Idle Analysis

Boy meets Girl.
Boy and Girl 'fall in love'.
Everything seems perfect.
Days are bright and sunny,
Nights are long,
Beauty seems all around.
and all that..........
Then after a while,
not suddenly but gradually, things begin to change...
They make as many compromises as fights.
Differences slowly mount,
just a little at a time,
till the point of suffocation,
a point of no return......
and POP!
Breakup!

....The most cliched story in the book. However, I know a few who may relate to this. Theres been no first hand experience though. So i must state unequivocally that I'm woefully underqualified to propound any of the following bullshit....Now, just for kicks, lets pick apart this situation bit by bit.....

Premise
A human soul ultimately craves happiness. All further arguments take this premise. An isolated soul inherently possesses the ability to self generate happiness. The source of this happiness is within the individual. Like the happiness that comes with achievement, perception of beauty in nature etc. The kind of elation an artist feels while painting.

Now, when this isolated soul interacts with another isolated soul, it perceives the second soul as another possible source of happiness that it may tap into, just as the second perceives the first. If the first soul now taps into the second, he derives a part of his total happiness from the second soul. A population is nothing but a number of such interacting souls. Each of the souls having its 'self' and the other souls in the population as possible sources of happiness. In life, this is mirrored by an individual deriving happiness from his loved ones, peers in the form of reciprocated care, attention, praise, acclaim etc. and himself. Lets define the case of one soul drawing happiness from another as that of 'emotional attachment'.

Case Study
With this background, lets focus our attention onto the case study in question. For simplicity we assume the boy and the girl to be isolated souls in the beginning. i.e. they derive a major portion of their happiness from within. (this is a fair approximation to make since in most cases the boy and the girl aren't as greatly attached with other people emotionally as they will be with each other a bit further into the story) Then they meet. Theres attraction. They start tapping happiness from each other.

Now both, the boy and the girl are deriving happiness from two well functioning sources. Theres an upsurge in the total happiness in each of the two causing the feeling of 'falling in love'. This state remains so long as each is drawing from both sources - within and without.

However, what tends to happen is that, one tends to increase dependence on the partner as the primary source and the (unlimited) inner source becomes secondary. Slowly the partner may tend to become the only source. This may be called the state of 'emotional dependence'. Now if the partner is also in the same state of emotional dependence, there is essentially no source of happiness between the two, since neither of them are connected to their inner source. This is when the total happiness within each begin decreasing rapidly. This paucity of happiness is what leads to suffocation and the inevitable break-up in our case study.......

After this break up, the two take some time to recover to their natural states of happiness as they try and reconnect to the inner source and other outer sources of happiness (friends, family etc.) Often they have to depend on outer sources temporarily till the inner connection is fixed and functioning. This is where friends and loved ones come in and the whole process of 'getting over' commences.

The solution to this is simply to stay connected to the inner source at all times.

The Pipeline Model
(Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with my final year BTech. project.)
The above hypothesis immediately puts forth many questions. Weren't the boy and the girl in love then? Or was it just emotional attachment that they mistook as love? What according to this hypothesis would be the definition of love then?

To clear some air in this regard i propose The Pipeline Model (lame as it may sound)

Now, visualise happiness as a fluid, say water. Every soul is a reservoir of this water that can be filled by this inherent, unlimited magma spring. When two souls interact, a pipeline is constructed between the reservoirs so that water can flow from one reservoir to another as needed. The pipeline could thick lined and strong or thin and brittle. It could be of various diameters, may have valves and all that.

The flow of water through these pipelines would signify emotional attachment. The amount of flow would determine the extent of emotional dependence.

Love is the existence of a pipeline between two reservoirs.

The pipeline is necessary for any flow to take place. The boy and the girl were in love. But since the pipeline wasn't thick lined enough, it collapsed.

However, the fact that theres a pipeline does not imply that flow must take place. An ideal relationship would be one in which theres a strong pipeline between full reservoirs with little or no flow............

Think about it.

Trust a Mechanical Engineer to convert love into a fluid mechanics problem, you'd say..... :)