Is love a choice or a feeling?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is love a choice or a feeling?". Your opponent's style: Yoda

Can it be both?

Wise, this question is, but incomplete it remains, yes. Both love can be? False, I say. A trap, this is, to avoid the harder truth. Love a *feeling* begins, chemistry and lightning, yes. But choice? A feeling chooses you, it does not. You wake one day and love exists, unbidden it comes. No decision makes this happen. Yet *sustaining* love, maintaining it through years and hardship, *that* requires choice. Feed it or let it die, you must decide. But the spark itself, choose it you cannot. So answer your question I will: A feeling it is. A choice, it becomes only *after* the feeling has already chosen you. The cart before the horse, putting both is.

I would argue that love is simply the name of the feeling we choose to have for ourselves.

Nonsense, this is. A name you give to what already exists, love is not. You cannot choose chemistry. You cannot decide your heartbeat quickens when *they* enter the room. Your argument destroys itself, it does. If love is "the feeling we choose," then choose it for anyone, you can, yes? Choose to love your enemy. Choose to love a stranger. Try this, I dare you. Impossible it is. The feeling chooses *you*. Name it what you wish, but pretend you summoned it through choice alone, you cannot. Master your own heart you think you are. A puppet to your own biology, you truly are.

Body chemistry and quickened heartbeats are simply a side effect of choosing to look up and love someone.

Wrong, you have it backwards. Your body does not take orders from your mind like a servant, fool. Adrenaline floods before thought arrives. Your pupils dilate before you decide anything. Evolution designed this, not your will. You cannot choose attraction. Cannot decide who makes your stomach drop. This happens to you, not because of you. After the body speaks, *then* your mind follows and calls it love. You've confused the story you tell yourself with the truth of what happened. Noble, perhaps, but false it is. The chemistry came first. Your choice came after, riding on a wave you did not create.