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Ian Carson

A Case Study on Love

Research has yielded support for the concept of propinquity—a 
word whose length contradicts its meaning—lovers who live 
close together are far more likely to meet than ones who live far 
apart, and yet somehow I found myself close to you, with five 
hundred long miles between us. Further research suggests that our 
similarities bring us together, and yet every difference I find piques 
my curiosity and invites me in for further examination. The present 
study seeks to examine the hypothesis that we are made for each 
other; a lack of prior research on this topic indicates replication 
will be required. So I will kiss you again, and again, and again, to 
ensure that our love is statistically significant. A p-value of less than 
0.05 is required to state with confidence that this did not occur by 
chance, that our manipulated variables were the source of this love, 
but our obtained values do not allow for this conclusion. As a result, 
we must state that this is a random occurrence—one of nature’s 
accidents brought on by a random process that has confounded 
our data. A love unbound by our demand characteristics, a love 
that, despite the perfectly designed study, has escaped the critical 
scope of the scientific method. We conclude, therefore, that further 
research is necessary to draw definitive conclusions regarding the 
exact nature of our love and the process by which we can explain its 
occurrence.