People need to experience love to know that they want it. I suspect most people develop a desire for love from their parents, family, peers, and books/media.

People need to experience love to know that they want it. I suspect most people develop a desire for love from their parents, family, peers, and books/media. And that desire evolves into a more romantic notion of love as they mature. The article briefly suggested that love was not something Dirac had received from his family, so he likely didn't know. If he indeed was a strange outsider among his peers and only read technical books, I can see how he managed to go so many years without developing much desire for an emotional connection with someone else. It's not mentioned in the article, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that his reticence to engaging with Manci was probably the result of one or more terrible experiences with women which were likely caused by his social awkwardness. I feel like "rationality" is really a mask that people use to avoid addressing difficult emotions like this. Growing up to be socially stunted is a very difficult handicap to deal with. Not least of all because it's imperceptible to the very people it effects.