Chemistry

Is romantic chemistry a psychological phenomenon? Or perhaps a desperate attempt at making sense of human relations. When it comes to relationships, people (myself included) love to decipher each partners own personality as an explanation on how the ended up together. We think that there is some magic code written in each individual’s psyche that predetermines who we end up. As fascinating as this is, I believe it is over-simplified.

This personality matching is even boiled down to some chemistry equation that somehow predicts which individual’s are best suited for each other. I know that in highschool on Valentines day each student would fill out a questionnaire, then the results would be analyzed and a list would be given to each student of which classmates are there best matches. This bogus match was based on some fundamental psychological assessment of each individual.

Of course it seems to be a quite a stretch to thing that human relationships can be so simply assessed. From my experience, there is no one simple formula for relationships. I cannot imagine any psychological test being able to predict with any shred of accuracy the probability of two individuals matching in real life. There is no one single recipe for love. Different strokes for different folks as they say. Here is one area that psychological testing would not be so successful in testing… Same can be said for internet dating. In my opinion, it is not a magic match but some way to boil down human affection to a statistic.