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.