not do practical experiments, then one approach is to develop a hypothetical model, and explore how well it fits reality.

My initial model envisages a set of tick boxes in the brain which record whether an impression of each of a range of aspects of another’s personality (or house) is favourable or not. In the simplest case this would be YES/NO; or more complicatedly it might be "marks out of 10", like the Dudley-Moore/Bo-Derek movie. I do not know how many boxes there may be, but shall we say "enough". I would not claim that people know what attributes their boxes are recording. It is an intuitive subconscious process.

I suggest further that we perform this operation continually with all people we see or meet. We thus develop a subconscious mental estimate of the distribution of the "scores" of our colleagues, friends, family, and neighbours. Let us take a hypothetical example. If we allot 1 to a YES box, but 0 to a NO box, and there are 100 boxes, then we may have a subconscious mental image of a distribution of scores between say 30 and 70. This distributional image is gradually developed during our formative years from a relatively small sample of people. It is said that, at any time of one’s life, one rarely has more than 50 close acquaintances. This basic image will inevitably be heavily dependent on the first 50. "Give me a child until it is seven" as the Jesuits are reputed to have said.

By the time emotional puberty sets in, this distribution is well in place, with a subconscious awareness of its mean, variance, and skew. Those acquaintances with the subliminal highest scores, most people would probably admit to loving, but would dislike those with the lowest scores. For those in the middle they would just be dispassionate. In previous generations, one’s circle of acquaintances often never changed significantly. There were also severe class-based restrictions on eligibility for romantic attachments. Many people married childhood friends from the same community. They may well have loved their spouses, but I suggest they did not fall in love with them.

I define "falling in love" as occurring when you meet someone the intuitive score for whom exceeds sufficiently the highest previous score. This seems to fit modern experience. By one’s late teenage years people are on the move. One may still have fewer than 50 close acquaintances, but they are a different, if overlapping, set of 50 people. Schools are much larger than they ever were. Students change schools, they go away to university or to start work. They go on foreign travel, if only for holidays with the family. They join clubs, or societies. They play Games and sports. Even if they just "hang out", they meet other new hangers out. Teenagers and early twenties are perpetually falling in love with someone new, not to mention the "7-year itch".

This does not necessarily mean that they cease to love "old flames". It may be rare, to be "in love" with more than one person at once, but one can still love several. After marriage, or the equivalent commitment, matters can get more fraught. Historically, particularly in continental Europe, they often managed their affairs more sympathetically. As I suggested earlier, spouses may have loved each other, but they had never fallen in love. Eventually perhaps, one or the other met someone else and did fall in love. The marriage did not collapse if the situation were handled discreetly, or there were considerations deemed more important, such as children, property, or inheritance. The husband took a mistress, or the wife took a lover, or both. Society invariably knew, or guessed, but turned a blind eye. The difference today is that most marriages are not only to people we love, but to people with whom we have mutually fallen in love.

With the ever increasing mobility within society, people continue to fall in love as they mature, as their in-built criteria are modified by their wider experience, and as they meet many more new people, not necessarily even in person. There are Internet romances!

To discover that your partner, with whom you fell in love, has fallen in love with some one else, is usually a bitter blow. It invokes more than jealousy. It strikes at the heart of one’s self esteem. Accepting that the betrayed spouse may still be loved is virtually impossible for that spouse, and for the new loved one. It is a situation with which our society has yet to come to terms. A common reaction today is separation, divorce, remarriage, and then another divorce, as the situation recurs. I confess I have no immediate solution. Yet if the model I am postulating is anywhere near the truth, the problem will not go away.

I suspect that only a major cultural shift would help. It has often been observed that we are too dependent on other people for self esteem. If my model suggests that we can never remove the potential for falling in love again and again, then stronger internal self esteem would at least make wronged spouses more resilient and less co-dependent. That is fundamental to aptious thinking. We are all of equal worth, whatever our passing value to society or to our spouse.

We are all perpetually of equal worth, provided that we mutually give due respect to all others. This should concern the potentially unfaithful spouses. Just because they have fallen in love with someone else, a situation they should realise is almost inevitable, they still have to decide what to do about it. If they no longer love their original spouse, they should still respect them as human beings. Antagonising them merely to precipitate a divorce is reprehensible. If they decide they still love their spouse, then that should be made clear to the potential new love. That may enable both of them to make a more rational decision about pursuing the relationship. It may be hard, but it may well be possible to revert to being "good friends", or even to "part for ever", accepting graciously the ego boost that mutual falling in love has brought.

There are many things in life which might have happened, and could have happened, but by mutual agreement never did happen. But even when they do:

"Women don’t cuckold their husbands deliberately. The act is deliberate, the necessity is not. That simply happens, and usually the wife has a worse time than the poor insulted husband" {Adam Hall}

and vice versa. If only we all could love and fall in love without guilt, but both jealousy and taking offence stand in the way. I lay much of the blame on the religious view of marriage.

The concept of a "job for life" has vanished, not because it is wrong, but because it is no longer so practicable. Similarly for marriage, "Till death do us part", is just not practical for today’s longer lives. It was more relevant when death was expected before the end of child-bearing years. It was a useful way of protecting family life for children. Even in our more riven society today, the welfare of any children should remain paramount. In childless marriages, or when children have flown the coop, (hyphenated?), the maintenance of mutual respect should be more relevant than any past vows by immature youth.

If adultery itself were not a ground for divorce that would change attitudes to marriage significantly. Much adultery is merely giving in to the temptation resulting from falling in love with someone new. I believe Oscar Wilde implied that the only way to deal with temptation is to give in to it; at least one then knows what is involved! If one does succumb, it is much more reprehensible to try retrospectively to justify freeing oneself for any subsequent new partnership by forcing a marriage to "break down irretrievably" by inflicting mental cruelty on spouses by attacking their self esteem. That is a deliberate act, diametrically opposed to the aptious philosophy of mutual respect.

Yet it is accepted by many as perfectly natural; just part of the ups and downs of marriage and human relationships. The key word is "natural". I am suspicious of anything for which "it’s natural" is the apology. As I said earlier, I regret I have no solution, merely those few aptious thoughts which seem to lead to the conclusion that, although unnatural to our current culture, accepting occasional discreet safe-sex adultery, resulting in no unwanted pregnancies, could produce a more self-confident caring stable society.

What I am more concerned with is whether the simple mental model I have suggested is close to reality. With slight modification, I believe it is. Recent experiments in the United States into our sense of smell have produced a model that is worth exploring more generally. One of the puzzles of smell was that we recognise hundreds of smells. How does the brain record and rank this data for instant recall. In comparison with my tick-box model for human relationships, where does the brain put its smell boxes. The brain is huge, there would be room, but surely there must be a more efficient way than merely holding long lists of predetermined scores. It turns out that there is.

Perhaps not surprising to many experts in computers, robotics, pattern recognition, or biology, the brain apparently recognises smell by means of a neural network. If this means nothing to you let me try to explain. Instead of a large number of individual tick boxes, one for each smell, there is much smaller number of tick boxes each of which may or may not be involved in recording each smell. It is the pattern of YES/NO ticks which delineate each smell. For small numbers this scheme is perhaps not so impressive. With 3 boxes one could cope with only up to 7 smells, but 10 boxes could deal with over 1000 smells, 20 boxes over 1,000,000 smells!

This is for simple YES/NO tick boxes. If one considered marks-out-of-ten boxes then even 3 boxes could conceivably deal with over 1000 smells, and put them into some personal order of preference. Proper neural nets are even more powerful having further properties such as the individual boxes or "nodes" being able to communicate with each other. My simple explanatory description is woefully inadequate. I contend, however, that it gives a useful model for the data base against which we compare newcomers when making such decisions as choosing a house or falling in love.

Falling in love is simply our subconscious neural net recognising a combination of responses significantly more agreeable than ever noted before. This is modern modelling, but the idea has been around a long time. Years ago I heard it said, I forget by whom, or when, and where, that falling in love is feeling that you feel you are about to feel a feeling you have never felt before! ’Appen? As they say in Yorkshire.

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