Head or Heart: What It Means to Fall in Love

I met my first girlfriend in the stands at a high school football game.

She introduced herself to me by pushing me off of the bench I was standing on. The rest of the evening consisted of teasing each other. By the end of the night, we were kissing. My friend and I drove her home and only then did I ask her name and discover that she was from the rival school.

Even though I fell in love with her, the rest of our relationship remained emotional and immature. We met at a non-alcoholic dance bar on weekends, when my parents would let me go. We talked a little bit over loud music, danced, and kissed. When she moved away a year after I met her, I can’t say I really knew her very well. But my heart was still broken. My parents tried to comfort my broken heart by telling me that this was just an emotional relationship, infatuation, “puppy love.” 

Many years later, I can see that my parents were right. My relationship with my first girlfriend was shallow and emotional, and not based on anything real or lasting. However, her fun-loving spirit was very attractive, and it was something I looked for in other women I dated and in the woman that I married.  

We are sometimes too quick to dismiss the experience of falling in love.

Instead, we should seek to understand the proper role of emotional love in our journey toward the vocation of marriage. That understanding begins with the proper concept of emotions in general.

The word emotion shares common linguistic roots with the word “motivate,” and that’s exactly what emotions do. They motivate us to attain something we think is good or to avoid something we think is evil. Desire and disgust are two of the most basic emotions.

Emotions are a physical ability found in animals. Animals with more complex brains have deeper, more complex emotions. Does that surprise you? We’re used to hearing that our emotions make us human. However, what makes us human is that human nature integrates the physical and the spiritual.

And this is where reasoning comes into play.

The spiritual abilities of reasoning and free will make human emotions even deeper and more complex than those of the most advanced non-rational animals. Furthermore, whereas animals are controlled by their emotions and will always act on them, humans have the unique ability to control, direct, and even choose our emotions. 

Human emotions are unique from animal emotions in another way, too. Because our emotional life is integrated with our intellectual life, our emotions can serve as a shortcut to our reasoning processes (hopefully not a short-circuit, though that can happen too). For example, people who regularly make certain kinds of judgments on the job will often claim that they can “feel” the right decision as if by intuition. What’s really happening is that their emotions are communicating an automatic, habitual reasoning process that they don’t need to consciously focus on anymore. 

What does all of this have to do with falling in love?

The emotional experience of falling in love can actually be the same process of shortcutting a reasoning process. As we gain experience in human relationships—family, friendship, romantic relationships, work relationships, etc., we are constantly engaging in a thought process of identifying personality traits that we like and don’t like. As we begin to focus on our romantic relationships, one product of our analysis is a list of traits that we “gotta have” in our future spouse and another list of traits we couldn’t live with. 

Very early in life, the process of analyzing relationships becomes automatic and habitual. When we encounter someone we might have romantic interest in, we automatically seek out traits in our “gotta have” list. If we identify any of those traits, our emotions sound the alarm and we fall in love (or at least experience infatuation).

Without the emotional shortcut, we’d be stuck ponderously analyzing every relationship we encounter. Thanks to the emotional experience of “falling in love,” we can identify someone as a good candidate for marriage more quickly and in a way that is frankly more fun and exciting than a rigorous rational analysis. 

What is the proper response to falling in love?

However, cautions about infatuation are still well-placed. While emotions play an important role in human life, we can’t automatically trust them and follow them. Emotions aren’t always accurate. This is especially true since human nature is fallen. Our senses can deceive us and unruly physical desires often get in the way of clear perception. 

With hindsight, I can say with confidence that my first high school girlfriend would not have been a good spouse for me. The same is true of other women I fell in love with. But the experience of dating, growing in friendship, and navigating my romantic relationships helped me refine the criteria that eventually led me to my wife.

In contrast to my first high school relationship, my relationship with my future wife was much more intimate.

We put a lot of effort into getting to know each other. It was beautiful to see our relationship grow more and more solid even as our emotional love for each other grew. We knew each other really well by the time we were married. Because we got into the habit during our time of courtship and engagement, we now continue to talk, to explore each other, and to grow in intimacy.

The best response to human emotions is to see them as an alert that we’re in a situation that deserves further thought and reflection. The experience of falling in love identifies a person as attractive and invites us to consider the relationship more deeply. Immediately giving your heart away is not the proper response to falling in love. Instead, start exploring the relationship path that begins with building trust, then intimacy (knowing each other on a deeper level), then commitment, and finally giving your heart away in self-sacrificing love. Falling in love is a beginning, not a destination.