I’ve been thinking a lot about how much energy goes into romantic relationships, wondering where it all goes, whether it’s all even worth it, whether we individually or as a society (or even species) get more out of relationships than we put into them.

In my head I’ve been calling relationships “endothermic reactions” thinking that means that they take in more energy than they give off. So today I decided to actually look up the word, and here’s what Wikipedia says:

“The concept is frequently applied in physical sciences to, for example, chemical reactions, where thermal energy (heat) is converted to chemical bond energy.”

Huh. I forgot about bonds. Bonds are stored energy. That’s actually kind of interesting. Energy isn’t destroyed. I kinda forgot about the first law of thermodynamics. (Gimme a break, it’s been a while since I’ve taken chemistry (even though I loved it and was good at it and I work with a bunch of Ph.D. chemists)).

I also have been using the word “friction” in my head, but I was less good at physics, and I don’t want to look it up because I almost don’t want to know how badly I’ve screwed up that concept in my metaphor.

Aside: reminder to myself for later musings: why is chemistry such a fertile ground for relationship metaphors? In fact, we use the word “chemistry” itself to describe the automatic, unwilling, almost physical reaction we have to another person.