The Poetry of Love: Why Your Brain is Basically a Dating AI

Most people romanticize love as this enigmatic, poetic force beyond explanation. But it’s actually a beautifully intricate algorithm running inside your brain. A system built on patterns, probabilities, and subconscious computations that guide you toward attraction and attachment. Don’t get too overwhelmed, let me break this down.

Okay so let me go into the maths and brain stuff. It’s actually pretty intuitive when you think about it. We all have preferences, right?. But where it gets interesting is HOW these preferences work in our brain.

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Note: Skip the italic words if it’s too overwhelming, read context inside braces instead.

Say you want to choose a guy (/girl) for a date (/marriage) and these are your parameters: his height, skin color, if he drinks/not, interested in long term or just short term, career, money, his car and his nose shape (?).

I, a friend, someone who knows you a little, would guess you care more about stuff like career, money, his relationship preferences and not so much about his nose size or his car (though I could be wrong!). What’s happening here? Your ventromedial prefrontal cortex (basically the part of your brain that assigns value to things) is running a silent auction, assigning different values to different traits without you even being aware of it. Wild!

You see this magic? I know you as a friend. Haven’t even met your boyfriends from the past, yet I still have a decent idea what you’d choose (works with boys too). And it’s not just friends – my mom goes into a clothing store and I ALREADY know what she’ll buy because her brain has these super consistent preference patterns. Same with coworkers – after just a few days, I can predict their behaviors. Our brains are these incredible pattern-recognition machines – temporal lobes (the parts that process what we see and hear) constantly building models of other people.

Now here’s where it gets even more interesting. This isn’t just me being observant – there’s actual science behind this.

In math, this whole parameter selection thing is called regression model, but in your actual brain, it’s this wild dance between your nucleus accumbens (the “I want that!” reward center), hippocampus (your memory storage system), and amygdala (your emotional processing center). My brain has basically created a predictive model of your preferences based on our interactions.

But wait – there’s a catch that makes this whole thing more complicated and beautiful at the same time.

The universe doesn’t care if I understand you correctly. You’ve had so many years of brain processing that I can’t access. I mean, your brain has like 86 billion neurons making 100 TRILLION connections! How could I possibly know everything about everything? Maybe you went to the Middle East as a kid and met some guy with a long nose who was super nice to you. That memory got stored away in your cerebellum’s implicit memory systems (the part that stores memories you’re not consciously aware of), and now you have this unexplainable preference. Or maybe your dad had this blue car where you had amazing family trips, and now blue cars trigger dopamine release (your brain’s feel-good chemical) without you knowing why. Or some tall kid bullied you and your amygdala freaks out a little around tall dudes now. You get what I’m saying?

The really mind-blowing part? This isn’t just about me not understanding you perfectly. It goes way deeper than that.

So your parameter selection process might be totally different than what I expect. But guess what? The universe is playing the same trick on you too! Even YOU don’t have much control over your parameter selection. You don’t even know why you find certain things attractive because your conscious prefrontal cortex (your brain’s “thinking” part) only gets the final output of all these complex calculations happening in the older, deeper brain regions. Your brain doesn’t bother explaining its reasoning!

So now let’s get back to the math stuff, but with this new understanding of how our brain preferences actually work.

Back to math – your “regression model” chooses tons of things in life, not just boyfriends but friends, coworkers, clothes, cars, even nail polish. Let’s call this “curve A” – it’s basically your neural network of preferences encoded across millions of synaptic connections (the connections between brain cells).

And this is where relationships get interesting – because now we’re dealing with TWO of these complex systems trying to understand each other.

Suppose some guy comes into your life. He watches you, listens to your stories, and builds his own theory about what you like. That’s his “curve B.” His mirror neurons (brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you watch someone else do it) and theory of mind networks (mostly in the temporoparietal junction – the part of the brain that helps understand other people’s perspectives) are working overtime trying to figure you out.

This is where most relationship advice completely misses the point. It’s not about finding someone “compatible” – it’s about finding someone whose brain can learn you well.

Curve A will never match curve B 100% – even YOU don’t fully control Curve A, so how could someone else get it perfect? But what happens is you give feedback – like when a guy is buying a car and you go “ooh look at that blue one, so shiny!” That feedback helps his model of you improve. Over time, curves A and B get closer through oxytocin and vasopressin (bonding hormones that get released when you feel close to someone) – those bonding hormones that strengthen neural pathways when you have positive interactions together.

This is what statisticians call “maximum likelihood” – not copying your preferences but learning them through trial and error. Neuroscientists call it Hebbian learning: “neurons that fire together, wire together” – creating stronger connections through shared experiences.

Let me show you how powerful this gets in real life with a weird example.

And it’s honestly amazing even if it’s a slow process. Like say you’re doing something completely new – your brain has no established preference patterns for it. But your partner who’s been learning your parameter model can actually guide you toward things YOU would like! Say you’re buying a spaceship (lol). What color would you want? Your partner might intuitively suggest a color that matches your fridge, not knowing you won a spaceship magnet in some childhood competition that’s been sitting in your hippocampus-based episodic memory (your system for storing specific personal experiences) ever since.

This seems random, but it’s not. Your brain is making connections between seemingly unrelated experiences. Your partner, having spent enough time observing you, has unconsciously built a model of your preferences and learned to predict them…even in situations neither of you have explicitly discussed before! This ability is why long-term couples sometimes feel like they can “read each other’s minds.” Their brains have simply fine-tuned their predictive models through thousands of shared experiences.

So there you have it – the mathematics/neuroscience of love is basically about prediction models running on brain hardware. It’s not about destiny or “the one” – it’s about finding someone whose neural network gets progressively better at modeling yours. The couples who last longest are the ones who’ve built the most accurate models of each other ie understand and care about each other.

And this is exactly why I find the scientific understanding of love so much more beautiful than the poetic nonsense we usually hear (sorry to be harsh on poets today, but you get my point…).

Love isn’t just some random feeling. It’s this beautiful dance between neurotransmitters, hormones, and multiple brain regions creating a complex, evolving computational model of each other. THAT’S the real poetry!

Thanks for reading 🙂