Love Before Lust: Pre-Sexual Bonding as the Original Attractor, Propinquity-Sexual Marriage, Infatuative Commutation, and the Genomic Substrate of Effective Co-Mutation

Most humans love before they know what sex is. The attachment bonds of childhood constitute original love in its purest expression: felt sense of ground state, without the competing signal of lust. We propose that this developmental sequence is not incidental. The attachment system is evolutionarily prior; the sexual system is layered over it at puberty, installing a competing navigation system.

Three distinct love failure modes are formalized: propinquity-sexual marriage (bond formation driven by proximity and sexual availability rather than genuine relational ground state reduction), infatuative commutation (the adaptive cycling of limerence objects without achieving attachment ground state), and original attractor failure (when the genomic substrate of genuine co-mutation is present but the sexual system has installed a wrong attractor preventing recognition).

The deepest form of original attraction is effective co-mutation: relational compatibility grounded in MHC complementarity, olfactory genome signaling, and the genomic architecture producing disease-resistant offspring. Hormonal contraception inverts the MHC olfactory preference. The body knew this before the mind arrived with its categories.