When I was a child living in a 4 room hospital house outside Glasgow hospital, my dad would often come home and play videos while Sidd and I were playing games in the living room.  These weren’t typical videos that you would normally show to 2 and 3 year olds; my dad is an ophthalmologist and used to tape his procedures and operations carried out on patients in order to reflect back on them and see where he could improve on - a practice I admire.  So there we’d be, sitting on the floor playing with our Lego bricks, then suddenly this eye would come on the TV, this big, dilated pupil, clamped wide open, eyelashes like spider legs, staring at us wherever we moved in the room and watching our every move. And then of course came the prodding and poking from the surgery.  It’s never bothered me, in fact, it’s something I found entirely fascinating through my whole life, what my dad does for a living and the consequences of his expertise.   

Eyes are our gateway to the world, they speak more than anything we can express with words or write down on paper and they allow us to see, well, everything. Whether or not one truly appreciates this gift is irrelevant, they are there and they are the best tool we have in life for they let us judge, admire, love, loathe, feel, imagine.. I could go on. They also allow us to express a multitude of emotions in a manner where opening your mouth is not necessary, for you know when you receive that certain look from someone things change in your body, and chemical reactions occur, hormones are released and before you know it, you’re in love.

The human body is an incredible thing, and it acts so completely separately from what we think it should react like, it acts on behalf of what we really do want and not what we think we want.  That feeling you get when you see that person, that automatic reaction. You get hot, you hear your heart, you feel your feet in your shoes and you become aware of  yourself. It’s physiology.  Your heart beats faster and harder, you can feel your fingers pulsating. It’s the multitude of chemicals your body is creating as a response to your attraction; dopamine and adrenaline most notably acting on the receptors in your heart.  You sweat. Your hands are clammy and you’re breathing faster. Those butterflies in your stomach when they look at you, when you’re near each other, when they say your name and you look up to see them. It’s the effects of blood being diverted from your stomach to the muscles of your extremities, your body’s preparation for what could just happen next.  Your pupils dilate as you look into their eyes as an autonomic response in order to absorb more of the world around you and react accordingly to the situation.  Your body is preparing you for something unknown, and unknown to it, it’s love.  

So just remember that romance isn’t dead. It might be due to responses from a series of chemical reactions from the body which were intended for a different context, but the fact that it’s involuntarily automatic and it’s perceived (physiologically) as a scary, unknown and potentially dangerous situation, isn’t that just something?

(Source: alltodaysparties)