The Yerins Theory of Love

For years I have wondered in the deepest ocean of my mind, trying to find the meaning of Love. What I found was that love is undefinable. Everyone has their own definition, their own explanation, according to their experience with this incredible feeling of life.

But the idea that love is undefinable does not sit well with me, something must be wrong somewhere. I believe along the line, we created so many meanings for this word that the true meaning ceased to exist. And even when the true meaning resurfaces, not much value is placed on it, for the same word, Love, is used.

I wrote a little about the phenomena called Love in my previous book Index, where I described it as an unintended manifestation, because the feelings manifest themselves unexpectedly. This means it is a natural emotion. I also described it as the most powerful emotion a human can experience.

Evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and ethology all provide various explanations on how love arose from evolution. Even Darwin wrote about what he called social instincts in The Descent of Man. All explanations, to greatly simplify, amount to this: love provides a survival advantage for social species. As such, these species are more likely to reproduce and spread their genes.

Love is but one of many prosocial traits that in the past few decades have been experimentally shown to exist in other hominid species. These other traits include friendship formation, altruism, a sense of justice, sharing resources, adopting genetically unrelated orphans, expressing guilt and forgiveness, and empathy, to name a few. We humans like to think we alone possess these human behaviors, but that is not the case.

Now that we have established a general understanding of love, let us dive deeper into romantic love. Loving someone and marrying someone are totally different things, because love is a spontaneous feeling while marriage is a compromise to live life with social liabilities.

Relationship is a journey, a journey you begin to embark on with a partner. Before you begin any journey, you need to know a couple of things: where the destination is, how long the journey is, and when it ends. Unfortunately, when it comes to love, most people do not know where their relationship is leading, or how long it will last, or even when it ends.

In my previous book Index I wrote a quote saying there is an end to every beginning, but no end to beginnings. This is to say the feelings you have for someone during the first few months of your relationship will come to an end. But that also means a new kind of feeling will begin after it.

So I decided to create my own words replacing love to describe these different times. The words are Giddle, Frontier and Malove. These can also be described as stages of love. What I found is that people who grow old and die together have passed all three stages. This means Giddle has an expiration date. So does Frontier. And the end of Malove is death from old age. During each stage, different parts of our brain react differently and a different neurotransmitter is released. Since this is the case, calling it one word just seems wrong. This I call The Yerins Theory of Love.

So what is Giddle? Giddle is when you have a sexual or romantic feeling for someone. Its duration is three to five years. If we say I have a Giddle feeling towards you, it implies what it really is, a sexual and romantic feeling. But at the same time, it also means we can try out a long standing relationship, but with the knowledge of each stage and its end. So during the period of three to five years, we have honest, routine conversations on how we feel about each other and whether we want to proceed to the next stage.