ec2-3-145-191-169.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic A very nebulous concept over whose definition I'm sure we could argue for hours. (As indeed we have --Admiral) In view of the entertainment this provides ToothyWikizens, I will start :) (And I'm bored as I'm sure you've all realised by now. Marking supervision work does this to me).
What one could term 'will-love' - the seeking of the best for the one loved.
Heart-love. Warm fuzzy feelings.
Like a butterfly. A burning thing. Only true in fairy tales. Will never ever let you be the same.
Lot's of people think that love just happens. Infatuation just happens which has a very short half-life (a few weeks to a few months). Love is a product of conscious or unconscious desire, and acting on that desire. Love is not something that just is, it is something the you do with someone. It does not say fall in love with thine neighbour as thineself, it says "Love" thy neighbour like thyself. Work, mould, create, fight, cry, sing, be, destroy, hate, play, kiss, fondle, adore, question, explore, cuddle, fuck, deal with crises, console, storm, flux, give space, give, take, share, wonder, pray, enjoy, praise, talk, debate, berate, inflate, surprise, cherish, promote, nurse, say those three words, relax, stress, sleep with, devote yourself, write letters, send cards, buy flowers and chocolates, make food, confess, endear, just do it. Today, forever and always all the days of your life. --Garbled
The bible says how to love God in the Shema: ... Love the lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.... (Deut 6:7) --Garbled Love belongs to the realms of Desire... and Desire is cruel. -ColinLeung Funny, I had thought that Desire was also selfish. However, love is reputed to often manifest as gratuitous acts of selflessness toward another person or people. This is all so much more convenient if you just have another deity to pin Love onto. --BlackMonkeyMage Mood Altering Brainwashing pattern of behaviour strongly linked to pheromones. Chronic use may distort your view of reality and your inhabitants. --EvilGarble??
Or as rimmer would say "love is a device invented by bank managers to make you overdrawn." --Steve Love is neither of the above. True love is a bond between souls. It exists independently of the persons involved; it is a separate entity.
When we say 'I feel love' we are, if we are speaking truly, making a statement more akin to 'I feel hot' than 'I feel angry'; that is, the 'feel' is one of perception, of awareness -- not one of internal emotion.
However, this perception can be mistaken. As in a fever we can say 'I feel hot' though the air temperature is no more than normal, so we can feel love, though a faulty sense, when no such bond is present.This is the case with an infatuation: a bond is perceived where no bond is.
Worse, though is when some kind of bond is present but is not true love. For real things may cast shadows, may cause echoes in the world. So it is possible to perceive, to really perceive, a bond; but a bond which is not love but is a mere shadow, or echo, of real love.
To the unwary, this will appear as true love. This will have the predictable results as the bond, which was never real to start with, inevitably disintegrates.
Those who have never encountered such shadows, who have felt (or who believe themselves to have felt) only infatuation and true love, may count themselves lucky. The shallow attractions of infatuation and the depths of knowledge of love are easily distinguished. The ghosts of true love, in the absence of the reality, may lead us astray for decades.
Those who found true love, and found it early, are the luckiest in the world; we salute and envy you. - m48-mp1
Um. I disagree entirely, but never mind. I have found love to be something you do with the person you love, as well as something you feel - Garbled's description is a good one. You can't control the feeling, but you can control what you do, and that's why it's a valid thing to promise, when getting married, that you will love your partner for as long as you both shall live. You couldn't really promise that if love were just a feeling, after all - SunKitten
What do you disagree with? I wrote that love is not a feeling. That was, in fact, very much the point of the whole thing: to explain how the verb 'feel' in 'I feel love' is used in its sense of perception, and therefore the 'love' is the object of the feeling, not the feeling itself. For feelings are fickle but love is not; therefore logically love must be not the feeling but something separate from the feeling - m48-mp1
I disagree with the statement that 'love is a bond between souls,' since I'm not entirely sure of the definition of soul. I don't think love is a separate entity, nor do I like the implication (which you may not have intended) that it exists waiting to be discovered by the two people. I do agree that love is not just a feeling, but your paragraph appears to imply that it exists between two people awaiting to be discovered, as it were. In my experience, love is soemthing that two people have to work on. Like, friendship, lust and romance are but bases for love to be grown, but it takes effort. It's not something that preexists and simply waits to be found. There is no Mr/Miss? Right for anyone - SunKitten
The problem with Garbled's description is that it is couched entirely in aetiological considerations and, more than anything else, true love (at least of the kind that is implied by the first responses; that is, we're not talking the love of friendship or family here ) can only be understood, almost by definition, in teleological terms - m48-mp1 By aetiological, you mean that Garbled was describing the phenomena that cause or contribute to love, correct? What do you mean exactly by 'teleological terms'? The design and purpose of love? I would say that Garbled is correct when he says 'Love is a product of conscious or unconscious desire, and acting on that desire. Love is not something that just is, it is something the you do with someone'. Love is not the desire. He also said it is not falling in love that is important, it is what you do with that - and I agree. His list of what you do with the person means that in everything you do with that person, do it with love. It's not a precise definition, no, but it captures the essence that love is soemthing you do all the time with the person you are loving, and it is a decision, not a feeling. By the way, can you sign your paragraphs with something, so we can keep track of the discussion? Thanks - SunKitten
I see the misunderstanding. You think that because this bond lies waiting to be discovered, it is all that is necessary; once the bond is discovered all will be 'happily ever after'. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. The bond is no guarantee of happiness, only of linked fates. It's possible, easy even, to screw it up, by negligence, by weakness, or by deliberate fault. The bond remains but the relationship is sour and love turns into bitterness and envy and hate: and yet still the two are linked, entangled, returning and hurting each other again and again. The bond waits to be found: there is a (well, there are zero or one) Mr/Miss? Right. But simply meeting them is no guarantee of happiness: it is merely the first step on a lifelong journey. It is, however, a prerequisate for beginning the journey - m48-mp1
No, sorry - you have completely misunderstood me. I don't think that. I've never thought that. You have, though, clarified what I disagree with in your previous paragraph. I absolutely do not believe in linked fates. Had I never met MoonShadow, had I married someone else, I believe I could have been very happy and in love with that other hypothetical person. Love is what you make of it. It is not a separate, amorphous force - SunKitten
Love can't be a decision, because decisions are only slightly less fickle than feelings. If love is a decision you make every day, what's to stop you from deciding tomorrow not to love the person you decided to love yesterday? And that would mean that love could be switched on and off like a switch: decide to love someone for a few years, then decide not to love them and to love someone else instead. Real love, of course, isn't like that: real love is love that lasts until parted by death, or at least, love which should last until parted by death, unless screwed up, which is, as mentioned, very easy to do. But if it's not that then it can't ever have been real love. Real love does not come with an expiry date - m48-mp1
That is correct. It is a decision made every day. You say 'if love is a decision made every day, what is to stop you deciding not to love the person?' Well, what is? Your strength of will and commitment. Your promise, your word. History - when you have loved someone, the decision to stop loving them is a hard one to make - even after much abuse of that love and trust. That is why love is hard work, and that is why one makes a vow, to reinforce that decision - when circumstances are pointing the other way, the temptation to walk away, to give up, to decide otherwise, can be strong. The memory of my marriage vow and the decision I made then and everything that has passed since then is what keeps it strong. I'm afraid life and love are not as easy as you paint them to be. It would be great if we could rely on the knowledge that our love is something separate, something 'real' outside our lives, but we can't. Love is, as I said, what you make it to be.
You must have missed bits of my post anyway, because you haven't added an identifier to your paragraphs. So I shall, since it makes it easier to understand the give and take of a discussion - SunKitten
m48-mp1, I'm interested to know how you came to believe this about love. Personal observation (whether in terms of your own experience or watching real-life others)? Philosophical-type reading? Novels/films? --MJ
As an aside, and to chip in to what seems like a quite interesting little debate, let me add my twopennyworth, because I like free therapy. My position is/was somewhere quite close to that of the anonymous writer m48-mp1, in sentiment if not in theory. There are some differences. From my personal viewpoint, love is very much what you make of it; be that something good, something great, or a complete mess. As for the nature of love, my view would be that it is something akin (although not the same as) a state of acceptance-of-being of another individual, a wish to learn of, respect and react to another person. As an atheist, the idea of soul seems a bit wibbly to me; perhaps this might be translated into me-speak as "the sum of all parts" of what makes someone who they are. The concept of a bond that pre-exists is one I find also a bit odd, and one that stirs a bit of conflict in me. Life is a mish-mash of relationships with other people; I find no pre-determination in it. I would agree here with SunKitten's idea that it would be possible to be happy with someone else had things panned out differently. However, that said, there are very few people that I am actively attracted to. Would this be the "pre-determined" bond of m48-mp1? There seems to be much discussion about "real" or "true" love. As m48-mp1 refers to it, this seems to be something like a platonic ideal; something perfect, and which exists independently in an ideal realm. As for any perfect thing, I would very much contest that this exists. My view would be that if it does exist, it exists for very fleeting moments in time for any given relationship; and it is these moments that constitute a lot of the "glue" in an ongoing relationship. This is not to say that the space between has no love in it, not at all, but to say that for the most part, "true" love is something aspired to, and rarely achieved for long time periods, more commonly only glimpsed. But ah, such glimpses! Conversely, when things go pear-shaped, this does not necessarily destroy the "bond" between two people, and can indeed cause an immense twist in both emotions and the way that the relationship between those two people will be afterwards that can cast a very long shadow over future relationships. The very effort put into a relationship (well, to me at least!) is what can really turn it into an emotional millstone later, action and reaction, cause and effect. Putting much effort into something only later to find out that the other person does not feel the same - what m48-mp1 might refer to as "ghosts" or "shadows" of love - is indeed something very painful. But what are you to do when that happens? There is not much alternative than to try again... but this is all the opinion of jaded ol' cynical, and perhaps-not-coincidentally unmarried me :-) . I am who I am, and why *should* your opinions of love match mine? My terminology is different but how different (or how similar), really, are my sentiments from *either* of those put forward above? --Jumlian
I would also comment, not to lecture, maybe just to remind myself, that if people really start pushing for or against their or other people's opinions, there is a distinct possibility that someone posting will get seriously annoyed or hurt. There are few feelings as potent as love, few drivers of human existence as powerful, and hence people's feelings on this subject will run *very* strong. If everyone contributing is being honest about how they feel and think, then in a debate such as this there is no right or wrong, only understanding or misunderstanding. In either case, respect for others is paramount. (I'll just make this dead clear now - I always have problems with text as a format, certain things do not come across well - if I have offended anyone in this post, I really wish it wasn't so, and it wasn't intentional. My style defaults to "rant" and well, I am sorry if I annoy anyone) --Jumlian
That didn't come across as anything other than thoughtful to me :) I (think I) see where you're coming from and would largely agree (I still really dislike the 'intended bond' thingy) - SunKitten
I guess part of the issue is - are we trying to arrive at a shared understanding of what this "real" or "true" love is, or merely each share our own understanding? And are our differences based on the same view of the world but choosing to include/exclude different territory within our definition, or is there an underlying difference of understanding of the world? An example of the latter would be to do with m48-mp1's assertion that love is an external entity of somewhat undefined character - the existence of which SunKitten looks to be disputing, as indeed do I. --MJ
People break promises every day. It's what they're best at. It's agreed, isn't it, that love cannot be defined in terms of feelings, for feelings are fickle and changable, and it makes no sense to say that someone was in love yesterday, and is not today, simply because her feelings have changed? That would be silly: if it ended like that then it can't have been real love, and indeed we recognise it was not and have separate words for it: crushes, infatuation. Now, surely you must see a similar situation applies if you base love on decisions and promises? In that case you could say that there was love at point A; but at point B, after the promise had been broken and the daily decision was no longer being made, there is no longer love. And that makes as little sense as saying that there could have been love one day and none the next, just because feelings had changed. If it finished (as opposed to going sour, or any of the other ways love can go bad rather than 'finishing'), then it cannot have been love in the first place: it must have been something else, something more akin to a crush or an infatuation. For what distinguishes love from a crush or an infatuation, but its end (teleologial end, rather than 'finish')? At the point when the two first set eyes on each other, they are attracted; but how can we tell if this is love, or just infatuation? Only in hindsight can we tell if they were really feeling love, or their feelings were objectless, like the ill man's fever. So the relationship of love must be defined in terms of its end, not in terms of either feelings or decisions; for defining in terms of feeling and decisions leaves open the nonsensical possibility that you could have two people connected by a relationship of love at point A and not at later point B. It also leads to the equally nonsensical conclusion that someone could be in love on their own: they could just decide to love someone else and that could of itself be real love, regardless of what the other person thinks or feels or even if they know. So these two reductios mean that the premise, that love is defined by decisions and promises, must be false.
Why can't someone love someone else without that feeling being requited? Why can't a pair of people love each other for a period of years and then no longer? Explain those to me, for I don't think I understand why you're arguing what you're arguing. You say that someone being in love on their own is nonsensical; why? - SunKitten
Which is not to say that feelings and promises don't have their place in love: simply that they cannot be its foundation. They are, however, necessary if love, once discovered, is to thrive and become the most wonderful place to live, rather than turning into the most horrendous prison.
If the pre-existance of the bond is a major stumbling block, I may note that there's no actual necessity for the bond to pre-exist (it could come into existance when the two meet), though there must be some kind of pre-existing potential that this pair and only this pair will form such a bond, to avoid the nonsensical situation of the same person being bound to two or more others. That is, the potential existance of the bond between these two and only these two is a necessary fact, whereas the actual existance of the bond is contingent on both of them happening to actually exist and meet (if, say, one of them doesn't exist, or they never meet, then the bond involving them will never be formed/brought into existance).
I am not convinced that a person cannot be in love with two people at once. In this culture, in my definition, love is commitment to one person above all others, so that is not possible, but there are cultures where polygamy or polyamory are accepted, and I see no reason in principle why that cannot be so.
I think the real disagreement is the position that there can only ever be one person who is right for you, and the only person with whom you can find true love is that one person. Please tell me, why can there only be one right person? Why must this bond, or the potential for it, exist? - SunKitten
Is this ontology of love based on literature, philosophy, or personal experience? All three.
And if anyone's worried about offending, the only thing which is slightly annoying about the discussion is the endless assertion that I think that life and love are 'easy'. I'd like to see some kind of justification for that. Perhaps if I had said that life is a fairy-tale where everyone has a perfect someone waiting out there, and once they meet their troubles are over and ever-after happiness awaits, that would be a justifiable criticism, but even the most cursory reading of what I have written will show that's not the case: love is discovered, rather than made, yes, but it is also rare and fragile and must be tended and nurtured with the greatest of care if it is not to turn sour and bitter. I fail to see how this makes life 'easy'. Indeed, if anything it is your view - seeming to regard love as merely a matter of interviewing candidates for a post of 'my husband', and picking the best of the bunch who apply before the closing date - which makes things easy. Go out looking for others who are just looking for someone they can be happy living with, and you'll surely find one who's both desperate enough to put up with you, and within your margin for compromise! And if you happen to screw it up with them, well, just pick yourself off the ground and move on to the next! Oh, if that was all it took, everyone would be happily married! But no, love is not like filling a vacancy: it is something altogether rarer, significantly harder, and therefore infinitely more precious than the negotiated-settlement-between-two-parties that you make it out to be. Signed, the (apparantly) last romantic.
I apologise if I have annoyed you, but to my mind, the statement that 'there is only ever one person' is commonly associated with the fairytale belief a lot of people have that 'and once you've found Mr/Ms? Right you live happily ever after.' Since you obviously don't believe that, that is one debate we don't need to have, but that was not clear from your first posting.
However, you are now the person misrepresenting my position. Nowhere did I say love is just interviewing candidates for the position. Nor have I ever said it's OK to screw up, pick yourself up and move on to the next; that is a blatant misreading of my position. In my view, the ultimatum of love is the marriage vow, which I hold to be permanent until death; very far from 'well, just pick yourself off the ground and move on to the next!', and very far indeed from making things easy.
Just to add a point of debate, though, have you ever met two people who had an arranged marriage and found their love some time after the marriage? - SunKitten
(I'm not sure whether to put this after the specific bit I'm responding to, or at the end. If someone doesn't like it here, I'm happy for them move it.) I don't think everyone having pre-existing bonding potential with only one other is significantly more likely than everyone having a pre-existing bond. I might be more willing to believe it if you proposed some kind of plausible mechanism for this to happen. Also, as it stands, our odds don't seem good of finding the perfect other match, especially if (as you seem to do) your bond can go to someone who doesn't exist. People who don't exist are so overwhelmingly common compared to people who do that your chance of finding true love with a real person is so small you might as well forget about it. Unless you believe in the cosmic micromanagement of Fate. Which again could do with some explanation, if I'm asked to believe in it. --Edwin
Another thought on the post from "the last romantic" - as I understand what you are saying, true love can only be recognised in hindsight, presumeably when one of the parties dies without the pair splitting up. At the time therefore, it is not possible to be sure whether what one experiences is 'true love' or what is being termed here 'infatuation'. So if you are in a situation where you are going through a difficult patch in a realtionship, maybe you're wondering whether to end it - how do you know whether this is because it is one of the difficulties you mention in true love, so you need to persevere? Or whether it is because it was never true love in the first place and you're wasting your time. Indeed, this seems to me the great danger if this approach - there are people who constantly wander unsatisfied through life looking for 'the one' because the people they get together with don't meet their expectations. Just to say that you will experience difficulties with 'the one' doesn't solve this, unless it also identifies a way to know which one is 'the one' with whom you need to persevere. --MJ
Why can't people love each other for a period of years and then no more? Again we're back to: love is not fickle, love is not changable; love is a constant. The connction that is love can't just... fade away. Again, we're back to the issue of what distinguishes love from infatuation. Two people meet, they fancy each other, they spend the night together, they move on. Was that love? No. They meet, they like each other, they spend a few week together, they move on. Love? No. Months, years, where's the line? There isn't one, there can't be, because there's no qualitative difference. Whereas love is a qualitatively different thing from inconstant infatuation. How-long-it-lasts is an accidental property of an instance of infatuation, whereas constancy is part of the sustantial nature of love - m48-mp1
"Love is constant." Assertion; provide reasons and arguments (note: I don't necessarily disagree, but basing an entire argument on an unfounded assertion is a bad idea) - SunKitten
As for someone being in love on their own, we know that's not possible because we recognise the difference between it and love instictively. Someone who pines their life away over someone they don't know, or who spies on and stalks them, or whatever, is called 'sad' and 'pathetic': words that couldn't be applied to love. 'Tragic', 'devestating', yes; sad and pathetic, no. These are small words for small lives, and unrequited love, unpleasant though it may be, hardly plumbs the depths of human experience in the way real love, which takes two people to very heaven or to the gates of hell (or, frequently, both) must - m48-mp1
I'd call it pretty tragic if one person loves another but the beloved does not return that love - SunKitten
Being in love with two people at once, again, is impossible because of what love is: two people being connected such that they can share themselves totally with each other. To be able to share one hundred per cent of onesself with two people is impossible by simple mathematics. If the totality of one is given to another person, one can't also give that totality to another - m48-mp1
I somehow doubt that we, as finite and selfish people, can ever give 100% of ourselves to another, whatever the ideal may be. Where do you get that definition from? - SunKitten
Culture is irrelevant: either love exists and has a particular nature or it doesn't and hasn't. If love as you understand it is simply a cultural construct, then it does not in fact exist at all, in any real, objective sense. And yet, love transcends culture: great love stories are found throughout the world. Far from being a construct of culture, love seems to be something which impresses itself from outside upon cultures, forcing them to come up with their own interpretations of this pre-existing, objective fact of human life. It is love that comes first, and shapes cultures; cultures do not define love - m48-mp1
No, culture does not define love, but it does define how we look at it. That can make all the difference - SunKitten
If the metaphor of interviewing candidates is inappropriate after marriage, would you agree it's still appropriate for your view of love in the pre-marriage state? In order to find someone to marry, you screen some applicants, interview others, try them out, offer the position to the best one you find who'll accept the job? But then, in what way does marriage change anything? The marriage vow doesn't create love: it recognises it. You, I assume, wouldn't marry someone unless you already were sure that you loved them. So I submit that my initial analogy is valid: you interview, and you pick the best one you find before the closing date (your wedding day). After that the interviewing stops, but only because you assume that you have already found love (or else you would have postponed the closing date). The process of finding love is exactly as I described - m48-mp1
I suppose so. How else would you describe dating? How else would you recommend going about finding a partner? (That does make it sound very cold-blooded, but if you've ever been in a serious 'dating' relationship, you'll know it's not). Personally, I did indeed find that our marriage vows changed little in the relationship at first. I was the same person who'd gone into the church as came out, and I found that a little weird. Four years on, I'm sure they've made a difference, but without a Sliding Doors-style 'what-if' scene, I will never know how - SunKitten
(As for arranged marriages, perhaps some do find that, by arrangement, they have ended up married to their true loves; how fortunate! More often though I suspect that what develops is affection and friendship; but as this is the height that many non-arranged marriages reach, a sort of bipartite alliance against loneliness rather than actual true love, that's no reason to single out arranged marriages) - m48-mp1
To the matter of the odds, I might note that in fact you need only look around to see that true love is in fact very rare. Not perhaps as rare as a naive consideration of odds might suggest, admittedly (though remember that we cannot tell, necessarily, from a snapshot in time or even from looking at the past who has found true love and who has not: we would need to know the future for that, and sometimes could not tell even then). But 'cosmic micromanaement of fate' is not required to explain that: it merely needs you to not dismiss out of hand the idea of any part of the universe having a teleological, rather than a mechanistic, nature; and, as I've already argued, love must be best seen (indeed, can only be really understood) in teleological terms, so hardline mechanism has to already be ruled out if you're even considering the idea that love might exist - m48-mp1
Who sets up this bond and how? Who or what determines who is to be connected to whom? What does the bond consist of? While I'm at it, what is a soul? How do you know it exists? - SunKitten
True love can be recognised in hindsight? Sometimes not even then. After all, just because they hadn't broken up by the time one of them happened to die doesn't mean that they shared a true love (and conversely, some who are connected by love might be unable to stand the sight of each other: love can be tragic like that). That, though, is beside your point. Is there a way to tell infallibly whether you've found 'the one'? Of course there isn't. That would make life far too easy. It's very very possible to be very very wrong on that score. However, again, this is beside the point, which is 'how do you know whether you should go on with a relationship, or whether it was in fact never meant to be?'. But this is (a) not a conceptual problem for my position, but one of practical advice and (b) more importantly, is dismissed easily with a simple tu quoque: the same dilemmia is faced whatever the ontology of love, and no ontology of love gives any better guidance on how to react. My ontology encourages giving up? You might as well say that mine encourages hanging on, if you think that the person you are with might be 'the one', while the alternative is the one that encourages giving up because 'there are plenty more fish in the sea'. Or that the alternative encourages staying in a relationship that was never meant to be rather than getting out. What you describe is just a hard situation whatever love is really like, and no theory explains it, or guides those who find themselves in it, better than any other - m48-mp1
So.. if there's no way to tell whether you have the bond, have the right person, not even in hindsight, then ultimately, isn't this all theoretical? A nice exploration into the metaphysics of love, which can't really impact the real world we inhabit because one can never tell? Doesn't that reduce it to the same level as the free will argument? That is, it's interesting to talk about, but since we can never know, we might as well get on with our lives and do the best we can with what we've got? - SunKitten
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