Meet your soul mate: how does it work?

Love, encounter: coincidence or alchemy?

In fact, there is no clear-cut answer, it’s a bit of both… Indeed, shrinks believe that to meet a soul mate, you must above all be free in your head, really available, in other words ready to love. For example, you take the metro on the same route for months, and you do not notice your neighbor who, however, also takes the same route. No click, the meeting does not take place. And then the famous spark arises, of an essentially psychological nature for some, essentially chemical for others. He or she will utter a word that you will appreciate, perform such a charming little gesture, give such a moving look, and the process will be triggered. Why him ? Why she ? “Beyond any rational explanation, the alchemy operates and touches the deepest of everyone’s emotions”, answers Dr. Sylvain Mimoun in “Sex and Feelings”. Even if everything seems due to chance, there is in fact an unconscious theater that will allow the rapprochement. As Freud said, alluding to the Oedipus complex: “Finding the sexual object (the loved object) is in short only finding it again. Here are the beloved parents who reappear, but also the child that we were and that we always remain a little in a corner of our head. During the shock of love, it is indeed the other who resonates with the child buried in himself, and who brings to the surface a crowd of buried emotions. But chemistry is also involved in the dating process, and as Dr. Philippe Brenot, psychiatrist and sexologist, affirms in “Le Sexe et l’amour” (ed. Odile Jacob), “to want too much to consider only our impulses psychic in love, we run the risk of no longer understanding anything.

The “animal” factor of dating

Man is not a bit animal and a lot human, nor the reverse, he is 100% animal and 100% human. Biology acts in us as much as our culture and our personal history. Thus, odors are involved in the process of attraction: those that stimulate our desire because they excite our olfactory memory (memories often linked to childhood or our love life), but also those that we do not not distinctly felt and which nevertheless play an essential role. Those are the pheromones (from the Greek “pherein”, to carry and “horman”, to excite), molecules “secreted outside the body, which do not act on the wearer himself but on his congeners”, explains Annick Le Guérant in ” The Powers of Smell” (ed. Odile Jacob). They are known in insects, fish or snakes, and even in mammals. But long before this work, “links had already been established between sexual behavior and bodily exhalations,” she explains. Those of the armpits (not to be confused with the smell of perspiration) and the genitals in particular, could well exert an unsuspected but real attraction, creating attraction. We can also notice that if amorous and sexual activity does not experience a real seasonal break, certain annual rhythms seem to persist, which is perfectly explained since the level of sex hormones, both female and male, varies during the year. , depending on the environment. Finally, what if we simply spoke – and more nicely – of “chemistry” between two individuals?