SOME THINGS ARE JUST TOO GOOD TO RESIST!

I know, there are only certain times in the day when it is appropriate to eat chocolate.

When I get up in the morning for my internship, I usually bounce out the door to breakfast. I have to eat eggs, it is my ritual, and so – with retrained complaint – I go to the cafeteria. I usually enjoy this quiet time. It’s when I brainstorm for this column.

And then, as my morning usually goes, I give myself extra time to get to my internship. So I walk out of campus to find a cab. As I walk, I remind myself of all the recent assignments I’ve been given (so that I don’t walk into the office with a blank stare as my boss unloads a new idea, which has already happened once).

And on this walk – it is usually around 10 am – I find myself at the corner of prospect and 36^th street, sniffing around for a cab, and then I usually decide, what the heck, I can pick up lunch in Wisey’s and take it with me.

And just as the early morning sunlight is getting more vivid, and I am appreciating how picturesque the trees are – BAM. I am HIT with the window between the Tombs and Wisey’s.

What am I talking about? WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT?

True, during the day it is an inconspicuous space. Innocent. Uninteresting. Empty. But at 10am (and 10am is the only time I have seen this) there are people in mysterious white robes – they may be chefs, they may be doctors, they may be physicists – I don’t know what they are really doing – because I am transfixed by what they are producing: mile high chocolate cakes so warm and gooey I swear I can smell them standing on the bricks on the other side of the glass.

These people never notice me staring at them. Or else, they are really good professional chocolate makers. They have a collection of instruments, a long line of ingredients, they are covered in powder, and always assert a serious glare into whatever cake they are adorning. How do they do that? I think some sign somewhere claims they are really the pastry chefs of the fancy restaurant, The 1789. I don’t know anything about the 1789, all I know is that my temperature rises to 1,789 degrees when I pass that window – and suddenly I am awake – and suddenly I am reminded that some things are just too good to resist. (I buy a pack of Oreos in Wisey’s to go with my lunch, but nothing will top what I’ve just seen).

Now, I may be exaggerating (a little bit) but what I have come to notice is that those moments when we discover temptation is a sexy, enticing, astounding thing – what on earth are we supposed to do? Bang on the window and demand they slather our tongues with their chocolaty spoons? Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll try that tomorrow morning.

But seriously, I cannot help but take a moment and wonder – is it our age? Is it our situation (college being this playground of possibly cute strangers)? Is it our hard working Hoya spirit that, after we work hard, urges us to play hard? I want to know – what is it that makes temptation so damn tempting?

Instead of inching my way into the pastry shop to mock-interview the chefs about this (and instead, scrape my finger for a taste of whatever they are making) I made my way over to the biology and psychiatry department. Apparently, temptation is nothing more than a product of dopamine. We usually know it as the “pleasure chemical” in our brains, but that role has been questioned by several researchers. One argument is that dopamine is really responsible for anticipatory desire and motivation, or “wanting,” as opposed to actually consummator pleasure, or “liking.”

This seems to make sense. When we want something, isn’t it often true that expectation, or anticipatory desire, that longing that goes with temptation, is so much stronger than the feeling we get when we actually get it?

And once we get it, was that the right way to deal with the temptation? If we want something, does that mean we should have it? We certainly seem to think so, or else we wouldn’t be tempted.

Mark Twain said, “I deal with temptation by yielding to it.” Even another American author, Sam Levenson, said, “Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we’ll find it.” I think in love, temptation can do nothing worse than lead us into an embarrassing situation where we end up with chocolate all over our face. If you see the implications of the mess you made, then you learn something. But if you didn’t really make a mess at all, then good for you – you just had some damn good chocolate.

UNREQUITED? UNDERSTOOD

As a philosophy minor, I seem to run into a lot of problems with "forever." Does the universe go on forever? Does our questioning of the universe go on forever? (Irrespective of the opinions of the characters in “The Princess Bride”) does love go on forever?

You are probably unsure of these questions too.

Despite being unable to argue my way to any conclusions, there is still one feeling that – every time – seems to bring with it the concept of "forever”: unrequited love.

Let’s take a practical example. In “Romeo and Juliet,” Romeo begins the play stuck in the mud of unrequited love. Even though "Rosaline" is a girl we never even meet, Romeo immediately shows us the doom of "foreverness" that he associates with unrequited love.

Lucky for Romeo, he met a bombshell the next day -- and she happened to be into him too.

But what are the things we can do to pull ourselves out of unrequited love?

If you meet a bombshell -- go for them. All kidding aside, usually unrequited love really takes the form of just an obsession-cold. All you need is one bright kick of vitamin C, and that cold is history. Suddenly, you stop sneezing. Some person comes along to grab your attention and, for whatever reason, you forget all about the negativity from the first person.

But when does that ever really happen? Bumping into a bombshell should happen to all of us. Even so, unrequited love is sometimes not just an obsession cold. It is a real sickness. You are love sick: not feeling like yourself, maybe even doing wacky stuff that you know is not you; you feel down, helpless, as if nothing could happen right, except for the total reversal of this persons affections from being away from you to being towards you.

Willing this is impossible. It does not work. The change you can make, though, is in yourself. And there two types of changes.

First, if we really love someone, usually we have offered them the best version of ourselves. If they can't want that, then there's seriously something wrong with them. Think about it. What's the best version of you? Smart? Funny? Kind? Clever? All of these things? Whatever your strongest attributes are – you just offered up all those shiny pennies, and that person is too dumb or too blind to not go for it. So the one change you have to make is this new thought: they're crazy not to love me back.

Another change however is not just a mindset. You actually change. The alternative is that we might not have been the best version of ourselves to this person. Maybe we were greedy, or weak, or succumbed to some temptations we shouldn’t have. Whatever the bad behavior was, that actually is a part of why they did not want us back. This may feel like an ugly, or tough idea to grasp, but the best part is that recognizing a weakness is always the next step to getting stronger. Whatever you did, do not do it again. If it was not right, and it was not you, then change it. Don’t succumb – be better, be stronger.

So, perhaps the best direction to channel unrequited love is to ourselves. Because, when you love yourself, you always get a little something in return.

TEST TUBE LOVE

I always found labs to be kind of funny things. People put on official white coats, and official plastic goggles, and – poof! – they are suddenly official experimenters. They pick out spooky liquids and powders, they mix and stir, heat and cool. Sometimes they explode bottles in an experimental mess, and sometimes they find an ingredient that heals or completely changes the state of something else.

Is it so different in love? I hate to reference that song, but are we not all chemicals reacting? We have good traits, bad traits, secret capabilities waiting to be discovered. But most interesting are the palpable results when we mix with another person.

I'm all for experimentation. Keep me out of a white coat and away from the periodic table, but other than that I think watching different people interact, mix, and repel is so fascinating. Take risks! Give new things a shot! Experiment! It can only result in you learning something new - maybe about a culture, maybe about yourself. The one thing that doesn't work, however, is test tube love.

See in the lab, you can wipe up spills. You can throw away the towel and start over. You can create highly controlled experiments. You can even replace glass test tubes, no matter how dramatically they shatter.

But with people, it’s very difficult to wipe away the spills. Those stains are already there. And if a person shatters, or a part of them does, you can't just get a new one. You have to discover the many ways humans heal (which is sometimes as tedious as fitting each shard back together again).

My point is that you can never conduct a fixed experiment with two people. When two people meet there are skyrocketing amount of variables, does he like my hair? Is she checking me out? Even after basic introductions, mysteries are in the mix you could never know going into it.

I say this because I've tried it. People think when you're going into something new with a person that you can just roll up your sleeves and start throwing in ingredients. Let's see what works and what doesn't. You could do this, but with people, you are handling a complex organism that certainly cannot fit into a nice, cylindrical glass test tube. We're complex, and so is the world outside us. It constantly involves new variables.

I encountered a situation this summer when I tried to pretend things were in the world of a little glass test tube, but the results of my experiment were devastating and some equipment definitely got singed.

This past summer I met a boy, a visitor to DC doing an internship downtown, and our chemicals certainly reacted. I instantly knew this was someone I wanted to combine with. However, this was not a 1 + 1 = 2 scenario. Apparently, this person was getting out of longtime, long-distance, complicated relationship. While my +1 was met with another +1, I knew we added up to 3, not 2. And I don't know about labs, but in relationships, three is a crowd.

But my state had been affected. We never shattered test tubes. In fact, we were a really good combination. We were happy. The hypothesis was a complete success. What was not a success was the removal of the third ingredient. So after all our summer time together, he decided his messy relationship was not one he could wipe away and then toss the towel. He left to fix it.

We were never 1 + 1, we were 2 + 1. It was an inextricable extra that maybe in a laboratory could so easily have been controlled, but we were in the real world. You never are in a laboratory in love. And when you do fall in love, you can't just put out the fire.

Despite all the lessons I learned in this little test, the one that reaches me the most is that love can't be conjured in a test tube. It's out in the real world. And it's the real world we have to be open to. If we watch those variables carefully, we realize it’s not about control. It’s not about having things go exactly as planned. Experimenting is all about discovering new things - things that may often not be in the hypothesis you began with at all.

PARTNER ME, PARTNER YOU

I am learning in my finance class that entering into a partnership can be pretty tricky. Even when the contracts are finally drawn up each party has to know what they are getting into. There are limitations they have to accept and responsibilities they have to bear so that they can both get what they want.

Despite the trickiest business deals, there can no partnership more complicated than a romantic relationship. Think of all the things that go on the line: your free time, your phone talk time, your texting time, your freedom to pursue other people…the list of negotiations is endless. And these are pretty important things to negotiate! What if you just want to spend the afternoon with your friends, and not your significant other? What if you want to get lunch alone? What if you are a smoker? No matter how understanding both parties are, rules bear down on what each one can and cannot do. Even rituals you had to yourself you may have to share with someone else.

Despite all the equations we learn in finance class, I begin to wonder - what are the right and wrong reasons to enter into this kind of partnership?

I think the decision has to start with asking, what makes you happy?

Imagine what would make you happy. For example, how much time do you imagine spending with the person you would be in a relationship with? While in a relationship, how would you want them to treat other people? And how would you like to plan for the future (separately or together)?

There may be other factors that go into the equation, but these issues are pretty valuable. Consider the first example. Would you want a relationship in which you share the maximum amount of time together? Meet for breakfast, text during class, study in the library together, and then maybe get in bed at the end of the day?

Would you want a relationship in which the other person pays no attention to other girls (or other boys) and their attention is only and always on you? In this case, when at the cafeteria, or at party, would talking and maybe flirting with new people not be allowed?

And, finally, when the inevitable time comes for all of us college students to think about the future, whose dream do you follow? If you map out that genius business plan you always had, or finally print out the admissions application to the grad program of your dreams do you then cut out the graduate programs on the coast your significant other doesn't want to be on?

Don't get me wrong, it is not always black and white. In other partnerships, like in family or in friendships, compromises come down to a shade of gray. But when it comes to love, it seems it is easier to loose sight of the original picture of what we wanted this to look like. Suddenly, your compromise becomes compromising.

Don't do this. After all, in love, as in any partnership, you are supposed to be happy. And the three valuable issues I listed are not the only ones. That other person should be fun, everyday, for whatever reason. Whatever is exciting to you should be there, everyday. And whatever makes you feel secure and safe should be there everyday. If not, that's a partnership in which you are loosing, not gaining. And in finance, as well as love, you don't want your stock to go down. Remember to invest in yourself you will have reap strong dividends.