We were sold the grandeur of love in almost every book, song and movie. We were told to believe in mysticism, in the depth of connection and to look for the other half. And we started doing it from childhood. Looking for the next single person at a party to join us so we can become a whole and live happily ever after. Yet, the divorce rate of 40%+ (UK&US) tells us that there’s something very wrong with our conception of love. Just think about it, almost half of the couples you know will split at some point.

Going through my own experience of falling in and out of love and looking at friends I wondered what exactly is true love. Is it even real? Or is it merely a medium to solve our problems? Is true love selfless or selfish? How is romantic love different from a love for a friend, a parent or a pet?

Picking a life partner is one of the most important decisions one makes. But how can one reason about it? I got tired of ‘love’ being defined so poorly. After thinking, writing and discussing the topic of love, I accidentally found that looking at love through the lens of graph theory creates a visual, powerful and yet simple framework. The goal of this essay is to demystify love and share this framework to reason about it holistically.

Picture yourself as a graph. You consist of a range of nodes and connections extending from the centre outwards. The nodes at the centre are your core nodes and highlight the essence of your being, they are what you value. The external nodes are manifestations of your core nodes and are visible to yourself and other people. Connections represent the action you do to value your core nodes and for simplicity can be thought of as acceptance. For example, the core node of curiosity may be manifested as books on your bookshelf. Accepting the core node of curiosity is a result of reading books. The graphic below visualises it.

Everyone is born with a range of unique core nodes. As we grow up, we try different things and see what brings us joy and pride in the process. By paying close attention and experimenting, one is able to identify the core nodes. Living in acceptance with core nodes is a prerequisite to true love.

But as we grow up we are constantly fed the idea of falling in love and how great it is. At some point, we get the fear of missing out and we actively start looking to fall in love. However, during our teenage years, we typically haven’t had enough time to understand our core drivers, our core nodes. They are likely to look like this:

We haven’t tried enough things to understand and accept our selves as a result our graph would be barely connected, with a range of question marks on our core nodes and some activities we partake in because society pushes us to. So what happens if we think that we fall in love with that kind of composition?