The Irrationality of Irrationality

Author's note: I tried playing around with a Notes from Underground style for the narration here. Forgive the indulgence. Or don't. That is rather the point. Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky's 1864 novella; a quick overview is here.

I have had a rough draft of this post ready for a hot minute.

The original version looked nothing like what you are reading now. That should concern you, reader. Not because the earlier draft was better, or more honest, or more pure. No. It should concern you because I was a different person when I wrote it, or at least I had convinced myself that I was. And what is more suspicious than a man revising his own sincerity? Either I need to start posting as soon as I write something, before I have time to become a coward about it, or I can keep tweaking it forever and call that growth.

I was also waiting for a good conclusion to the story. Then I realized, just like my last post, that I love endings that have the indecency to keep breathing after they are over. So I will tell you now, reader, and save you the suspense: there is no happy ending to this piece, and no sad one either. There is just an ending. Do not wait for the bow. There will not be one.

So here we are.

This piece is, in itself, a self-rationalizing insight into me discovering limerence and trying to decode how I think just to rationalize why I feel the way I feel. Limerence, The term is generally credited to psychologist Dorothy Tennov's 1979 book Love and Limerence. Merriam-Webster has a short overview here. if you have not had the misfortune, is the clinical-sounding name for that involuntary, obsessive infatuation with another person, the kind that hijacks your attention, scripts entire futures out of nothing, and survives almost entirely on the hope of being wanted back. A fancy word for a humiliating condition. And do not admire that opening sentence. It is not wisdom. It is evasion with better vocabulary.

For as long as I can remember, I am heartbroken about something or someone. It is kind of what fuels me at this point. I need to feel like I just lost the love of my life, like it means everything to me, so I can work productively. Ridiculous? Obviously. Effective? Unfortunately. And that is the problem, reader. If a delusion makes you useful, you start negotiating with it.

If you eavesdrop on what I am listening to at any given time, you would probably think I am sixteen, having just lost the love of my life. Heartbreak music, melodramatic pop, T-Swizzle, the kind of songs that make ordinary inconvenience feel mythological. Somehow this helps me function. I can work better when some part of me believes the world has ended.

You may judge me. I would judge me too. In fact, I am judging myself as I write this. That is the whole trick, is it not? I accuse myself first so nobody else can do it with any originality.

I love watching movies. More in a movies-are-a-window-to-the-human-spectrum-of-emotions way, and less in an I-am-a-cinephile-slash-film-snob-who-is-going-to-judge-you-for-not-having-watched-Citizen-Kane-yet way. Although, reader, it is as good as everyone says it is. Give me a Hugh Grant or Meg Ryan film, and you know I am going to shed tears by the time the credits roll.

Now, if you know me in real life, you probably think I am a humanoid who always makes the most rational and logical decision. I would agree that I try to make the most rational and logical decision, unless I am doing something for the bit, because I rarely get hot-headed or really mad, and I think before I do things. There is a reason I was chosen to dress up as C-3PO for Halloween when my friend group decided we were doing Star Wars. But sometimes you just do something while fully knowing the consequences, because not taking the chance is so much worse.

There. That is the first confession. The irrational part is not that I did not know better. The irrational part is that I knew exactly what I was doing, and did it anyway.

At this point, this article is not about a specific person at all. If you know me and you know why the afternoon of February 28th, 2026, is slightly significant for me, you could extrapolate some details. But as of writing this, I do not think it matters anymore. And if that sounds too neat, too dignified, too conveniently mature, then good. You have caught me. I do not know whether it matters. I only know that I would like it not to.

At the same time, I am always kind of thinking about someone at any given point in time. I cannot pinpoint when in life I started thinking this way, but I am almost always hung up on something or someone. I have thought of happiness as this unreachable summit that I will never truly be on. If I summit, I have to come back down. So I am transitioning this ideology into happiness being more of a journey than a destination. Call it the Sisyphus complex, where you have to fall in love with the process. Yes, I know. Very profound. Very convenient. Very gym-poster-with-Greek-mythology.

But the valley of despair is real. When it feels like this is the most heartbreaking, end-of-the-world thing that has ever happened to anyone, and nobody else has ever had it worse than you, and nobody will ever understand it like you do, you really do realize what compels you to love. Why men wrote ballads and poems about their love.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

I am not here to say these feelings are not real. Love might be a chemical reaction at the end of the day, but why be rational about it?

No, really. Why? That is not a rhetorical question. I have asked it like a man asks for mercy. Because, reader, once you begin allowing irrationality one small room in the house, it does not stay there. It starts redecorating. It hangs pictures. It opens windows. It starts calling itself intuition.

And then you end up maladaptive daydreaming and thinking about all possible future scenarios where things could have gone. I have a bad habit that when I really want something, and it does not end up panning out, I blame myself for wanting it too much. As if life has played a cruel joke on me by denying me the undeniable right of getting everything in life.

Reader, it is never this serious. And yet it is. Do you see the problem? I know it is not serious, and I feel it as if it is sacred. I can laugh at myself and still obey the feeling. I can call it absurd and still build a shrine to it by noon.

Most things in life are not really that deep. Most of the time, you will not even remember how intensely you felt about these things. This will just be a faint chuckle, thinking about how silly you were. But to feel is to be human. To feel intensely, to love, these emotions are what drive us into a life worth living.

Okay, then. This post already has a weird title. The thesis already does not make any sense. Where are we going? What is the purpose of this article, dear reader? Is this a confession of a man who finally fell in love? Is this advice on throwing that Hail Mary because who knows what could happen? After all, you only need to "win" once. All countless past losses stop mattering when it works out. Failure is just the cold start time. Or is this to warn you that you might be falling in love with the idea of being in love? Or am I trying to rationalize love based on safe choices?

Do not ask me. I am a silly goose. I make a lot of mistakes, and I still have a lot more to make. Maybe I am Ozymandias, the king of kings, warning you to "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" From Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias. Poetry Foundation has the poem here.

Life is not fair. Some days you wake up and in your soul you feel how incredible a person is going to be. Like nothing else in life matters except their happiness. Like you cannot rationally explain why you think they have so much to offer to the world, and even being a fly on the wall and seeing them succeed in life would be enough to satisfy you.

I will warn you, my dear reader: you have your own life to live. Do not live vicariously through someone else's life while you still have yours to live. Do not confuse admiration with surrender, tenderness with destiny, or the fact that someone makes you feel alive with the idea that they are responsible for keeping you alive.

When every waking moment when you are not thinking, you think of them. A small gaze into the abyss. Staring outside the window, and instead of seeing the wind rustling the leaves, you catch yourself thinking of them. When no flaw could stop you.

That sounds romantic until you remember that the other person is real. Terribly real. Real in the most inconvenient way. Real enough to have their own desires, their own fears, their own timing, their own private weather. Real enough to say no. Real enough to not even know the role you cast them in.

At the end of the day, I just want people to be happy, man. I love complaining about everything. I do not actually mind inconveniences, but I do love complaining about them.

John Gardner, in his 1984 book The Art of Fiction, said that there are only two types of plots, and they are just different perspectives of the same event: the collision between a stable world and the unknown. This is usually paraphrased as "a person goes on a journey" and "a stranger comes to town"; Oregon State's literary terms guide attributes that framing to Gardner here.

1. The journey, the hero goes out.
2. The arrival, the unknown comes in.

Both plots are the same collision, Gardner says, just filmed from different sides of the door. And here is what undid me, reader: I never knew which one I was in. Was she the unknown arriving into my stable little world, or was I the one who went out? I cast myself as the hero on the journey when I was really just the stable world getting walked into. The man who thinks he is on a quest is often only standing in a doorway someone else opened.

I hold the belief that at some level life is about creating and telling stories. What stories are you passionate about in your life? If you were on your deathbed, would you tell the story of tonight? Would you sit around a campfire on a cold, starry night and recount the time you were so heartbroken you thought you would never feel this way again?

I would. I know I would. And that is my sickness, or my gift, or the ridiculous little engine that keeps me human.

How can someone ever mean so much to you in a short amount of time, while on the other hand, they most likely are not thinking about you at all? Loving is supposed to be easy. People are not convenient props in the story of your life. They have their own arcs and journeys to follow. Sure, this might just be the best thing you think can happen right now, and nothing else in life matters besides just getting this one thing.

But life is weird, dear reader. You feel like it is over one day, and then the next you have already forgotten how intensely you felt. That is the humiliation of it. Not that you felt too much. That the feeling, which once arrived dressed as fate, eventually leaves like a guest who overstayed.

There is also the irrational belief that you can bend, or will, life and destiny to do your bidding. But forewarning, reader: respect other people's decisions. I never really thought I would ever have to call the cops on someone, but yeah, that happened. So no, I am not defending delusion. I am not defending obsession. I am not defending the ugliness that disguises itself as devotion. I am defending the part of being alive that refuses to stay measured.

I have always respected logic. I just do not think logic has the exclusive custody of truth. Being self-aware does not always make you safer. Sometimes it just makes your bad decisions more articulate. Some of these decisions are not impulsive. They are fully informed acts of emotional disobedience.

I have outsourced a strange amount of my productivity to yearning. Vaporwave actually got this right. Feeling nostalgic for a time I never actually knew. There is something hilarious about how quickly the mind can build a cathedral from a glance. I have mistaken potential energy for destiny more times than I would like to admit.

Not every strong feeling is a prophecy.

Write that down, reader. Tattoo it somewhere humiliating. Not every strong feeling is a prophecy.

I am never fully sure whether I want the person or the permission they give me to feel this much. There are times I think I have loved someone, and times I have loved what loving them turned me into. Not every muse is meant to become a partner. Some people only arrive to make you feel something and leave.

Wanting is not a license. Nobody owes you a role in the story you wrote for them. The cleanest proof that your feelings are real is that you can accept an answer you do not like. There is nothing romantic about refusing another person's reality.

Now that, dear reader, we have put some sense in your brain as to how you should not ever act, we can go back to being delusional again. Because of course we can. Because I can know all this and still make a fool out of myself. I am always more than happy to make a fool out of myself. I will probably always be a little silly and foolish. I would rather refine that foolishness than replace it with numbness.

You should never keep running because you do not want to face your problems. You want to look back and do the Six Sigma thing of root cause analysis on why you are feeling this way.

A little piece of my soul is going to be forever citing her and everyone else who came before, and comes after, for the sentences I still mistake for my own, for the footnotes they left in every version of me, and for the ways they made me more myself, and less mine.

I would rather be like Icarus and fly too close to the sun than never experience what it feels like to fly. Yes, I know what happened to Icarus. That is not the counterargument you think it is.

I am a yearner. I love love. I hate when I think of her when I do not think of anything, when I am at peace and I have no thoughts, I think of her. Nothingness is her, and everything is her. That tab is always playing audio in the background.

I know the joke is cruel when you joke instead of "she can fix me," "I need to become better." You do not want to raise the ceiling. Instead, raise the floor.

It is the moment potential energy starts cosplaying as destiny. It is when you do not know someone deeply yet, but some irresponsible committee inside your head has already begun drafting futures. It is like koi no yokan (恋の予感), Roughly, the premonition that you will fall in love with someone after first meeting them. A short explanation of the phrase is here. where when you meet someone for the first time and you feel like the two of you will inevitably fall in love. But fate is a dangerous word to use for a person who did not consent to being part of your mythology. That is the sentence I wish someone had beaten into my head earlier. Fate is a dangerous word to use for a person who did not consent to being part of your mythology.

And maybe that is the whole point. I do not want to be reasonable at the cost of being alive. I do not want a life so optimized that nothing ever breaks the model. I love love. I love the game. I love the absurd human tendency to turn chance into meaning, music into prophecy, and one impossible night into a reason to become better. I am not asking to be cured of that. I am only trying to become worthy of it.

I would say I wish I never met her. That would be a lie.

The irrational part is not that we do not know better. The irrational part is that we do. And we are going to continue. Because it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. A paraphrase of Tennyson's line from In Memoriam A.H.H.; see Poetry Foundation's text here. Or so I tell myself, dear reader. Or so I tell myself, because the alternative is admitting that I would rather be wounded than bored.

एक ही तो दिल है, आखिर कितनी बार तोड़ोगी?