Stonewall 0410

By Joan Opyr

What Do You Get When You Fall In Love?

Stop with the love and marriage and, please, stable the horse and carriage.  Let’s talk about love and physics.  Why?  Because what love is all about, Alfie, is gravity.  It’s about taking a leap of faith and landing happily on your feet or, alternatively, falling headfirst into a deep, dark gorge.  It’s all or nothing, stop or go, get hep to that step or get out of the way.  Love cannot live on Burt Bacharach alone.  What the world needs now is love sweet love, but what love needs now is Sir Isaac Newton.  Allow me to explain.

You can’t appreciate love until you understand gravity, and you can’t understand gravity until you understand Newton’s Laws of Motion.  We all get the First Law, inertia.  It’s easy – you don’t have to do a damned thing.  You’re either moving at a constant speed or you’re standing still.  Either way, nothing’s changing unless some net force acts upon you. 

Are you with me so far?  Okay.  Let’s move on to the Second Law, momentum.  This is mass times acceleration.  Imagine you’re sitting in your Lay-Z-Boy recliner, minding your own business, when some net force comes out of the blue and knocks you sideways.  How hard are you hit?  It depends on the mass, and it depends on the velocity.  At this point, you might ask yourself a question like what the hell was that?  Or, since I’m trying to make an analogy here, why do fools fall in love? 

The answer is that some net force has just rocked your inertia.  You see that freight train a-coming, but you’re lying on the tracks.  Inertia dictates that you won’t roll away.  Instead, you’ll be flattened like a penny.  Or, if you’re the train, then inertia is what will keep you from putting on the brakes.  You’ll flatten that penny and derail yourself.

Love, like gravity, is intractable.  But don’t despair.  We have Newton’s Third Law to cover our asses.  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  While you’re being crushed, Poor Penny, someone else is being inflated.  And as for you, Engine Number 9, while you’re telling anyone who will listen that you’ll never fall in love again, someone else is on top of the world, looking down on creation.  There’s a natural force at work here.  What goes up must come down.  Spinning wheel got to go ‘round.  So take heart.  While you’re being kicked to the curb, some other lucky spud is making out like Shane on The L Word. 

I understand that knowing one or two or even three things about gravity might not be any comfort right now, but I am happy to assure you that your day will come, and you’ll have everything.  No, really – your day will come.  To understand this, we must leave Isaac Newton and return to Burt Bacharach, who’s kind of schizophrenic on the subject of love. 

Burt says he wants us to have it.  He says it’s sweet but in short supply.  So hurry up and grab it, right?  Well, maybe.  What do you get when you fall in love?  A girl with a pin to burst your bubble.  Oh, yeah.  That’s what you get for all your trouble.  And God help you if you should kiss her.  Burt says that the only thing you’ll get out of that transaction is enough germs to catch pneumonia.  I hope you’re taking your Vitamin C. 

Love can be as sweet as a Smith Brother’s cough drop, but Burt tells us that it’s also filled with lies and pain and sorrow.  Sounds like a miserable bargain, doesn’t it?  A fifty-fifty bet.  Love stinks, except when it doesn’t.  Love is a kick, but is it a kick to the teeth or a wonderful kick far superior to champagne?  The answer depends on whether you’re the one bursting the bubble or the one catching pneumonia.  Are you the action or the reaction?  Inertia or the net force?  Flip a coin but remember this – you don’t want to be sitting in the cheap seats when Sir Isaac Newton or Burt Bacharach gives you a practical demonstration of the physics of love.

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