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Love, common perception states, is very complicated. To produce love you need two humans, which are intricate and fragile machines, like Hyundai sedans, and to turn those two Hyundais into a larger, functioning couple, you need to rip apart the Hyundais, separate all the parts, and somehow reassemble everything into a large mini-van.
It’s true, humans are weird, finicky beings. And it’s also true that relationships can be difficult to maintain and explain. But really, love isn’t that complicated. It works on four axes. And each of the axes can be rated on a scale from 1-11.
Here are the four axes, and this is the order they’d normally go in, but as we’ll discuss later, sometimes they go in a different order.*
This is the axis of surface attraction. When you see a pretty woman in Starbucks, and she’s wearing a bikini and she’s tan even though it’s January, and she’s sipping a latte, and you think, “That lady looks totally insane, but I’d still have sex with her,” this is purely a Body Axis reaction. When you make out with a cute guy in a bar, but can’t remember his name, and can’t remember ever talking to him (actually maybe you mistook him for someone else), but he is cute, this is your Body Axis taking over.
This is where the Body Axis is:
You will notice that the illustration has a sun and a rainbow. I added those to make the drawing more colorful. But you will also notice that the illustration shows arrows pointing to the male and female genitalia, and that’s because you use your genitalia to make Body Axis decisions. When you hear a guy say, “I was thinking with my penis, not my head,” he means that he made a decision based purely on a Body Axis judgment. (He’s slightly wrong though, because your testicles do your Body Axis thinking for you, not your penis. For women, the ovaries are the decision-makers.)
However, it’s important to note that the Body Axis is not restricted to just physical attraction. When a woman likes a guy just because he has a lot of money and a Saab 9-3, that’s Body Axis, too.
The Mind Axis is where intellectual connections are made. If you think of the Body Axis as pictures on a Facebook page, then the Mind Axis is everything else on the page – the interests, activities, quotes, notes, and wall banter.
When a woman says, “I liked him until he opened his mouth,” this is an example of a positive Body Axis reaction getting destroyed by a negative Mind Axis reaction, usually because the guy inadvertently insulted the woman or spoke with a devastatingly think Boston accent.
Because we usually see our love interests before we talk to them, first impressions are typically created by the Body Axis alone. It’s only when we get to know somebody (which can take weeks, months, or years) that an accurate Mind Axis assessment can be made.
This is the irrational axis, and the one that’s usually to blame for the mistaken belief that love is a complicated thing. The Heart Axis is where crushes are developed, it’s why your body starts to tingle whenever you’re near him or her, it’s the reason you fall in love, and sometimes it’s what makes you do sad and idiotic things like stop hanging out with your guy friends to watch Grey’s Anatomy and drink white wine.
But the Heart Axis is not complicated at all. It’s simply a function of the Body Axis and the Mind Axis. When you’re attracted to someone’s mind and body, your heart will be soon to follow. Unless the fourth axis gets in the way.
This is the bad axis. I don’t even want to talk about it. But I have to. It’s the black hole of axes, and it’s the only one that operates on a vertical plane, between the two lovers. The Fourth Axis can be like a force field that prevents the other axes from functioning. It can even break a rainbow:
The Fourth Axis, the black hole, contains any element that would prevent the couple from fully loving each other. Any road block a relationship has ever encountered goes here – long distance, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, inability to commit, in-laws, career ambitions, mental illness, accidents (I’m thinking of the quarterback getting paralyzed in Friday Night Lights), etc. Sometimes all the horizontal axes can be at full-go (Body, Mind, and Heart are all 11s), but if the Fourth Axis is an 11, too, that’s bad, because it means the relationship is cluttered with obstacles and probably won’t work.
A not-very-extreme example of the fourth axis coming into play would be if you were in Baltimore but your girlfriend were in San Francisco. Even if you loved her, and were registering 11s on all horizontal axes, you would have to figure out a way to overcome a significant Fourth Axis presence.
One of my former high school English teachers presents a more extreme example, for she was in a relationship that involved an insurmountable Fourth Axis. There was no doubt that she was in love with her significant other. She kissed him in public and had a giant portrait of him hanging on the wall. There was also no doubt that the significant other loved her. He followed her everywhere, always kept an eye on her, and probably, behind closed doors, humped her leg. In their case, their relationship could never work because he was a poodle. So they had a very large Fourth Axis. Definitely an 11.
Obviously there is a great deal of interplay between the four axes, and relationships unfold following different blueprints and timelines. But here are several charts to explain some basic, and typical, axes progressions.
The fist chart represents a standard progression: you meet, you think he or she is hot, you sleep together (and it’s good), you get to know him or her (actually, this should hopefully come before sleeping together), you like him or her (this, too), you fall in love.
But sometimes that’s not how it happens. Some people meet on the Internet, and they initially become attracted to the other person on the Mind Axis, and then they exchange pictures, and then they develop a Body Axis connection or else meet with the person in a coffee shop, and it turns out the woman is not a woman at all, his name is Buck, and he’s going to make sure nobody ever hears from you again. But this chart represents a pleasant Internet dating arc, one like they talk about in eHarmony commercials:
But both those progressions are unrealistic. It’s rare that Body, Mind, and Heart get to 11 and stay at 11 without some bumps in the road. So let’s introduce a Fourth Axis obstacle (again, I hate to do this) to an otherwise perfect relationship. Let’s say one half of the couple suddenly has to move to China for business, but the other half has to stay home to take care of a sick grandmother.
As you will notice, the Body Axis is often the first thing to suffer when the Fourth Axis comes into play. This is when you start hearing phrases like, “I’m just not attracted to him anymore,” or “I’m starting to have trouble remembering what she looks like,” or “I never realized that she doesn’t really have a chin.” When distance is wedged into a relationship, the Mind Axis can stay positive, at least for a while, through correspondence, but eventually even this can wane. And if the Body and Mind aren’t functioning positively, the heart will follow.
Optimists believe that the Fourth Axis can always be overcome if the other axes are rated highly enough, and I believe this, too, so long as your lover isn’t a poodle. But the goal of this column is not to describe how relationships function, break, and heal. The goal is to describe how love works. And really, that’s not too complicated. It’s not a Hyundai mini-van. It’s just love.
*
Why are you doing this?
A Basically to make a lot of conversations easier. While bartending I hear one interaction over and over, and it drives me crazy. It’s the one between two women in which they talk about men, insincerely pump up each other’s confidence (“You’re the best part of him and he doesn’t even know it!”), and discuss love as if it were a car engine with seven hundred, equally important, parts. By giving these women the gift of the four axes, they will now be able to order a drink (and hopefully drink it quickly), and one of the women, the one with the guy problem, will say, “Two of our axes are 9s, but one is a 4, and it’s the important axis, but I guess everything comes down to the fourth axis, which is a 7,” and then the other one will say, “Yup. There’s your problem right there: the fourth axis,” and then they will leave my bar. (By the way, this conversation would be equally annoying, probably more annoying actually, if it were between two men, but men don’t really talk about feelings, so it doesn’t happen.)
Well, where did the theory of the four axes come from?
A A lot of paper napkins, cocktail and otherwise. I’ve drawn all these diagrams before, or most of them anyway, over the past year and a half, and I felt it was time to take these napkins, stuff them in a bottle, and throw the bottle into the ocean, so that some day, on some beach, somebody can find the bottle, read the napkins, and have a better, easier, discussion about love. Hopefully they’re not stranded on an island all alone though. That would be a waste.
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