By: Oskar Niburski

I understate many things and understand even less than that. For example, I do not understand quantum mechanics, people, administration, and legal proceedings, nor can I grasp how refrigerators work, when my dog must go pee, and what I mean when I say I love you.

I have never been in love before, maybe that is why I am unable to accurately understand the notion of love. From an overview, you seem to be taking some sort of emotional average, with it’s range being everything you experienced together and transmogrified into one word. But that is just one statistical way of looking at it. If you are like me, then you tried different things - like writing a book for them.

And when all of the 181 pages are complete, you realize you have not said enough. So then you use body language and when she comments playfully about your thrusting, you quickly switch to posting 500 post-it notes on their wall, each with a unique message regarding musicals and travels and poppy seed bagels, but when that still is not enough, you try to tell them: I love you.

She stares in your direction.

Those three words have been written on everything from tree bark to washroom stalls. This arduous graffiti makes love seem slightly trivial: if cellulose has the word engraved in its atomic structure, what makes your sentence so special? This inevitable and unoriginal thought leaves you with apologies, fumbling around your own tongue, burrowing your hands deep into your pockets, forcing you to utter three more words - I am sorry – more aptly summarized as I am sorry cannot tell you how much I love you.

The word feels recherché in your mouth, and when you used it the first time, you felt like you diffused a bomb with a paperclip. Somehow, you did, and this escapes you. It escapes many, though. Love is the world’s most known and debated subject, with major religion somehow equating God into love or that the feelings we have are connected to some seraphic order.

But I am not writing to proselytize anyone, nor am I trying to consecrate the word itself. I am more likely attempting the opposite. Maybe if I outline love’s etymology I can better understand the word myself. Love, or “lufu,” comes from the German language and roughly would translate into “desire.” It has created other Anglo-Saxon derivates such as leave and lief. Interestingly, lief is just an archaic way of describing happiness.

These definitions do not aid me, however. I remember the well quoted Sonnet 18: “so as long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this give life to thee.” Yet even Shakespeare never mentions love in his poem. We only have implicit references to it, which continues to cause uproar on whether Shakespeare was in love or was trying to find it still.

This is discouraging to me, because if love cannot be defined by the world’s greatest poet, what chance does the Silhouettes’ worst Opinion’s contributor have? Shakespeare’s answer seemingly was that we can only be left with the enigmatic. But I want to tell them and her and everyone else how much they mean to me. I need to do what Shakespeare didn’t. I need to capture the word’s highs and lows in all its totality.

In order to do this, I turn to the master logician, Ludwig Wittgenstein. But logic can fail too, and so Wittgenstein’s response is more than frustrating. He says that the limits of the language are the limits of his world. Blast, what good is private or public language when our vernacular fails to define a simple four-letter word? I am in awe, and rightfully so.

Yet I wonder if Wittgenstein ever went into a paint shop? Of course, that is not to question the great man, because he surely has an answer. But I think it necessary to show the reader something they already are well acquainted with. There is a prodigious amount of colours, commensurate to the different wavelengths that exist, and only so many words to describe them.

Red, pink, reddish-pink, pinkish-red, rouge, hot pink– as one can tell, despite the wide range of spectrum between these colours, will soon not last. The number of colours will be greater than the number of words used to describe them. That is not to say those colours do not exist though, but rather there seems to be an inability to define them. So we are the mercy of our words.

And when I said I loved you, I must have been at your mercy. I wondered how you would react, when I had disarmed my olive branch, this dove in front of you, now empty-handed. This vulnerability made me squint and supine, making me wait for the killing blow. What came was a kiss, and the most striking following was, I couldn’t say a word.  Speechless could describe that… maybe.

When we try to describe the ineffable, we most likely will get frustrated. In a way this is to my advantage for if I were to tell you everything about my partner, describing them head to toe, you might fall in love with them too. Yet if I cannot describe love, even to my significant other, how can I explain the joys I am feeling to you?

I could refer to Dante’s canzones about Beatrice, or perhaps to Einstein’s famous quotes about the matter, but we would be left sitting around, wondering what they meant. Therefore although I cannot describe to you this wonderful and staggering topic, I hope you will remember this poorly written article. If you do, maybe one day you will be walking down the road, and suddenly observe two people, one with dirty blond hair and the other sporting the darkest brown you’d think it was black, laughing just slightly too loud. You might hear this elated laughter, become curious, and then note they are holding hands, smiling with off-white teeth, and their legs are swinging oddly coloured pants in unison. They are side by side, concerned with only where the next foot will take them. They’ll look up at you, nod knowingly, and then be off their way, leaving you to wonder like in a paint store: those two were lief.

Perhaps better put - those two were in love.

Approaching potential beaus takes a lot of planning.

Tyler Welch

The Silhouette

Do you remember the days when letting out even the slightest hint of a crush would lead to a merciless interrogation by your classmates and peers?

Do you recall those days, maybe in grade five or six, when your life would become miserable as your friends chanted, “Phillip and Suzy sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G”? (This, of course, would only have been the case if both your name, and the name of your prospective suitor, was either Phillip or Suzy, but you get the point.) My fear is that many of us, despite our advancements in age, education and life experience, have failed to grow out of this immature attitude toward the prospect of romantic involvement.

Even in university, a place where we are supposed to grow up, find ourselves and be moulded into responsible adults, the knowledge that one of your friends “likes” another will cause their words to be examined, their actions scrutinized and both involved to become a popular topic of discussion. The problem here isn’t the discussion, it’s the manner of that discussion. No matter what, other people’s love lives will always be an interesting topic of conversation.

However, it’s not as though we gather with our friends and maturely evaluate the outlook of potential romantic intertwinements. Rather, we spend much of the time pointing out flaws in either (or both) partners, laughing at our friend’s newfound joy and excitement, or making crude jokes about their possible physical interactions.

I believe part of the problem is that our friends and peers have no time for transition. Their minds have to jump from knowing you as single, when school and friends are your top priority, to knowing you as pursing, or in, a romantic relationship, with very other priorities.

For this reason, I’ve created a term to bridge the gap and to describe the confusing intermediary period between singleness and romantic attachment: PRI (potential romantic interest), which can be used to describe someone, without embarrassment, as a person you have met and could possibly see a romantic future with, but by no means are you losing sleep over the prospect.

A person can acceptably have more than one PRI at a time. This is a great middle stage in romantic development. A person can become a PRI early or late, when you first meet or years into a friendship. Once a person is placed on the PRI list, he or she can be further examined and observed, and effort can be made to get to know them better.

From this stage, one can be dropped from the list, remain a PRI or move up to a full-fledged RI (romantic interest). A prospect can remain on the list for decades, or be dropped/moved up in a matter of hours.

The beauty of the PRI is that it’s nothing to be embarrassed of. No one can respectfully tease another person for having a PRI – we all have them. There is not one person who doesn’t have at least somebody they could possibly see romantic interest in. Now, when a bro turns to another bro and says, “Hey bro, what’s the deal with that girl?” it’s fine to hear a reply saying, “Oh, she’s a PRI”.

Romance takes time; it takes persistence and patience. Simply showing interest in getting to know someone further should no longer be reason for ridicule. Give your friends some time to transition.

Use the term ‘PRI’ and the romantic waters will be easier to navigate.

The entire process of love can be broken down into numbers and patterns.

Kacper Niburski

Assistant News Editor

This Valentine’s Day, save the chocolate, burn the roses and stop the cheesy love poems. Such sentimentalities won’t foster a loving relationship, because love is not some innate, abstract emotional response.

It’s just chemistry.

Before I explain further, let me dissuade any possible illusions. No, my heart wasn’t bitterly broken, nor am I of the opinion that Valentine’s Day should be changed into the more fitting holiday “Single Awareness Day,” or SAD for short. Rather, I am a chemist and as a result, I have an affinity, for attraction, contrary to what my ex-girlfriends may say.

Don’t let the glasses, calculator or insurmountable number of scientific formulas delude you. All of it, from the lab coat to the overbite, have made me understand that chemistry and love are the same thing, a constant in the equation of life some may say. There cannot be one without the other, no matter how hard one tries to split the two like atoms.

Sure, some will rebuke the idea that love is even remotely related to chemistry. They’ll question my conclusion. They’ll demonstrate passionate examples of unconditional emotion. They’ll even think it preposterous that I reduce something as inexplicable as love as if it were some mathematical formula, something to be measured. In the end, they’ll feel that they are literally and figuratively being attacked right in the heart.

Bearing the criticism, I dare ask where would any of us be without chemistry. From unicellular organisms to bipedal mammals, humanity’s timeline bubbles with the cream of chemical reactions. Beginning with the Big Bang, Goldilock conditions unraveled the cosmos. A once imperceptibly dense darkness becomes a sparse, chaotic universe. From there, energy shattered, quarks formed and all of a sudden, human beings bustled into existence after billions upon billions of years of evolution.

In a way, humanity’s existence is not one of choice; it is because we are all connected. Whether atomically, chemically or biologically, we are the stuff of the stars. Certainly this is why the most mystifying aspect of the world is not the atoms that compose its structure but the way the atoms are arranged. For from stardust to human flesh to all the other molecular arrangements feasible, we have become beautiful creations.

This is owed entirely to chemistry. Your life, dear reader, is no different. Consider that approximately x amount of years, y amount of months and z amount of weeks ago you were little more than a mothball of cells. In the human Big Bang; or sex, as it is commonly known, sperm met ovum, ovum met sperm, and soon the iterative process of life began. Cells became tissue. Tissue took shape. Waterfall upon waterfall of hormones swelled together. And what was once an amorphous blob of goo became something more than it’s indistinctness could ever mask: you.

It is this science – the analysis and subsequent understanding of the complex processes that form us – that explain why love is but chemistry. Despite how we came into being, we stand as a testament of what a few buckets of water can become. That is to say, we became a chemical equation that can breathe, play catch, eat, complain, fart around, and most importantly, love.

In the end, love is chemistry because we are. As walking-talking chemical reactions, we attempt to stoichiometrically balance our relationships. Counting the moles on our body, we determine the weight of our heart, and let it beat until equilibrium is reached. We search for love, and love searches for us. Kisses become our pipettes; laughs, our titrations. In the chemistry of love, we all try to win the Nobel Prize.

But while this may be true, what does it matter if one can dissect the world in front of them? Attempting to break everything down into a timeline is irrelevant if one doesn’t live in the present. The same could be said of analyzing love as a science. Even if one understands how it works, that does not make them a lover.

So while both life and love necessarily needs chemistry, they are one of the many ways to describe the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us, the chemical cesspools that we are, be without love? Or perhaps a better question is what would chemistry be without love?

If you don’t have an answer, it’s okay. Potassium is all you need anyhow. It’s the stuff of love and more importantly, bananas.