The anatomy of love

I have said for many years that you choose who you love, and I believe it. With all the girls I have pursued over the years I remember actively deciding that I was going to pursue them, and effectively selecting them for love.  I know not all of them have appreciated this but hey, everyone was someone's stalker once, right?


But now I am looking at things with my Aspie hat on I have started wondering if this is normal.  The fact that people have disagreed with me about it many times suggests that it is not.


From all around me in advertising, films, literature and people's descriptions of their own lives I get the message that love is an impulse; uncontrollable, unpredictable, that "the heart wants what it wants."


Not mine. My heart wants what I tell it to!


I've always felt that people who walk the "heart want" line are simply absolving themselves of responsibility to their existing relationships, being lazy or simply (badly) justifying adultery. I read a quote from Johnny Depp recently, and while I can't remember it word for word, it was along the lines of "if you love 2 things equally, choose the second, as if you really loved the first one you wouldn't have fallen in love again".  This just smacks of desperate justification and I just hate this binary view, that it is only possible to love 1 person.


But what if I am wrong? What if love is that wild and unpredictable? What if I am defective in my emotions, and simply don't have the normal "love" drive?  I am very much a slave to some of my other emotions - rage, frustration, anger - but I never hear anyone waxing lyrical about "the hands punch what the hands want to punch", but this is where I feel my strongest emotions lie, and when I lose control of them I know that people around me worry as I become aggressive and unpredictable, and it takes great effort of will not to be violent (I am well practiced by now. Violence only happens to inanimate objects)


But I wonder. Is this what neurotypical people feel when they are in love?  Overpowering, madly distracting, unfocused emotion that practically paralyses them until they can deal with it?


If so, I'm glad to be love-deficient, and glad I make my own choices.