If the significance of Valentine's Day is anything to go by, the meaning of uncompromising and selfless love has become a fleeting illusion.

Attraction and love can be reduced to resemble an economics “cost-benefit analysis” that borders on shrewd manipulation, if modern-day psychological explanations of the psyche of humans falling head over heels in love are tenable.

It seems that the more we find out about love, the more cynical we get once we begin to unravel its inner workings.

But first, here is the road map to how we got to that conclusion.

Valentine’s Day used to be a pagan festival in ancient Rome, historically associated with romance and the union of the sexes to celebrate fertility.

No surprises then, as a lot of people naturally fell for the idea since making love in itself is attractive, let alone a festival to celebrate it.

Owing to its popularity and realising the difficulty of denouncing Valentine’s Day, the ancient Church had to officially sanction it in an attempt to “de-paganise” this much-celebrated occasion.

Commercialisation

Having lost sense of most of its religious politicking these days, Valentine’s Day in its present incarnation has been transformed into a commercial entity measured by the profits it rakes in for retailers.

This money-making process has been met with rhetorical denouncements of Valentine’s Day profiteering. “A waste of money” and “feeding the restaurants and florists with money,” are common but perhaps equally dismissive, albeit superficial responses.

Interestingly, denouncements spawned another by-product known as the intellectualising of Valentine’s Day and its meaning. Applying the intellect and deriving criticisms usually come with value judgements of Valentine’s Day being perceived to be bad.

For example, Valentine’s Day has been and still is accused of being a flagrant proliferation of the capitalist mode of production or that it stigmatises the singles and privileges couples.

However, do we really think it is about over commercialisation or are we just saying it because everybody who says it tries to sound intellectual, critical or even cynical, when being interviewed for an opinion?

Your guess is as good as ours.

Psychology of attraction for “profit”

Now for the insightful explanation that is supposed to be devoid of value judgements but serve to reveal and articulate the hidden psyche of love and attraction.

According to research conducted by Reuben Ng, a 26 year-old psychology graduate pursuing his master’s degree in Nanyang Technological University, the psychology of attraction revealed that “inferred attraction” comes out as the top reason for being attracted to another person.

Simply put, “inferred attraction” is attraction to someone on the basis of thinking or knowing that the other person liked you in the first place. Such an approach to “love” or “romance” is similar to an investment on others because there is a higher success rate of entering into a relationship.

On a psychological note, the aim to “profit” or “cut losses” happens knowingly or unknowingly in one’s head, creating a higher likelihood of being attracted to someone when we think that the attraction is mutual.

But this somehow recalls the dismissive criticisms of how profiteering has taken over, and we are more susceptible to be driven by the profit motive of successfully being a couple with someone else, than we give ourselves credit for.

Furthermore, these findings is based on research of 400 students from primary five to tertiary level over a four-year period, where “inferred attraction” is the main reason found to cause sparks to fly.

This sample pool is telling as it reveals that kids, all the way through to young adults, are susceptible to this sort of attraction.

Ng, a psychology graduate and university scholar from NUS, said, “We always say that love is blind, but it seems that at the subconscious level, love is not blind. We tend to conduct all these cost-benefit analysis when it comes to investing attraction on other people.”

Mutual and reciprocal love

If all these talk of profiteering leaves one wanting for less cynicism, the consolation is that humans are perhaps made to love and there is evidence to show an inherent deep emotional attachment to possessions. (This is a loose definition where people amount to possessions.)

Of all the people interviewed for this Valentine’s Day article, only one of them made a reference to love for a pet animal.

John Yap, media producer of NUS computer centre, said, “I miss my deceased white dog, and someone made a ‘plushie’ of it with recycled material.

“With it was a card that says, ‘First loves are the most unforgettable’.”

As strange as this may sound, we will make this serve as the epitome of human’s capability for attachment and unsettles the notion of self-serving love.

Attraction is a phenomenon that none of us can fully comprehend but inflicts us instinctively. It is not just about falling for someone or a pet, but an array of inanimate objects that cannot even remotely display “mutual” or “reciprocal” feelings back to us.

Try recalling the fascination some people have with shoes and the pains of acquiring as many of them as possible. And then go into a giddying high, and repeat process one more time.

Anyway, we can only wonder what psychologists would make out of that and by what means of research experiment.