Melancholy

I started treating the version of her I was in love with as dead.

Not metaphorically “dead to me” but actually deceased in my internal model.

The girl I projected onto, the girl I could look at all day and never get bored, the girl that made all other women in the world feel unattractive to me, the one my brain kept generating soft-focus montages of, got a quiet funeral in my head.

That version no longer exists.
Grieving a corpse is cleaner than arguing with a ghost that still posts.

The saddest truth is, you will never find the same person twice, not even in the same person.

I will never find anyone like her ever again, that’s never gonna happen.
It’s a very hard pill to swallow.

Because there’s no one else like her.
What we had together could never be replicated.
Even if we go back together.
Because we both are different people now.

After that, the romantic operating system started looking less like magic and more like a very elegant biological exploit.

The Chemistry

Let’s talk about what actually happens when you “fall in love.”

Dopamine - is the main character. Novelty + reward prediction error. Your brain notices a specific human and starts treating them like a slot machine that sometimes pays out attention, validation, physical contact. The high isn’t love. It’s the anticipation of more of them. Same pathway that makes people check their phone 200 times a day or chase the next hit. Romantic limerence is just high-stakes intermittent reinforcement with better aesthetics.

Oxytocin - gets marketed as the “bonding hormone.” Cute branding. In reality it’s more like a temporary trust and attachment amplifier. It drops after orgasm, during prolonged eye contact, when someone makes you feel safe. It also makes you more tribal and less critical of the person it’s currently bonding you to. Convenient for pair-bonding. Extremely inconvenient when the data later shows they were running a side quest.

Serotonin - usually dips during the early obsessive phase. That’s why you can’t stop thinking about them. Low serotonin + high dopamine = the mental loop where every song, every street, every 2 a.m. thought routes back to one person. It’s not deep connection. It’s a temporary dysregulation that feels profound because your brain is currently bad at thinking about anything else.

Cortisol - joins the party the second things get uncertain. Betrayal spikes it hard. Suddenly your nervous system is treating a text left on read like a predator. The same system that evolved to keep you alive in the savannah is now firing because someone you assigned special status stopped performing the expected behaviors. Your body doesn’t care that it’s “just a relationship.” It only cares that the attachment figure became unreliable.

Put those together and you get the classic early-relationship cocktail:
elevated dopamine, fluctuating oxytocin, lowered serotonin, and cortisol waiting in the wings for any inconsistency.

It feels transcendent. It is mostly just a temporary shift in neurotransmitter ratios that evolution found useful for keeping humans reproducing and co-parenting long enough for the offspring to not die.

The Uncomfortable Part

Once you see the mechanism, the romantic narrative starts looking like post-hoc storytelling.

We experience a chemical state, then invent a story about “soulmates” and “meant to be” to explain why we can’t stop checking their location.
The story is downstream of the chemistry, not the other way around.

I’m not saying attachment doesn’t exist.
Humans form deep bonds.
Preference exists.
Care exists.
Shared history and mutual respect exist.
Those are real.

What’s oversold is the idea that the initial chemical storm is some pure, elevated truth about another person.

It’s closer to a temporary software update that makes one specific human look high-resolution while everything else goes slightly out of focus.

After the betrayal, the update failed. The idealized version of her became a liability.
So I deleted it.

Not in a toxic “I hate women” way.
Just… stopped running the simulation.

The living person still exists.
The version my brain was in love with does not.

Treating that distinction as real was the most effective way I found to stop the residual dopamine loops from firing.

So do I believe in love?

I don’t believe in the mystical version that tells you the intensity of the early high is proof of cosmic significance.

That version is mostly just your brain doing what brains do when they hit a strong reward signal mixed with uncertainty.

The version of her that lived in my head is dead.

The chemicals still work the same way they always did.

I just stopped mistaking the high for the truth.