Trying to Calculate Whether I Was in Love

There is a particular kind of confusion that appears when you try to solve an emotion as if it were a technical problem.

In June 2010, I wrote a very short entry about not being able to tell whether you were in love.

My explanation was simple:

You probably were.

The problem was that you had written the person’s advantages and disadvantages on a piece of paper, started calculating, and got lost in the analysis.

That was the whole entry.

It was a joke about overthinking.

It was also uncomfortably accurate.

There is something deeply appealing about lists.

Lists make ambiguity look manageable.

Pros.

Cons.

Reasons to continue.

Reasons to stop.

Compatible.

Incompatible.

Good idea.

Bad idea.

Once the columns exist, we feel that a decision should eventually emerge.

Maybe the answer is hidden in the arithmetic.

Three strong advantages.

Two serious disadvantages.

One uncertain item.

Total score:

Proceed.

This is useful when buying a laptop.

Less useful when trying to understand whether you love someone.

Not because emotions are mysterious forces beyond reason.

They are not.

Relationships absolutely benefit from thought.

Compatibility matters.

Values matter.

Timing matters.

Behavior matters.

Trust matters.

Attraction matters.

Practical reality matters.

The mistake is not thinking.

The mistake is assuming that all of those things can be reduced to one final number.

Human attachment resists clean aggregation.

Someone can be excellent on paper and wrong for you.

Someone can have obvious disadvantages and still matter enormously.

You can love a person and correctly decide not to build a life with them.

You can be compatible with someone and still not be in love.

These are different questions.

Young me often wanted them to be one question.

Is this person good for me?

Do I love this person?

Should I continue?

Would this work?

Are we compatible?

Would I regret leaving?

Would I regret staying?

If all of these could be compressed into one answer, life would be easier.

So the mind begins optimizing.

This is where the engineer enters the relationship.

Not with flowers.

With a decision matrix.

There is something funny about imagining love subjected to requirements analysis.

Mandatory criteria.

Optional criteria.

Risk factors.

Weighted scoring.

Decision threshold.

But the instinct is understandable.

People turn to analysis when uncertainty becomes uncomfortable.

We do not necessarily want the truth.

We want relief from not knowing.

A list promises relief.

Once everything is written down, perhaps the feeling will become obvious.

Sometimes it does.

Writing can reveal patterns.

If the “cons” column contains disrespect, dishonesty, fear, manipulation, and constant unhappiness, the list is doing useful work.

If the “pros” column contains nothing except “I don’t want to be alone,” that is useful too.

Reflection matters.

But there is another kind of list.

She is funny.

But sometimes late.

Smart.

But stubborn.

Beautiful.

But likes something I do not.

We get along.

But what about five years from now?

The list grows because the decision was never really about the items.

The decision was about tolerating uncertainty.

That is harder.

When enough analysis fails to produce certainty, we often respond by doing more analysis.

This is a familiar failure mode.

Not only in relationships.

Projects.

Jobs.

Purchases.

Career choices.

Where to live.

Whether to move.

Which offer to accept.

At some point, additional information stops improving the decision.

It only postpones it.

The technical term may be analysis paralysis.

The lived experience is simpler:

thinking until movement becomes impossible.

The old entry linked this feeling to being unable to decide between options.

That connection matters.

Sometimes uncertainty about love is not really uncertainty about feeling.

It is uncertainty about choosing.

Those are not identical.

You may know very clearly that you care.

The difficult part is what to do with the care.

Continue?

Leave?

Say something?

Wait?

Choose one person over another?

Choose a relationship over a different life?

Then the mind cleverly disguises the decision problem as an information problem.

If only I understood exactly how I feel, the decision would become easy.

Maybe.

But perhaps you already understand enough.

You simply do not like the consequences of either option.

This is where lists become emotionally attractive.

They create the hope that one choice can be made objectively superior.

No guilt.

No loss.

No doubt.

The paper will decide.

But real decisions often contain loss whichever way you move.

Choosing one life means not choosing another.

That is not a bug.

That is what choice means.

When I was younger, I think I wanted decisions that proved themselves before I made them.

I wanted to know.

Not merely choose.

Knowing feels safe.

Choosing feels responsible.

If the answer is objectively correct, then I am not really responsible for the alternative that disappears.

The evidence made me do it.

Relationships rarely offer that luxury.

There is usually no complete dataset.

People change.

Circumstances change.

You change.

The future refuses to provide test results in advance.

So you choose with incomplete information.

Engineers do this too, despite the fantasy that engineering decisions are perfectly rational.

Real systems are built under uncertainty.

You do not know every future requirement.

You do not know every failure mode.

You do not know how users will behave.

You make the best decision available with the evidence you have.

Then you adapt.

Oddly, this lesson is easier to accept at work than in love.

At work, uncertainty sounds professional.

Risk management.

Tradeoffs.

Assumptions.

In relationships, uncertainty can feel like evidence that something is wrong.

If I really loved this person, wouldn’t I just know?

Not necessarily.

Feelings can be clear while decisions remain difficult.

And decisions can be clear while feelings remain complicated.

A breakup can be correct and painful.

A commitment can be right and frightening.

A relationship can contain love and still fail.

This is difficult because romantic culture likes purity.

The right person.

The obvious feeling.

The unmistakable sign.

The moment you know.

These stories are attractive because they remove ambiguity.

Real life usually contains more noise.

You may love someone and still notice incompatibilities.

You may be happy and still have doubts.

You may be attracted and still know the relationship would be destructive.

Emotional truth does not eliminate practical judgment.

Practical judgment does not invalidate emotional truth.

This is why a pros-and-cons list can become dangerous if it is asked to answer the wrong question.

A list can help answer:

What are the risks?

What patterns do I see?

What matters to me?

What am I tolerating?

What would need to change?

These are good questions.

A list is worse at answering:

Do I love this person?

Love is not a sum.

There is also a hidden problem with scoring people.

Once you begin assigning points, you may start treating a relationship like product selection.

This person has feature A.

That person has feature B.

One is funnier.

One is more stable.

One shares more interests.

One fits the imagined future better.

This can become dehumanizing very quickly.

People are not configurations.

Compatibility matters, but a partner is not a bundle of specifications.

The experience of being with someone is emergent.

It comes from interaction.

Tone.

Timing.

Trust.

History.

The way conflict happens.

The way repair happens.

The way silence feels.

None of these is fully captured by a checklist.

This is similar to choosing a car from specifications and then finally driving it.

On paper, one option may dominate.

In reality, the whole system feels different.

Human relationships are infinitely more complex.

A person with impressive qualities may make you feel small.

Another with fewer obvious “advantages” may make life feel easier.

The list can contain the parts and still miss the relationship.

This does not mean “follow your heart” is always wise.

That phrase is too simple too.

The heart is capable of wanting terrible ideas.

Attraction can ignore warning signs.

Loneliness can imitate love.

Fear can imitate commitment.

Familiarity can imitate compatibility.

The answer is not to stop thinking.

It is to use thought for what thought is good at.

Reason can examine behavior.

Patterns.

Values.

Boundaries.

Reality.

It can ask:

Am I respected?

Can we communicate?

Do our lives point in compatible directions?

Can conflict be repaired?

Do I feel safe being honest?

Am I staying because I want this relationship, or because leaving scares me?

These questions do not calculate love.

They protect it from fantasy.

There is another useful question:

If I removed the fear of making the wrong decision, what would I want?

That question can expose how much analysis is really anxiety.

We often say:

I don’t know.

But underneath:

I know what I want; I don’t know whether I am allowed to trust it.

Or:

I know what I want; I am afraid of the cost.

Or:

I know what I should do; I do not want to feel the loss.

These are harder truths than uncertainty.

The piece of paper becomes a place to hide from them.

I can imagine the younger version of myself making that list.

The old entry does not explicitly say I personally had a sheet of paper in front of me at that exact moment, so I should not claim a literal scene the archive does not support.

But the joke clearly came from recognizing the behavior.

Calculate.

Compare.

Get stuck.

That was familiar enough to write about.

The language of accounting is telling too.

Pros and cons.

Hesap kitap.

Calculation and bookkeeping.

As if affection were a balance sheet.

Assets.

Liabilities.

Net emotional position.

The absurdity is exactly why the joke works.

Emotions create qualitative differences.

One item can outweigh ten others.

Trust is not “plus one.”

Betrayal is not “minus two.”

Some things change the entire system.

This is another reason arithmetic fails.

The variables are not independent.

A person’s humor may matter because you feel safe with them.

Their ambition may be attractive until it destroys time together.

A habit may seem small until repeated every day.

A difference may be irrelevant early and central later.

Weights change.

Context changes.

The model is unstable.

No wonder the calculation does not converge.

There is a broader lesson here about decision-making.

We often use precision to disguise uncertainty.

A score of 82 feels more authoritative than “I prefer this.”

A spreadsheet feels more objective than intuition.

Numbers can improve decisions enormously when the underlying quantities are meaningful.

But false precision is comforting.

Not truthful.

If I assign “7/10 compatibility” to a relationship, I have not necessarily measured anything.

I may have only converted uncertainty into a number.

The number feels solid.

The uncertainty remains underneath.

Good analysis knows its limits.

That is true in engineering.

It is true in statistics.

It is true in personal life.

A model is useful when it clarifies.

It becomes dangerous when it pretends to know more than the inputs support.

Maybe that is the mature version of the old joke.

Write the list if it helps.

Just do not mistake the list for reality.

The paper is not in the relationship.

You are.

Another thing changes with age.

You begin to value the cost of indecision.

When younger, waiting can feel neutral.

Do nothing until certainty arrives.

But doing nothing is still a decision.

Relationships continue while you analyze them.

People form expectations.

Time passes.

Possibilities close.

Sometimes endless evaluation is less fair than an imperfect choice.

This does not mean rushing.

It means recognizing that uncertainty has a cost too.

There is no risk-free option.

Choosing carries risk.

Not choosing carries risk.

Staying carries risk.

Leaving carries risk.

The desire to eliminate all risk can trap you permanently at the decision point.

A good decision is not necessarily one that guarantees the best outcome.

It may be one made thoughtfully, honestly, and in time.

That is a more realistic standard.

The old entry assumed something else that I find interesting now.

It said that if you are unable to tell whether you are in love because you are buried in pros and cons, you are probably already in love.

That is funny, but I would not treat it as universally true.

Overthinking does not prove love.

Sometimes people calculate because they are trying to convince themselves to want something they do not.

Sometimes they are trying to justify leaving.

Sometimes they are anxious by nature.

Sometimes the relationship is genuinely complicated.

The archive gives me the younger conclusion.

I want to preserve that voice without turning it into a law.

The younger me believed the confusion itself was evidence.

Today I would say:

The amount of thought shows that the decision matters to you.

It does not tell you what the answer is.

That distinction is important.

Emotion tells you significance.

Not necessarily direction.

Still, there is tenderness in the younger assumption.

If you are thinking this hard, you must care.

Probably true.

Indifference does not usually require spreadsheets.

You do not build decision matrices for people who mean nothing.

So the list itself may contain one piece of information:

this matters.

Maybe that is all.

From there, another kind of honesty has to begin.

Not:

What is the total score?

But:

What am I afraid to admit?

That question does not always produce a comfortable answer.

Maybe you love the person.

Maybe you do not.

Maybe love is present but not enough.

Maybe the relationship is good but the timing is wrong.

Maybe there is no elegant explanation.

Life often denies us elegant explanations.

We still have to move.

This may be one of the hardest transitions for analytical people.

Understanding that a decision can be reasonable without being provable.

At some point, the calculation ends.

You close the notebook.

You stop asking the columns to save you.

Then you choose.

And afterward, like every real decision, you live forward into an answer you could not fully compute in advance.

In 2010, I reduced all of this to one joke:

If you cannot tell whether you are in love because you have written down the pros and cons and become lost in the calculations, you probably already are.

I still like it.

It captures the ridiculous moment when the mind tries to measure something it is already inside.

Today I would add only one line.

The list may help you understand the relationship.

But the list cannot feel it for you.