Kids,
Sorry for the late letter. I stopped writing for a little while because I wanted to step away and simply experience life for a moment. Now I’m back, and I have so much to share with you. And the first letter after a while is about love…
“Love is blind.”
You’ll hear that sentence your entire life.
People say it whenever someone stays in a relationship they should leave, gives up opportunities for another person, or makes sacrifices that seem incomprehensible to everyone else. We speak of love as though it temporarily disables the very thing that separates us from other animals: our ability to reason.
There is a curious contradiction at the heart of almost every love story ever told. We celebrate love as one of the greatest experiences a person can have, yet we describe it using the language of madness. We “fall” in love rather than choose it, speak of being “crazy” about someone, and warn others not to let love blind them. If intelligent people repeatedly make life-changing decisions because of love, perhaps the problem is not love itself but the way we understand it.
Before asking whether love makes us irrational, we first have to ask what “rational” actually means.
Economists use the word very differently from the rest of us. In everyday conversation, being rational usually means remaining calm, objective, and unaffected by emotion. In economics, however, a rational decision is simply one that consistently maximizes a person’s preferences given the information available. Those preferences can include money, family, reputation, morality, or love itself. A parent who risks everything to save a child is not acting irrationally because the child’s life is worth more than any financial cost within that parent’s own system of values.
Love becomes interesting because it does not merely influence our decisions; it changes the preferences from which those decisions are made.
Before falling in love, you may organize your life around independence or ambition. Afterwards, another person’s happiness begins to enter your own calculations. Economists call this a change in preferences. Most of us simply call it falling in love.
Evolutionary biology tells a very different story.
From nature’s perspective, love is not poetry. It is an adaptation that increased the probability that vulnerable human children survived to adulthood. Pair bonding, attachment, jealousy, and grief all make more sense once viewed through the lens of survival rather than romance. Evolution is not trying to make us happy; it is trying to make us successful ancestors.
History, however, reminds us that biology is never the whole story.
If love were nothing more than an evolutionary mechanism, it would be difficult to explain why kings abandoned kingdoms, artists sacrificed fortunes, or ordinary people repeatedly chose affection over security. Throughout history, love has shaped diplomacy, inspired masterpieces, and occasionally destroyed empires. It has never behaved like a simple biological instinct because human beings have never been simple biological creatures.
Perhaps the mistake was never in love itself, but in the standard by which we judge it.
Throughout this essay, we’ve borrowed definitions of rationality from economists, evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. Each discipline offers a compelling explanation, yet none seems entirely sufficient on its own. Economics asks whether a decision maximizes utility. Evolution asks whether it improves reproductive success. Neuroscience explains the chemical mechanisms that shape attachment, while philosophy asks what kind of life is ultimately worth living. Each framework illuminates part of the picture, but none captures the whole.
But very few people, looking back on a long life, wish they had been more efficient.
Most of us hope for something far richer than that. We hope to build a family, to belong somewhere, to love deeply, to be loved in return, and to become the kind of person who is capable of putting someone else’s well-being alongside our own. Once those values become part of the equation, many decisions that once looked irrational begin to look perfectly reasonable. Perhaps love doesn’t suspend reason. Perhaps it simply changes what reason is trying to optimize.
That doesn’t mean love should excuse poor judgment. It should never ask you to ignore red flags, compromise your principles, or tolerate cruelty in the name of romance. But don’t dismiss every sacrifice as irrational simply because it can’t be entered into a spreadsheet. Some of the most meaningful choices you’ll ever make will never maximize wealth or convenience, yet they may still be the wisest decisions of your life.
So kids, when you read this, I don’t know who you’ll be in love with, whether you’ll still be searching, or whether you’ll decide that marriage simply isn’t the life you want. Whatever path you choose, I hope you remember that love is too important to be guided by feelings alone, and life is too precious to be guided by logic alone. If these pages accomplish anything, I hope they simply persuade you to ask better questions than my generation did. Don’t ask whether love is rational. Ask instead what kind of life you are trying to build, and whether the person beside you helps you become someone you’re proud to be. I suspect that question will take you much farther. I also hope you remember that love deserves both courage and wisdom. Don’t be so afraid of making the wrong choice that you never love at all, but don’t become so blinded by love that you stop asking difficult questions. The happiest relationships I’ve ever seen weren’t built by people who found perfect partners. They were built by imperfect people who chose each other wisely, again and again.
Love you,
mom
