I fell in love with a pair of feet
I need to tell you a story that makes no sense, which is exactly the point.
A story about chemistry that defies all logic.
I popped around to a mate’s house one afternoon, nothing planned, just dropping in. I walked into the lounge and his sister had a friend visiting from Dorset, about two hours away. She was sitting on the sofa with her feet up.
I saw her feet first. And I fell in love. Instantly. Before I’d even looked up.
I’m aware of how that sounds. And I should be honest: she had rather long toes. These were not objectively, conventionally, magazine-cover feet. But something in my brain, something I had absolutely no control over, fired a signal so powerful that by the time I looked up and saw her face, the feeling didn’t start. It compounded. It was already there. Her face just confirmed what my nervous system had apparently already decided.
We ended up together for five years.
To this day, I cannot explain what happened in that moment. No amount of psychology textbooks has given me a satisfying answer for why a pair of slightly unusual feet triggered the most immediate, overwhelming sense of recognition I’ve ever felt. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t rational. It was something else entirely, something that arrived before thought, before assessment, before any of the machinery of attraction had time to engage.
That’s chemistry. Real, undeniable, inexplicable chemistry. And it led to five genuinely wonderful years, so I’m not going to stand here and tell you it was wrong. It wasn’t. That lightning bolt led me to someone who changed my life.
But the feeling was real, and it happened to work out, but the feeling alone didn’t tell me it would work out. I got lucky. The chemistry pointed me at someone who was actually compatible. It doesn’t always. And when it doesn’t, the intensity of the feeling can keep you locked into something that’s hurting you, because you mistake the fireworks for proof.
So this isn’t an article about chemistry being fake. It’s about learning to read it, to tell the difference between a signal worth following and your nervous system misfiring.
Everyone’s chasing the spark
Think about the last time you had an incredible first date. The kind where the hours vanished, your heart was racing, you couldn’t stop thinking about them afterwards. You probably described it as “amazing chemistry.”
Now think about the last time you had a nice, pleasant, perfectly fine first date. Good conversation, genuine laughs, nothing wrong with it at all. And you probably said something like: “They were lovely, but… there was no spark.”
What if the first person made you feel that way because they triggered your anxiety, and the second person felt “boring” because they made you feel safe?
What’s actually happening in your brain
When you feel “chemistry” with someone, nobody can hand you a readout of your brain chemistry. What exists is a model, a handful of small studies and a lot of popular retelling. These are the three chemicals that get named most often:
Dopamine is better described as a wanting and learning signal than a pleasure chemical. Dopamine neurons respond when a reward is better than predicted, and they drive the motivation to pursue it. In recordings from monkeys, some of those neurons also ramped up their activity when a reward was most uncertain (Fiorillo, Tobler and Schultz, 2003). Whether “do they like me?” works the same way in a person on a date has not been measured, but it is a reasonable guess that uncertainty helps keep you hooked.
Noradrenaline (norepinephrine) is part of the body’s arousal system: heart racing, palms sweating, can’t eat, can’t sleep. Helen Fisher’s model of romantic attraction links it to this phase, largely on the strength of animal research.
Serotonin is the one behind the claim that new love resembles obsession. That claim rests on one small 1999 study: 20 people who had recently fallen in love had fewer serotonin transporters on their blood platelets than 20 controls, much like 20 people with OCD (Marazziti and colleagues). It did not measure serotonin in the brain, so “Why haven’t they texted back?” on a loop is not a proven serotonin deficit.
What is not in doubt is the overlap you can feel: the bodily signs of attraction look a lot like the bodily signs of anxiety. Racing heart, heightened alertness, thoughts that won’t settle, butterflies in your stomach. These show up when you are falling for someone and when you are frightened.
And people are not always good at telling which is which. In a famous 1974 field study by Dutton and Aron, men who met a female interviewer on a swaying suspension bridge were more likely to phone her afterwards than men who met her on a low, solid one, which the authors read as fear being felt as attraction. It was a small study (34 men in that comparison, none of them randomly assigned to a bridge) and later attempts to repeat it had mixed results, so treat it as a suggestive story, not proof. That possibility of misreading is where the trouble starts.
The anxious-avoidant trap
Attachment theory was developed by John Bowlby and carried over to adult relationships by Hazan and Shaver in 1987. Popular versions sort people into roughly four styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and a fourth, fearful pattern that combines the two insecure ones (sometimes loosely called disorganised). Researchers treat these as tendencies, not fixed types.
Levine and Heller’s popular book Attached calls this pattern the anxious-avoidant trap:
An anxiously attached person meets an avoidant person. The avoidant person sends mixed signals: warm one day, distant the next. This creates massive uncertainty. Uncertainty keeps their attention locked on. That fixation feels like chemistry. The anxious person thinks: “I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. This must be love.”
It isn’t necessarily love. It can be their attachment system in overdrive.
Meanwhile, when an anxiously attached person meets a securely attached person, the secure person is consistent, available, and straightforward. No mixed signals. No uncertainty. No rollercoaster. And the anxious person thinks: “They’re nice, but there’s no spark.”
It is tempting to go further and say that “chemistry” tracks attachment insecurity more closely than it tracks compatibility. That is a hypothesis, not an established finding. What the research does support is narrower: anxiety about a particular person is a normal part of early romantic interest, and it goes hand in hand with wanting them.
In a set of studies of budding relationships, anxiety directed at a specific love interest was higher before the relationship was established than after, and it predicted passionate love and wanting to be near that person (Eastwick and Finkel, 2008). So intensity tells you that your attachment system is switched on. It does not, by itself, tell you whether the two of you are a good fit.
A question worth sitting with.
That relationship I started through an inexplicable pair of feet? It was wonderful, genuinely one of the most important relationships of my life. The chemistry got us through the door, and what we built together kept us there for five years. But was the lightning bolt the reason it worked, or just the reason it started? Would I have walked past someone equally compatible if the initial feeling hadn’t been so dramatic?
Think about your own experience. The relationships that gave you the most intense initial feelings: the dizzying highs and devastating lows. And then think about the people in your life where you feel most consistently safe, valued, and yourself.
Are they the same people?
For a lot of us, they’re not. And that gap is worth understanding.
So should you ignore chemistry entirely?
No. Absolutely not. Chemistry matters, but you need to learn to read it.
Good chemistry looks like:
- Energy and ease: you feel more alive, not more anxious
- Curiosity: you want to know more about them, not just whether they like you
- Comfort with silence: pauses feel natural, not terrifying
- Mutual disclosure: both of you are opening up, not just one
- You leave feeling good: not obsessive, not drained, just… good
False chemistry looks like:
- Obsessive thinking: can’t stop analysing every message
- Walking on eggshells: monitoring your behaviour to keep their approval
- Extreme highs and lows: euphoria one day, despair the next
- Relief, not joy: when they text back, you feel relief rather than happiness
- You leave feeling unsettled: something’s off but you can’t name it
One caution. If “walking on eggshells” means you are afraid of how someone will react, or they check up on you, put you down or cut you off from friends, that is not chemistry of any kind. The red flags guide explains the warning signs and lists support lines for your country.
The “calm chemistry” of secure attachment
Secure attachment doesn’t feel boring. It feels different. It’s the warmth of being genuinely seen. The ease of not having to perform. The quiet confidence that this person isn’t going anywhere.
It’s less like a fireworks show and more like a fire you actually want to sit beside.
How to test real compatibility beneath the surface
This is exactly why guided conversation tools exist. When you’re running purely on “chemistry,” you’re not doing careful compatibility assessment. You’re chasing the feeling.
Dive Deep Dating’s questions are designed to cut beneath the surface. They’re fun enough to feel like a great date, but structured enough to reveal who someone actually is: their values, their conflict style, their capacity for vulnerability.
Long Game takes it further for couples getting serious: 56 questions across four levels about the things that matter in a shared life, such as financial values, family expectations and how you each handle disagreement.
Neither replaces chemistry. But both give you data that chemistry alone doesn’t.
A reframe that might change your dating life
Instead of asking yourself “Do I feel a spark?” after a date, try asking:
“Did I feel safe enough to be honest?”
That question points at something the spark can’t tell you. The obsessive, can’t-eat intensity belongs to the early stage: a 2009 review by Acevedo and Aron found that romantic love without that obsessive element can and does last in long marriages, and goes with greater satisfaction. What remains is whether two people can be real with each other.
If you felt safe being honest with someone on a first date, that’s not boring. That’s rare. That’s worth a second date.
This article is part of “The Big Questions” series, exploring the deepest questions about love, dating, and human connection through the lens of real research.