I sometimes imagine an evening out with my future partner. We are having dinner at a vibrant restaurant playing light music, with the white noise of the general din of the crowd humming in the background.
I, then, driven by some instinctive urge, get up and proceed to the stage. I start to talk – about what I feel for her and what she means to me, and after some time when I reach the denouement, I say, teary eyed and in a choking voice – “all the wait, all the years and months and days and minutes I spent alone, yearning for a company, were worth it, because today I have you. There was meaning in all of that agony, all the loneliness, all the time I believed. Every time it did not work out, it was for this moment. Today, I have crossed the brimming river, and stand on the other side holding your hand. Today, I am with you.”
And then, I am summarily dismissed by my rational mind which laughs, chides me, asks me to get a grip, and diverts me from the beautiful but frail castle I had been building. As I see the castle – the closest resemblance to perfection I could afford – dissolving into the waves, I am comforted by him. It is but natural to behave non-rationally when any question of love is involved, he says.
The way we meet new people in our lives is inherently non-deterministic in nature since our volition is involved – we may, of our own accord, choose to initiate conversations with any one of several people we meet on any given day. And then, as the days and months pass and we meet more people, forge new bonds, and as the existing ones stengthen or weaken, our life emerges and takes shape. Over time, we are able to discern noticeable changes and realise how different our life has become driven by our past choices.
In chaos theory, a particularly interesting phrase is used to define chaotic systems – they are defined as “deterministic systems that have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, implying that in such a system, it is possible to calculate the future state of the system if we know its present state, but even the slightest error in defining the present state will lead to huge discrepancies in the future predicted state. A good example would be the rolling of a dice.
Our current scientific knowledge is enough to predict the outcome of a roll of dice provided we are able to precisely define its initial state when it is falling – something which is inherently very difficult, not least because the dice has pointed corners and the surface on which it falls is never perfectly smooth.
Although our life is not, in strict terms, chaotic because our free will makes it a non-deterministic system, as a metaphor it does imbibe the beauty of chaos theory in that the smallest change at one stage of our life can lead to a completely different life progression over the years.
So how and where I shall end up meeting my future partner cannot be predicted, for all it needs is the firing of one arbitrary neuron in my brain at any arbitrary point on any given day to change my life path from the default state – maybe I take a different route to office that day, or travel in a different bus, or maybe I just decide to walk; maybe I visit a new restaurant for lunch, or take part in a workshop with people from all over the city; maybe I travel to a nearby city on the weekend and stay in a hostel, or maybe I visit my parent’s house and it just so happens that I end up making eye contact with someone across the street who is visiting her relatives.
It may even happen that I am strictly following my daily routine, but a rogue neuron in my future partner’s brain sends her day into a different trajectory that comes and intersects with mine.
Or it could even be that both of us are following our usual routines, taking the usual route to office in the metro, and we just happen to raise our heads and look at each other and smile. Let me look around, maybe that lady sitting a few rows away from me is my future partner?
The possibilities are endless and our lives exemplify the butterfly effect in practice, uniquely imprinting everything, and tearing and pulling down any pretences at predictability – every action, every decision we make is a potential catalyst that could bring the two of us together. It is not written, for it cannot be written. Your fate could, at least in theory, set you up with any person in the world provided a certain set of circumstances arise; and no set of circumstances, as far as bringing two people in contact are concerned, are impossible – some are merely more probable than others.
So, in reality, my future partner is not going to be that “special someone” because the chaotic nature of a human life betrays any sense of purpose – it is non-teleological. It cannot, so to speak, “work towards bringing to reality a certain chain of events”.
But then how does one reconcile one’s feeling of “having found the one” in the face of such non-determinism? How do we end up finding someone who is “perfectly suited for us”?
It is nothing but our naive human nature at work, which only needs to feel the slightest sensation of butterflies in the stomach to start ascribing all kinds of emotions and rationales and reasons to why the given person entered our life, including the feeling that “the entire universe has conspired to make the two of us meet”, that it was “written”, that you had been “waiting for her for all your life”, that you had “known it all along” and so on. This is basically a catharsis coming in the clothing of hindsight bias.
To be fair to our human nature, though, we should concede that the agonising gut instinct that we will “never again meet someone like them” is actually a fairly well-placed fear, for even if there were other people who were better suited for us, the chances of their lives intersecting with ours to such an extent that it leads to a conversation, are minuscule.
I will end by taking a detour into the world of science, and from where I can find a striking parallel.
In the year 1925, Erwin Schrodinger, a quantum physicist, came up with an equation called the “Schrodinger Wave Equation”. Very simply put, it describes the wave equation for any given object and tells us what is the probability of finding that object at any given point in space.
When such a wave is observed, it is said to “collapse” and the object ends up occupying a particular point in space where we can see it. Yes, quantum physics is weird.
I think there is a similar “Schrodinger Love Equation” – there is a wave of uncertainty about who is “the one” for us, and it is only when we “observe” a given person and choose her and take steps towards her that the uncertainty breaks down, the Love Equation collapses and, out of all of the millions of women out there, this particular lady becomes our “the one”.