I
knew a guy in college who had radioactive pheromones. At least, it always felt that way, because
whenever I would come within a certain radius of him, my IQ would seemingly
plummet, and all of my attention would be devoted to eliminating any physical
distance between us. My reason, shouting
dimly in the background, would rein me back barely within the confines of
common decency, but the compulsion was a force to be reckoned with. It was entirely puzzling, because once I
exited the radial range of those pheromones, I would regain higher function and
wonder what on earth had happened to me.
He was good-looking, to be sure, but there were a lot of good-looking
boys who didn’t have this effect on me.
I eventually decided that it had to
be chemical.
There is a whole host of issues that
falls outside of reason. Essentially, in
the map of my rational mind, these are the areas marked hic sunt dragones: here be dragons, including pheromone sandpits
and gut reactions. Hormones, adrenaline,
instinct, and intuition all percolate beneath a neat little world of reason and
empiricism, and I think it’s when the one tries to find meaning in the other
that things get unnecessarily complicated.
Take the aforementioned male
specimen for example. As I experienced
strong—ahem—compulsions, my brain tried to make sense of them. We live in a culture where it is colloquially
acceptable to assert that your body is “telling” you something: that you
haven’t been sleeping enough, that you’ve pushed your endurance too hard, that
someone shouldn’t be trusted. For a
while I thought my body might be aware of something my brain was not: that he
was special somehow, that the strength of my attraction was indicative of
something my brain had not caught on to yet.
The sensation feels different from intuition, but it is hard to resist
for the same reason intuition is hard to ignore: something about it is
powerfully instinctive, and often, instinct is trying to tell you something
important. I thought maybe the intensity
of our chemistry was telling me that in spite of his idiotic tendencies, he was
worth pursuing romantically.
I’ve
gone through a few versions of this scenario since then and started to notice
that my brain’s desperate need to organize the universe also extends inward to
the land of instincts and hormones.
These feelings, these unexpected chemical interactions, must mean something. Right?
Maybe not.
As
it turned out, all my instinct was telling me in the case of this guy was that
I should bang him over the head and drag him back to my cave, so to speak. It’s instinctive all right, but I think it’s
also a felony when taken literally.
Fortunately, reason intervened before I went too Neolithic, but I still
managed to make a fool of myself by trying to make a boyfriend out of a
caveman.
I
began to think that the common saying “better living through chemistry” should
come with a few caveats.
Recently, I was biking home from
campus on my new commute. Now, instead
of a forty-five minute bus ride, I have a fifteen minute bike ride on a well-maintained
path beside a babbling brook. (It’s
almost embarrassing—but not quite.) As I
coasted down a hill, hair on end and bike humming away beneath me, out of
nowhere I suddenly felt an intense sensation of contentment bloom in my
stomach. It felt certain, and in my
first month in a new place in a new graduate program, the certainty had a
borderline narcotic effect. My brain
instantly interpreted it as an indicator that I had made the right decision by
coming here.
Only at a stoplight did I stop to
examine that thought, in light of what I’ve learned about chemistry and
rationalizing.
First, I hadn’t exercised in an
obscenely long time, so my body was probably just overwhelmed with exercise
endorphins. Second, and more
importantly, I have been trying to move away from the idea that there is a
right decision, a right path, and if you choose correctly, you get some sort of
cosmic prize or positive reinforcement.
I made a decision, I invested in it, and I am (so far) pretty happy
here. That doesn’t mean, though, that
there was one road to happiness, and through luck or skill I happened to choose
correctly.
The problem is that my brain wanted
to desperately to believe that my body had told me exactly that.
I believe in intuition and, with
some chagrin, I believe in signs from a benevolent universe. I also believe, though, that it is dangerous
to depend on chemical combustions and planetary alignments to prove ourselves
right. If you want a sign, you’ll
probably find one. What bothered me was
that I had thought I was utterly and completely certain about my choice—why then
did my brain seize on some chance endorphins as additional proof? Probably because I’m never quite as certain
as I think I am, and I think that’s where I run into trouble.
I am in a new place, doing a new
thing, starting a new life. Of course I’m terrified, but that just
means that this is all important to me.
I chose my choice, and that has to be the thing I depend on. If the universe or my hormones wants to send
me some additional chemical signals, that’s fine, but I need to have faith in
the choice first, and the signals second.
I also need to remember that sometimes chemistry is just chemistry, and
just as my brain is not all-knowing, neither is my body.
My life is complicated enough
without the messy business of self-auguring.
One complication is that there is a
man in my life right now who seems to have those magical pheromones (just how
many of these men are there, anyway?).
This time, though, it’s not just proximity I want—I also have an
irrational desire to bear his children. I
swear, I go a little cross-eyed whenever I smell him. Incidentally, he happens to be a great human
being as well (not a Neolithic bone in his body, as far as I can tell). Nevertheless, when I exit that fatal radius,
my brain knows that something isn’t quite right yet. I think I understand by now, at least in
theory, that for a thing to work, the chemistry and the reason have to line up. I’d love to find meaning, find proof of
something, in my chemical reaction to this man, but I also have to admit that
there are a lot of things I still have to understand in the misty realms
between mind and matter, rationality and pure chemistry. So maybe his smelling good is just a function
of good hygiene and excellent taste in cologne, and neither of those things
should effectively lobotomize me, nor indicate anything about his suitability
as a partner.
In the meantime, I resolve to have
faith that somewhere between the Neolithic and the neurotic, there really is an
adult in here who will be able to figure this stuff out.
