“Some would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love.”François de La Rochefoucauld · Maxime · 1665 · Maxima 107
Some loves are imitations: expectation shapes experience, and the copied role is mistaken for spontaneous feeling.
This is one of the coldest observations about human manners: it suggests that some loves are imitations. A person reads novels, hears stories, watches the spectacle of passion, and then produces his own version, convinced he is feeling something spontaneous. The mechanism is suggestion: expectation shapes experience. A teenager who falls in love exactly in the form he saw in films, with the same lines and gestures, is reproducing a script more than living a destiny.
Why it matters In the age of social media, where models of relationships circulate massively, the maxim helps distinguish one's own feeling from a performed role. The question becomes: do I love, or am I performing love?