Love, meeting: the fruit of chance or alchemy?
In fact, there is no clear answer, it’s a bit of both … Indeed, shrinks believe that to meet a soul mate, above all, you have to be free in your head, truly available, in other words ready to love. For example, you take the metro on the same route for months, and you don’t notice your neighbor who, however, also takes the same route. No click, the meeting does not happen. And then the famous spark arises, of an essentially psychological nature for some, essentially chemical for others. He or she will say a word that you are going to be sensitive to, perform such a charming little gesture, cast such a touching look, and the process will be triggered. Why him ? Why she ? “Beyond any rational explanation, alchemy operates and touches the depths of each person’s emotions”, replies Dr Sylvain Mimoun in “Sex and Sentiments”. Even if everything seems to be due to chance, there is in fact an unconscious theater which will allow the reconciliation. As Freud said when alluding to the Oedipus complex: “To find the sexual object (the loved object) is in short only to find it. Here are the loved parents who reappear, but also the child that we have been and that we always remain a little in the back of our mind. »During the shock of love, it is the other who resonates with the child buried in himself, and who brings to the surface a host of buried emotions. But chemistry also intervenes in the process of meeting, and as Dr Philippe Brenot, psychiatrist and sexologist asserts, in “Sex and love” (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 the romantic encounter
Man is not a little animal and very much human, nor the other way around, he is 100% animal and 100% human. Biology acts in us as much as our culture and our personal history. »Thus, smells intervene in the processes of attraction: those which stimulate our desire because they excite our olfactory memory (memories often linked to childhood or to 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 carrier himself but on his congeners”, explains Annick Le Guérer in “ The Powers of Odor ”(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 of the genitals in particular, could well exert an unsuspected but real attraction, creating the attraction. We can also notice that if the 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 “alchemy” between two individuals?
How do the meetings take place?
26% through friends, 14% in the workplace, 13% through chance, 7% on a website. (Source: Harris / Top Santé 2010 survey)
