The psychology of love

Why do people fall in love? Why do we become attracted to certain people and not others?
Why do we sometimes fall in love at the first sight?
What is love all about??

Before studying psychology i used to think of love as something supernatural, unpredictable and that follows no rules. Later on when i learned about the psychology of love i started connecting the dots and understanding how love happens.

Why love happens?
When a child is born he doesn't have anything in mind, no thoughts, no beliefs and no memory. As the child progresses through life it starts developing certain needs as a result of the experiences it went through.

For example the child that was dethroned by the newly born brother will learn to become an attention seeker in order to capture the parent's attention and might become a showy adult if his parents didn't pay attention to this problem.

Now as we grow up we keep acquiring more and more desires and unmet needs. Based on these unmet needs to start to build a the picture of the potential partner we want to be with. Whenever we meet a person who appears to be able to satisfy these unmet needs we fall in love with him.

So if showing off was the only unmet need the child in the previous example had then he will either fall in love with a very beautiful girl (to show off) or a popular one.

This is a very simple example that can rarely exist in real life because each one of us has tons of unmet needs and not just one but in the end the concept will be the same. We do love those who appear to be able to help us satisfy our unmet needs.

Why do we fall in love at the first sight?
As a result of the unmet needs we have we form a list that contains the qualities we need to find in a potential partner.

If the qualities the other person has that can help us satisfy our unmet needs can be seen at the first glance then there is a big possibility that we will fall in love at the first sight.
Why do we love things?

Why do we love things like food, cars, TV shows, music...etc?
If a little child was attacked by a dog at a young age he might develop a phobia that lets him fear dogs for the rest of his life. In this case his mind believed that dogs are dangerous and thus it used the feelings of hatred to prevent him from getting near dogs in the future.

Love follows the same exact mechanism but it goes the other way around, Love is nothing more than an emotion your mind uses in order to bring you closer to the things that can make you happier.

If your parents treated you well while you are a kid your mind will let you love them in order to help you stay close to them. This is what love is all about.