There are many people for whom it is utterly impossible to fall in love. For a few this is due to physical inadequacy. But to most it is a result of unfavorable conditioning that has made them selfish or afraid of contact with the opposite sex. How does a person get the ability to fall in love? From a physical standpoint certain hormones pour into the blood stream of a man or woman past puberty that create sexual tension. But that only starts to explain the complexity of the love relationship.
Your ability to fall in love depends for the most part on your own previous experience as far back as childhood. In the beginning, for example, your mother met all your needs. Every time you cried your mother rushed to you, to feed you, to give you a drink, to change your diaper or to remove a pin that was sticking in you. Gradually in your mind the mother becomes associated with everything pleasant, with eating, the relief of thirst, the elimination of pain. You probably became attached to her with a depth of love and affection that lasted for many years. Similarly your mother received pleasure from hearing your coos when she gave you relief from pain, she received the approval of your father for bearing you and the admiring comments on you from the neighbors; and she satisfied her motive of mastery by having something (you) under her control. Her love deepened for you.
It has been observed in the South, where the nursemaids may often spend more time with the child than the mother does that the child becomes more favorably conditioned to the nursemaid than to the mother. That illustrates that love is a learned process.
As you grew older and began playing with children you learned to like those with whom playing was fun and you learned to dislike those where your association was marked only by dissatisfaction and unpleasantness.
Similarly if your early associations with those of the opposite sex were all marked by unpleasantness and nervous tension you tended to stick to those of your own sex; but if they were marked with pleasure you turned more and more to the other sex.
Even the appearance of the girl that a young man likes is due to pleasant associations with other persons who had one or more of the characteristics that his girl has. It is not just accident that girls are more likely to fall in love with boys who have characteristics resembling their own fathers than they are with boys who don’t. Similarly a boy is more likely to fall in love with a girl who resembles his own mother than with a girl who doesn’t.
If your early life has been marked by strife in the home and tension in your relation with people your own age, then you have been poorly conditioned for the comradeship married love can provide. And you probably will have the greatest difficulty finding happiness in marriage.
But if your relationships with people have been relatively serene, you will find it easy to learn to love someone of the opposite sex. You will find that when you do certain things you receive approval by way of happy smiles and rewards. Gradually you learn to put your best foot forward. You and your date both are conditioned to be on your best behavior and if you have many things in common develop a deep friendship with each other.
Then, if the conditioning during the friendship is quite favorable, your mutual feeling of appreciation and affection for each other grows and finally ripens into love. There you have it.
In your love for each other you will both gradually become sexually vibrant and you both will begin to feel a need for sexual expression through each other. As this need becomes increasingly strong, you both begin to think of engagement and marriage. Ideally when your need for each other becomes so strong that it can no longer be denied, you are married.