The Boy Who Cried “The One”

I’ve been throwing around a new term lately. It’s a term to describe what happens to me on a daily basis on the bus to and from work and in grocery store aisles when all I’m really trying to do is determine the best tuna-for-my-dollar option and while I’m sitting in front of a computer at my friendly neighborhood coffee shop. I’ve described the problem in posts before, and if your personal knowledge of me extends beyond the realm of the blogosphere you’ve probably witnessed the problem firsthand.

If I’m going to have any addictions, I guess I should consider myself lucky that this is my only one. I’ve never done drugs and rarely drink. I’m not a shopaholic and certainly won’t be checking into any sex addiction clinics given my recent resume. No, my problem is a relatively harmless and, if you ask me, endearing one.

I’m addicted to falling in love, and I do so all the time. You have to understand, first off, that I’ve never actually been in love. I’ve loved, but never in reciprocated fashion. That’s certainly done it’s share of damage on my old thinking box, I assume. For this reason, I believe, I’m looking for a chance at love at every opportunity I can. When I see that “right girl” on the bus or in the grocery store or sitting across from me in the coffee shop, then, I’m eager to jump to the conclusion in my thinking box that this girl – who I’ve never even spoken to, mind you – is the most perfect angel in the world and was put on this world for me and me alone.

I call it a heart boner. The typical man’s men get your more traditional boner – deriving from the genital region – when they stumble across a pretty girl, and look to engage the girl in conversation with the intention of dragging her back to their love cave for a night of carnal passion. I, however, have the much more respectable and not-in-the-least-bit-crazy intention of introducing the girl to my grandmother after our first blissful week of knowing each other results in an engagement, wedding plans, and baby-naming possibilities.

Not in the least bit crazy, indeed.

I know my thinking is very flawed when I fall in “love” with these strangers. I understand most women (or at least I’m told) are secretive animals who don’t like to explicitly reveal any strong emotional attachment until a reasonable amount of time has elapsed and social norms finally give you the okay to say “I love you” without looking like a total nut. By these calculations, I must be out of my mind, right? There must be something seriously wrong with me if Wednesday night I was actually considering sitting next to the beautiful girl on the bus and telling her she’s the one I’ve been waiting for my entire life.

Like when genetics made the mean girls from high school get fat in college, however, science has my back. A study of falling-in-love brains has found that falling in love isn’t a slow process that occurs over the first few months of a relationship’s construction. Rather, the chemical reactions within the brain that cause us to feel love occur in less than a second…one-fifth of a second, to be exact. As we sang in Hello, Dolly in the high school musical my sophomore year, “It only takes a moment…”

That one-fifth-of-a-second chemical reaction could take place three weeks into a relationship, three months, or, for the severely emotionally detached, three years. I guess that I, on the other hand, am genetically pre-disposed to undergo the reaction at first glance. I believe in love at first sight because I experience it all the time. Some may not believe in it because their brains don’t reward them with lovey-dovey butterflies for a few months. To each his own.

I’m not trying to imply that I’m any better for my heart boner condition, either. I know I need to wait a little while and find proof that my initial gut reaction was an accurate one. I know I need to keep things under wraps for a little while once it’s confirmed before I go blurting out anything I may regret. The first time I ever said I love you, for instance, came 767 days after that initial one-fifth of a second realization. (But who’s counting?)

My heart boners, then, are perfectly harmless. They’ve been much more common lately, and sure I may be texting my friends a little too often saying, “I found the one!” these days, but what’s the harm in hoping each day that I may have actually found someone to be happy with?

I can answer that question in one-fifth of a second.