>>Oh, good, there is a very loud part of my brain that is pretty much always trying to convince me whatever I'm going to say is incorrect in some way, such as insufficent relevance to the topic. Realtime communication can help in some cases, but in others it makes it worse because whatever my problem is I need to say Exactly The Right Thing.<<
If nothing is going to be good enough, then don't worry about it, because worrying about it won't change it. Just do your best.
>>I mean, I can buy that, but it is one thousand percent not how people talk. I see all the time stuff that basically says you're relationshipping wrong if you don't have all three.<<
Well, consider the source. Are you hearing that from people with 70 years of marriage or the guy who's tried 5 times and failed all of them? Is the culture stable or has it got high rates of domestic violence and divorce? America is a rape-friendly garbage fire. I'd look three times before taking their advice on relationships.
Just because people say things, doesn't make it true. America also used to think it was okay to enslave people, and still practices genocide. Sometimes people are wrong, even in large groups. Does the statement seem logical? If you test it, does it work? Or at least work better than other models you have? With relationships, I prefer to look for sources that might actually be competent.
>>I mean, I've seen a lot of arguments that that's obsession, not love.<<
It can be, but doesn't have to be. The same is true for many types of love.
>> But what does that feel like? What does it look like? <<
I don't know. It's really not me. If I cut someone out, I tend to mean it in ways that most people don't.
>> I can understand caring about people from far away, because I care about a lot of people I don't get to see often. But with my father... I don't know with my father. I don't know if I care. Maybe I'm hiding from it. <<
Well, if you don't know, then you might care a little but not a lot. If you cared a lot, you'd probably know that.
>> The entire world seems to say it's impossible not to. Of course, the entire world is not known for accuracy.<<
Exactly. People might believe it, but that doesn't necessarily make it true. Look for evidence for or against. Look for other possible explanations. And if you don't find anything convincing, you can choose not to take a stance!
>> Conceded, allow me to rephrase: if unconditional love ends because someone was behaving horribly, it can't have been unconditional. <<
I suspect that many people who thought their love was unconditional have discovered it had some conditions like "don't hit me" or "don't murder people."
>> And if unconditionalness is required then it can't be love. If unconditionalness isn't required then I guess that works, but I'm salty about people getting it wrong. <<
You have every right to be irritated that people have given you wrong information. In their defense, however, this society doesn't handle relationships well and has little formal teaching about how they work and what's healthy or not. A few schools have it, there are even college degrees on family development, but it's not common. Most people are getting it from peers, and if you ever overheard tween sex talk in the bathroom, that's about the quality of relationship advice in America.
>> True. I said I loved my girlfriend when I was fifteen. I didn't mean to, because we'd met a week ago and I don't believe it's possible to sufficiently know anyone enough to really know that in a week, but after I said it it felt true.<<
That can happen. It's not very common. Like at first sight happens too.
>> Still don't know what the hell it means. <<
Many explanations have been proposed. Likely more than one is true in different situations. They include but are not limited to: * The other person smells good to your body because of pheromones, which have strong influence over emotions. * Their body language, ideas, etc. resonate with you -- which is much more striking if this is rare. They just seem to "get" things that others don't. * Both of you are currently looking for new friends or lovers, which makes a tighter bond. * You know each other from a past life.
>>Especially since it turns out I was absolutely right and the person I saw was highly incomplete in some ways that allowed trouble to happen to other people. <<
Bummer. But then at that age, most people are incomplete in ways that cause trouble. That's teenage for you.
>> Feelings are just really annoying. <<
So very true.
>> There's no way to prove them, they just sit there inside. No microscope, no scale, no ruler, just words and sensations. It's awful. Qualia, ugh.<<
Well, you can do some things with emotions.
I really like Plutchik's wheel of emotions because it shows different feelings can be more or less intense and how they relate to each other. That can help you think about whether you feel something just a little bit, or a lot; and whether you feel more strongly about this item or that item.
You can learn about how physical sensations and emotions have a feedback loop, each affecting the other. So for instance, if you know that, then when you're saddled with an emotion you don't want, you can try to break it up by changing your physical stance or actions. A classic example is deep breathing for calm, when you're freaking out and want to pant. Panting will make you freak out worse. Slowing it down will make it harder for your feelings to run away with you.
>>I mean, true. I guess I always took it as implicit that the whole thing about How To Relationship Correctly was about people, not stuff. Or fictional people.<<
Now think about people's relationships with food, or alcohol, or money. Those can be good relationships or very bad ones. Poor relationship skills can fuck you over with more than just people.
Also, lots of folks get attached to fictional characters or celebrities they've never met. It's more common for people to feel that than not to feel it. When someone famous dies, we feel sad -- sometimes extremely sad -- because we had a relationship with that person even though it's mostly one-way.
>> grumble Then people are being imprecise and incorrect in their speaking and I don't like it. grumble <<
Totally justified. Some of them are really wrongheaded about it. Others are merely ignorant or misled.
Consider that it's hard to separate things if you've never seen them separate. People conflate sex/gender because the two almost always match. You only start noticing they're different when there are counterexamples.
But I think that most people just don't know as much about emotions or relationships as they think they do. If they did, the world would be a very different place. We wouldn't have the "boys don't cry" meme or a sky-high divorce rate.
>> I have certainly tried to care less on purpose and just. like. failed. completely failed. utter failure. <<
That can be a very difficult thing to accomplish. It takes an average of 7 times for a woman to leave an abusive partner. A plausible explanation is that evolution set it up that way so people wouldn't run off and get eaten by saberteeth. But I suspect that Europe's history started with one person, probably a woman, who said, "Fuck it, I'll chance the saberteeth," and started walking and didn't stop until she was clean out of Africa.
>> words fail me about how useless that was. But I think it was kinda necessary. I couldn't stop caring, but I did function. That's important. Of course, this is a very neat story to tell myself so I feel less like screaming over all the unnecessarily wasted time.<<
If you try your best to do a hard thing, and fail, it's not wasted effort. It matters that you tried. Maybe you made a little progress, or maybe you learned something. At least you didn't sit on your ass and ignore a problem. Maybe if that problem comes up again, you'll do better.
>> It's damnably inconsistent and sometimes incomprehensibly vague. I'm still frustrated by the difficulty in distinguishing romantic feelings from strong nonromantic* feelings beyond "kissy" and "not-kissy" (a distinction which doesn't work for all people, but so far has been true for me.) <<
I am a gender scholar and have yet to come up with a clear distinction between those. Once you throw out kissing, the distinctions all seem to be about either depth, or nothing more specific than a different "flavor" of feeling.
>> I get liking someone and not loving them, that happens all the time. But I don't understand what the difference between simply feeling a duty toward someone and loving but not liking them is. Love, separated from duty, is mostly about feeling deeply warm and fuzzy about someone, isn't it? <<
It depends on the type of love. Some is warm and fuzzy. Some really isn't. A lot of mothers talk about love as separate from liking, and it's often quite a fierce thing, more about protection.
>> And people tell me it's not possible to just,,, not love people with certain roles in your life (no matter how unnecessarily difficult they make everything), <<
Oh, it's possible all right. Love is a feeling, not an obligation. You can't force it. Some people don't feel much connection to others, and some feel a lot. Some expected they would feel it and then nothing happened, so they feel bad about themselves. Others own up to it. But they're less likely to talk about it openly if it makes people go apeshit. For example, parents who don't love their children:
>> (apparently, though if my intrapersonal intelligence is so amazing, the rest of the world needs help) <<
I certainly think it does.
>> but the other half is that if somehow you really don't have a bunch of warm feelings, it's because you're, like, a bad person. And the world is almost always being entirely too reductive when it says things like that, especially when it's about feelings, but it's really hard not to worry about it.<<
Feelings just are. Shaming people for them is really destructive. It is difficult or impossible to change how you feel. Actions are different, those are things people choose. This doesn't stop the world from outright attacking people for having emotions that are disapproved. "All feelings are valid" is a psychological truth, and an ethical truth, but it is absolutely not a social truth and if you believe it is then people will destroy you. Only a very limited range of emotions are socially acceptable in a given situation. That's a problem.
>> *I concientiously object to the word "platonic" to mean "non-romantic non-sexual" because I find Plato's thoughts on love generally sexist and objectionable.<<
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancing_serpent
Re: What Even is Love, Anyway?
Date: 2022-01-04 08:00 am (UTC)If nothing is going to be good enough, then don't worry about it, because worrying about it won't change it. Just do your best.
>>I mean, I can buy that, but it is one thousand percent not how people talk. I see all the time stuff that basically says you're relationshipping wrong if you don't have all three.<<
Well, consider the source. Are you hearing that from people with 70 years of marriage or the guy who's tried 5 times and failed all of them? Is the culture stable or has it got high rates of domestic violence and divorce? America is a rape-friendly garbage fire. I'd look three times before taking their advice on relationships.
Just because people say things, doesn't make it true. America also used to think it was okay to enslave people, and still practices genocide. Sometimes people are wrong, even in large groups. Does the statement seem logical? If you test it, does it work? Or at least work better than other models you have? With relationships, I prefer to look for sources that might actually be competent.
>>I mean, I've seen a lot of arguments that that's obsession, not love.<<
It can be, but doesn't have to be. The same is true for many types of love.
>> But what does that feel like? What does it look like? <<
I don't know. It's really not me. If I cut someone out, I tend to mean it in ways that most people don't.
>> I can understand caring about people from far away, because I care about a lot of people I don't get to see often. But with my father... I don't know with my father. I don't know if I care. Maybe I'm hiding from it. <<
Well, if you don't know, then you might care a little but not a lot. If you cared a lot, you'd probably know that.
>> The entire world seems to say it's impossible not to. Of course, the entire world is not known for accuracy.<<
Exactly. People might believe it, but that doesn't necessarily make it true. Look for evidence for or against. Look for other possible explanations. And if you don't find anything convincing, you can choose not to take a stance!
>> Conceded, allow me to rephrase: if unconditional love ends because someone was behaving horribly, it can't have been unconditional. <<
I suspect that many people who thought their love was unconditional have discovered it had some conditions like "don't hit me" or "don't murder people."
>> And if unconditionalness is required then it can't be love. If unconditionalness isn't required then I guess that works, but I'm salty about people getting it wrong. <<
You have every right to be irritated that people have given you wrong information. In their defense, however, this society doesn't handle relationships well and has little formal teaching about how they work and what's healthy or not. A few schools have it, there are even college degrees on family development, but it's not common. Most people are getting it from peers, and if you ever overheard tween sex talk in the bathroom, that's about the quality of relationship advice in America.
>> True. I said I loved my girlfriend when I was fifteen. I didn't mean to, because we'd met a week ago and I don't believe it's possible to sufficiently know anyone enough to really know that in a week, but after I said it it felt true.<<
That can happen. It's not very common. Like at first sight happens too.
>> Still don't know what the hell it means. <<
Many explanations have been proposed. Likely more than one is true in different situations. They include but are not limited to:
* The other person smells good to your body because of pheromones, which have strong influence over emotions.
* Their body language, ideas, etc. resonate with you -- which is much more striking if this is rare. They just seem to "get" things that others don't.
* Both of you are currently looking for new friends or lovers, which makes a tighter bond.
* You know each other from a past life.
>>Especially since it turns out I was absolutely right and the person I saw was highly incomplete in some ways that allowed trouble to happen to other people. <<
Bummer. But then at that age, most people are incomplete in ways that cause trouble. That's teenage for you.
>> Feelings are just really annoying. <<
So very true.
>> There's no way to prove them, they just sit there inside. No microscope, no scale, no ruler, just words and sensations. It's awful. Qualia, ugh.<<
Well, you can do some things with emotions.
I really like Plutchik's wheel of emotions because it shows different feelings can be more or less intense and how they relate to each other. That can help you think about whether you feel something just a little bit, or a lot; and whether you feel more strongly about this item or that item.
You can learn about how physical sensations and emotions have a feedback loop, each affecting the other. So for instance, if you know that, then when you're saddled with an emotion you don't want, you can try to break it up by changing your physical stance or actions. A classic example is deep breathing for calm, when you're freaking out and want to pant. Panting will make you freak out worse. Slowing it down will make it harder for your feelings to run away with you.
Did you know that feelings manifest in different parts of the body, and the patterns are pretty consistent? You can map your own too.
>>I mean, true. I guess I always took it as implicit that the whole thing about How To Relationship Correctly was about people, not stuff. Or fictional people.<<
Now think about people's relationships with food, or alcohol, or money. Those can be good relationships or very bad ones. Poor relationship skills can fuck you over with more than just people.
Also, lots of folks get attached to fictional characters or celebrities they've never met. It's more common for people to feel that than not to feel it. When someone famous dies, we feel sad -- sometimes extremely sad -- because we had a relationship with that person even though it's mostly one-way.
>> grumble Then people are being imprecise and incorrect in their speaking and I don't like it. grumble <<
Totally justified. Some of them are really wrongheaded about it. Others are merely ignorant or misled.
Consider that it's hard to separate things if you've never seen them separate. People conflate sex/gender because the two almost always match. You only start noticing they're different when there are counterexamples.
But I think that most people just don't know as much about emotions or relationships as they think they do. If they did, the world would be a very different place. We wouldn't have the "boys don't cry" meme or a sky-high divorce rate.
>> I have certainly tried to care less on purpose and just. like. failed. completely failed. utter failure. <<
That can be a very difficult thing to accomplish. It takes an average of 7 times for a woman to leave an abusive partner. A plausible explanation is that evolution set it up that way so people wouldn't run off and get eaten by saberteeth. But I suspect that Europe's history started with one person, probably a woman, who said, "Fuck it, I'll chance the saberteeth," and started walking and didn't stop until she was clean out of Africa.
>> words fail me about how useless that was. But I think it was kinda necessary. I couldn't stop caring, but I did function. That's important. Of course, this is a very neat story to tell myself so I feel less like screaming over all the unnecessarily wasted time.<<
If you try your best to do a hard thing, and fail, it's not wasted effort. It matters that you tried. Maybe you made a little progress, or maybe you learned something. At least you didn't sit on your ass and ignore a problem. Maybe if that problem comes up again, you'll do better.
>> It's damnably inconsistent and sometimes incomprehensibly vague. I'm still frustrated by the difficulty in distinguishing romantic feelings from strong nonromantic* feelings beyond "kissy" and "not-kissy" (a distinction which doesn't work for all people, but so far has been true for me.) <<
I am a gender scholar and have yet to come up with a clear distinction between those. Once you throw out kissing, the distinctions all seem to be about either depth, or nothing more specific than a different "flavor" of feeling.
>> I get liking someone and not loving them, that happens all the time. But I don't understand what the difference between simply feeling a duty toward someone and loving but not liking them is. Love, separated from duty, is mostly about feeling deeply warm and fuzzy about someone, isn't it? <<
It depends on the type of love. Some is warm and fuzzy. Some really isn't. A lot of mothers talk about love as separate from liking, and it's often quite a fierce thing, more about protection.
>> And people tell me it's not possible to just,,, not love people with certain roles in your life (no matter how unnecessarily difficult they make everything), <<
Oh, it's possible all right. Love is a feeling, not an obligation. You can't force it. Some people don't feel much connection to others, and some feel a lot. Some expected they would feel it and then nothing happened, so they feel bad about themselves. Others own up to it. But they're less likely to talk about it openly if it makes people go apeshit. For example, parents who don't love their children:
https://toxicties.com/parents-dont-love-their-children/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-experience/201510/8-reasons-parents-fail-love-their-kids
https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a22189/i-regret-having-kids/
Sometimes mother-love takes a while to develop:
https://postpartumprogress.com/when-bonding-isnt-immediate-feeling-like-you-dont-love-your-baby-enough
And some parents never do love their children:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/6n8372/i_dont_love_my_kids/
>> (apparently, though if my intrapersonal intelligence is so amazing, the rest of the world needs help) <<
I certainly think it does.
>> but the other half is that if somehow you really don't have a bunch of warm feelings, it's because you're, like, a bad person. And the world is almost always being entirely too reductive when it says things like that, especially when it's about feelings, but it's really hard not to worry about it.<<
Feelings just are. Shaming people for them is really destructive. It is difficult or impossible to change how you feel. Actions are different, those are things people choose. This doesn't stop the world from outright attacking people for having emotions that are disapproved. "All feelings are valid" is a psychological truth, and an ethical truth, but it is absolutely not a social truth and if you believe it is then people will destroy you. Only a very limited range of emotions are socially acceptable in a given situation. That's a problem.
>> *I concientiously object to the word "platonic" to mean "non-romantic non-sexual" because I find Plato's thoughts on love generally sexist and objectionable.<<
Some other options:
https://www.powerthesaurus.org/platonic_love/synonyms