Romantic love has been widely depicted across centuries as mystery, magic, and the mysterious chemistry between individuals. Many people believe that the secrets of romantic love are beyond our comprehension, rationality, and reasoning. Their beliefs in love admit irrationality of some sort. While the less educated people of the traditional cultures referred to the “magic of love”, the modern educated people call this “love’s chemistry.” The latter undoubtedly sounds more scientific yet still admits to love’s magic. Anyway, both “concepts” accept romantic love’s inexplicable irrationality. The scientific nature of love chemistry continues to elude our intellectual comprehension (Karandashev, 2017, 2019).
Unknown Causes and Nature of Love
The causes of love are unknown. Why may a man or woman not love someone who is good and nice in many respects? Why does a person sometimes fall in love with bad boys or girls?
Love can strike at any moment and in any place, rendering a lover a powerless victim who acts irrationally and loses control over his or her actions and motives. Men and women do not intentionally choose with whom they fall in love. It is assumed that it is impossible to purposefully fall in love with someone.
A person “falls in love not by design and conscious choice but according to some accident of fate over which the victim has no control”
(Greenfield, 1965, p. 363).
Romantic love is felt as an uncontrollable emotion, as an experience driven by an external power that overwhelms one’s life.
The Irrationality and Mystery of Love
As in any other mystical experience, romantic love appears as an insight that is incomprehensible and unreachable for the rational mind. To some people, the mystery of romantic love is comparable to the magic of religious experience. In both cases, rationality is not suitable to grasp them. In both cases, the rationale is not applicable to their comprehension. Lovers, like the denoted believers, are free from “the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine” (Weber, 1958, p. 347).
The emotional experience of love for them resembles magical transcendence. Romantic love is felt as an “aching of the heart” and an “infection of the brain” (Tennov 1979).
According to anecdotal love stories and myths, people don’t truly understand why they love one person but not another. They rarely choose a partner and rarely fall in love for rational reasons.
The idea of an intentional fall in love by choice sounds unlikely. Most people do not believe that they can fall in love with someone when they wish.
Mystical Experience of Love
Across time, the mysterious, wonderful, and magical feelings associated with love have fascinated people. These long-held beliefs in the mystery of love were due to people’s inability to rationally explain why people suddenly fall in love. Cupid’s arrows fired from his bow caused the person struck to fall in love.
Love magic and love spells have been practiced for hundreds of years. The stories of success have been mostly anecdotal.
Love magic presumably attracts the love of the beloved. It’s frequently used by a woman to induce a certain man to love her or by a man to induce a specific woman to love him. It was a promising cure in the case of unrequited love. Magical love spells are supposed to be helpful in such cases.
Certain herbs, like the mandrake, were supposed to have aphrodisiac or magical properties that were particularly beneficial in cases of love. All in the name of love, amulets, charms, and talismans have been created, candles lit and ritualistically controlled, and ceremonies performed. The Gypsies use a variety of love charms and practices. They include using magic to draw in someone you want, push away someone you don’t want, and make connections stronger.
The Mystery of Love Across Cultures
The idea of the irrationality of love seems to be cross-culturally universal. The concepts of God’s blessing, miracle, destiny, fate, and love chemistry all describe that romantic love is beyond our rational understanding. Some cultures and some people believe in the irrationality of love more than others. For example, French people tend to more readily believe in the irrational nature of love than Americans (Karandashev, 2017, 2019).
Love at first sight is one of the most mysterious phenomena. People across many cultures experience it in their lives and relationships. Scientists are attempting to explain love at first sight.