You have just described a series of power relationships. I see nothing unconditional about any of them. As I said, Love is never pure.Quote:
Originally Posted by jersea
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You have just described a series of power relationships. I see nothing unconditional about any of them. As I said, Love is never pure.Quote:
Originally Posted by jersea
Most likely you don't see why they are unconditional because you have not experienced them, when one experiences unconditional love one knows it.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
I thought the question was, Does love exist? The answer is yes, it does. There are, however, many kinds of love. They all require their own definitions though. If you are thinking specifically of the chemical imbalance and hormonal firestorm which is romantic love, then this too exisits. It just doesn't last. It doesn't even have to be mutual. Just because a power relationship is what it is, it doesn't mean it can't incorporate someone's definition of love. If someone gets off on dominating a relationship, and someone else gets off on being subordinate, or dependent, if it works and they want to call it love, that's up to them. What you see it as is ultimately irrelevent.
Love exists. I don't think there's anything mysterious about it: it's a useful trait to perserve our species. I'm not just talking about passing on the genes to another generation, as some biological interpretations narrowly define it. Love is also what drives parents to raise and protect their children; it's what leads people to organise themselves in communities; it's what allows people to cooperate and to find solutions together for problems, to defend themselves against enemies, and to overcome hardships. Love is present in all stages of our life, disguised under many masks.
The modern cynicism that doubts the existence of love can't really explain how come we're all here discussing love if it doesn't exist. Without love, our species would be extinct a long time ago.
Love is never pure. Love is blind. Love is a prickled herring if you want it to be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
I don't believe love exists in any form. Not the idealised Love we read about and hear about.
I believe that if you spend enough time with a person are connected to a person enough, like them share experiences etc with theme eventually you both change and that person become apart of who you are. You identify yourself to an extent with how you relate to them. You Love your family because your family is part of you, and you love yourself.
Then again I may just be describing love and not know it. But all these flowers and sunsets mushy business? Sorry I can't believe that.
Wilson- I'm not sure if you are talking about romantic love or familial love. I think that may help clarify what you are talking about in terms of pure love. I think many people have tried to describe the difference between romantic love and other forms of love. I received unconditional love from my grandfather, but my parents were unable to provide that kind of support role. I am married and have an attachment with both my husband and child. So I can say that for me the unconditional attachment was necessary when I had nothing else to anchor me. I trusted that he would always be there for me, because he always was. I think that searching for the ideal love and finding it is a very rare and difficult thing. I know a married couple that might fit this category you describe. He waited for her for six years and they were virgins. So I believe in unconditional love in a romantic relationship, but I think it happens more often between a parent and child- given the "power" dynamics.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jersea
All forms of love are essentially struggles for love.
To deny that love exists would be foolish. To deny the truth about love would be pathetic.
What truth are you implying?
I have a problem with the reduction of love to mere chemistry. Human beings are complex, they are capable of great love and great hateQuote:
Originally Posted by jersea
Love exists. Want proof? Go fall in love.
Neuroscientists will reduce it to brain chemistry, to the actions of chemicals like oxytocin. To me that's like reducing a work of art to its physical and chemical composition, calling a painting just an amalgamation of molecules. That's all a painting is, in the scientific sense. But that says nothing of its true reality, of how its experienced, felt - of what it truly is.
As the Devil said, Love is like eating large quantities of chocolate.
:reddevil:
That makes sense, any good relationship will have a good intellectual life as well as a good sex life, and even better yet, a good spiritual life.
A lot of marriages are made without love, a lot of children are raised out of responsibility and in hate, a lot of communities are built out of convenience, and people defend themselves against enemies due to instincts of self-preservation, not love.Quote:
Originally Posted by Heteronym
Does falling in love, then hating yourself for loving, then hating the other person for making you love him/her, then hating yourself for daring to hate him/her, then hating him/her for hurting you, then hating yourself for not enjoying the pain you deserve, then trying to become one person, then trying to cut the other person off to stop the pain, then becoming frustrated and confused, then wanting to kill the other person and yourself all together, count?Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88
Sounds like love yes. lol.Quote:
Originally Posted by cl154576
Strange that so many people fall out of love then.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88
or they thought they were, but really weren't.
To fall out of love you first have to fall in love. Love therefore exists.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
Could "falling out of love" be disillusionment?Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88
Through a glass darkly, we all move in shadows around and around. Who is to know?Quote:
Originally Posted by cl154576
I don't know. To me for it to be genuine love it can't be illusioned. There's a difference between love and infatuation. When you're infatuated you perceive the person as being perfect, airbrushed in a way. When you're in love you know your beloved's imperfections and love them all the same. I supposed you could be fooled, as so many of us often are. But then you were loving the act, the lie, not the person.Quote:
Originally Posted by cl154576
Really I don't know how anyone could deny the reality of love unless that person has been rather extremely deprived. Love for me has always ended in misery and pain, but I still know its feeling, its power, its truth. Its real, oh yeah, its real. For better or for worse.
Love is a drug to silly people with empty heads. - I am a fool like them.
This love stuff is mindboggling. This nauseates us and we will start behaving irrationally and idiotically. Love does exist indeed when it comes to regeneration or else we would not have been here had our ancient parents had never loved.
Nobody wants to live unloved.
That is why love exists here but malignly
What about lust?Quote:
Originally Posted by osho
And nobody gets what they want.Quote:
Originally Posted by osho
Isn't everyone lonely, on a deeper level? Aren't we all deprived?
Lust is fire, passion; love is cooler.Quote:
Originally Posted by cl154576
Sure, but human beings are social animals.Quote:
Originally Posted by cl154176
Yet almost all people that think they're "falling in love" are just lusting for a genetically-desirable phenotype and don't realise it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88
I'm not arguing that love doesn't exist anyway - just that it's a human construct and highly overrated. Most people have no concept of what it actually is. If someone has been partnered to the same person for more than 20 years and can honestly say they're still madly in love with their spouse, I'll accept they know what they're talking about, but less than that, possibly not.
The longevity of a relationship is no proof of its authenticity. There is no way of proving love which makes song writers happy and poets miserable.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
No you are wrong. Everybody is not lonely on a deeper or outer level. Do not judge things by what you experienced or read about. There are other domains of reality you have yet to experienceQuote:
Originally Posted by cl154576
Like outer space, man.Quote:
Originally Posted by osho
Down here on this planet you can have love, trust. Every human is capable of loving and hating and it lies in us too ignite the flame in the other.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
Nobody is completely insensitive, though moderately or greatly he or she is but under certain circumstances the flame of love might have been extinguished, and if you have it, the capacity to love you can reignite that spark
I beg to differ, but maybe I'm just luckier than most.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
What's to prove? That emotions exist? We know that already; we know where they occur in the brain, what chemicals they release and what actions they produce, such as why your heart beats faster when with the one you lust after.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
Love is not just the chemical reaction when catalyzed, my friend.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Atheist
Random struggles to define love so it doesn't exist are misleading not to say pointless. Love is not just lust, otherwise you cannot love the ugly. If you're just discussing "couple love" then you're probably stretching the concept too thin -which you can do ad infinitum until it ceases to exist-.
Is love overrated? Probably. Is pain underrated? Definitively. The real question is: Can you blame them?
I haven't said it is. Most of it is human construct: learned behaviour.Quote:
Originally Posted by osho
Love is an evolutionary adaptation.
You love your family because they share your genes and you love your lover because it increases your chances of reproduction.
There are parts of our brain involved in forming long lasting attachments to other individuals. We can see this activity in the brain structure of monogamous mole rats. Part of us simply can't help forming emotional dependencies on contact with other human beings, love certainly exist in that sense.
As a social construct, when we seek to say X is love and Y is not love. We are playing a game of social exclusion, trying to legitimize the emotional experiences of others because we disapprove. Who's to say that the loose woman with a different lover every week does not love. And I'm no stranger to the kind of rhetoric used against lesbians and gays to suggest their emotional relationships are less legitimate than heterosexual ones.
Hmmm. Love involving sexual fidelity increases a man's "chances of reproduction". I wouldn't have guessed that, but I'm glad cyberbob has educated me.Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberbob
Everything is an "evolutionary adaptation", I suppose, but so what? How does that help us understand love? Or is it simply a facile truism that has little or not explanatory value?
Monogamy is adaptive to a point, mostly as a way to sequester females from potential mating conflict. In that way, an emotional connection to sexual partners helps drive the prevention of being cuckolded, and also acts as an incentive to stick around and improve one's fitness through improving offspring survival.
Of course, it's also adaptive to sleep around if you can get away with it and cuckold other males. Conflicting selective pressures are common in evolutionary biology.
I doubt OrphanPip knows whether monogamy or polygamy is 'adaptive'. That's one (of the many) problems with evolutionary explanations for complex, culutrally constituted behaviors. People simply assume that if a trait exists, it must have adaptive value. This is a logical error. Evolutionary theory states that if a (inheritable) trait has adaptive value, it will tend to spread.
Simple logic tells us that we cannot infer from our acceptance of this postulate that if a trait has spread, it has adaptive value. If A, then B does NOT imply: If B, then A. We're simply guessing as to whether monogamy or polygamy have adaptive value -- I'll grant that it makes sense that they probably do (in particular situations) but to "explain" the traits based on a wild guess seems a little silly, especially when the guess offers no predictive or explanatory value.