Love

[Epiphany]

okay m gonna read it buh i termd it as reffered to as love NOWADAYS

That's NOT love buddy.

 

[Monster]

That's NOT love buddy.

True tht! tht is just temporary attraction!

 

[SalmanPakRocks]

no not th

is kinda space......like talkin to others or stuff i meant space like ur requirements above his......space to xpress ur thougths and ideas!!!!!!if i thought dt love would suffocate i would have never posted this man!

So you mean you want to 'love' someone and talk to other people too? Awesome! No really, it's just too 'awesome'. You know, when you 'love' someone you'll always want to be with that person. It's just my definition of love, maybe it differs from mine yet I must agree to whatever, 'Islam' says about love.

P.S: No harsh feelings, no arguements, not in the mood.

 

[Epiphany]

So you mean you want to 'love' someone and talk to other people too? Awesome! No really, it's just too 'awesome'. You know, when you 'love' someone you'll always want to be with that person. It's just my definition of love, maybe it differs from mine yet I must agree to whatever, 'Islam' says about love.

P.S: No harsh feelings, no arguements, not in the mood.

I think you're confusing similar points. Won't doubt that, the message itself was a bit shaky. I think she meant that if a person declares that he loves his spouse or if it's the other way around, he/she should give them full liberty to talk to relatives and friends as such and not bound them to do whatever he/she orders to.

 

[Wardah97]

So you mean you want to 'love' someone and talk to other people too? Awesome! No really, it's just too 'awesome'. You know, when you 'love' someone you'll always want to be with that person. It's just my definition of love, maybe it differs from mine yet I must agree to whatever, 'Islam' says about love.

P.S: No harsh feelings, no arguements, not in the mood.

uff bhai by space i meant freedom ov speech with the person u love.....i mean u shud be able to express urself with dt person!!!!!!!!!

 

[SalmanPakRocks]

I think you're confusing similar points. Won't doubt that, the message itself was a bit shaky. I think she meant that if a person declares that he loves his spouse or if it's the other way around, he/she should give them full liberty to talk to relatives and friends as such and not bound them to do whatever he/she orders to.

Oh! I mis-understood it. Sorry!

 

[SalmanPakRocks]

uff alolag bhai by space i meant freedom ov speech with the person u love.....i mean u shud be able to express urself with dt person!!!!!!!!!

Yeah sorry, actually I just hate that word 'space'. This 'space' destroyed my life!

 

[Wardah97]

@epiphany thnxx for makin ma msg a little bit clear!!!!
@salmanpakrocks..............it's ok...i understand!!!!

 

[Wardah97]

bhai kahaani milti julti lagti hai

kyun bhai ap k sath bhi aisa kch hoa hai kia?????/

 

[AlphaCentauri]

I wish I had time to post on this topic.... I've thoughts that are a bit different from many of yours.....

+10

 

[AlphaCentauri]

Quite an interesting thread I must say


Amazingly carried out Salman
This is something I read somewhere and this was entirely thought provoking so I thought I should add it here!

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. When you find out love and you have roots tht grew towards each other and when all the blossom falls u just realize tht You are a single tree and not two!
So for me love is more deeper than just saying I love you in all senses! Its more like loving someone with all their good and bad!

You wrote 70% of everything I've tried to say here. Finally, someone gets the concept.
+20

 

[Monster]

You wrote 70% of everything I've tried to say here. Finally, someone gets the concept.
+20

Tks! but this is true! Most of the ppl here are confusing real and true love with temporary crushes!

 

[AlphaCentauri]

Tks! but this is true! Most of the ppl here are confusing real and true love with temporary crushes!

Temporary crushes are teenage traps. Loving love is an adult trap.
Or the expression of it is wrong.

 

[Epiphany]

Came across this on my first attempt to 'research' the topic.

What is love? It is one of the most difficult questions for the mankind. Centuries have passed by, relationships have bloomed and so has love. But no one can give the proper definition of love. To some Love is friendship set on fire for others Maybe love is like luck. You have to go all the way to find it. No matter how you define it or feel it, love is the eternal truth in the history of mankind.
Love is patient, love is kind. It has no envy, nor it boasts itself and it is never proud. It rejoices over the evil and is the truth seeker. Love protects; preserves and hopes for the positive aspect of life. Always stand steadfast in love, not fall into it. It is like the dream of your matter of affection coming true.

Love can occur between two or more individuals. It bonds them and connects them in a unified link of trust, intimacy and interdependence. It enhances the relationship and comforts the soul. Love should be experienced and not just felt. The depth of love can not be measured. Look at the relationship between a mother and a child. The mother loves the child unconditionally and it can not be measured at all. A different dimension can be attained between any relationships with the magic of love. Love can be created. You just need to focus on the goodness of the other person. If this can be done easily, then you can also love easily. And remember we all have some positive aspect in us, no matter how bad our deeds maybe. And as God said Love all
Depending on context, love can be of different varieties. Romantic love is a deep, intense and unending. It shared on a very intimate and interpersonal and sexual relationship. The term Platonic love, familial love and religious love are also matter of great affection. It is more of desire, preference and feelings. The meaning of love will change with each different relationship and depends more on its concept of depth, versatility, and complexity. But at times the very existence of love is questioned. Some say it is false and meaningless. It says that it never exist, because there has been many instances of hatred and brutality in relationships. The history of our world has witnessed many such events. There has been hatred between brothers, parents and children, sibling rivalry and spouses have failed each other. Friends have betrayed each other; the son has killed his parents for the throne, the count is endless. Even the modern generation is also facing with such dilemmas everyday. But love is not responsible for that. It is us, the people, who have forgotten the meaning of love and have undertaken such gruesome apathy.
In the past the study of philosophy and religion has done many speculations on the phenomenon of love. But love has always ruled, in music, poetry, paintings, sculptor and literature. Psychology has also done lot of dissection to the essence of love, just like what biology, anthropology and neuroscience has also done to it.
Psychology portrays love as a cognitive phenomenon with a social cause. It is said to have three components in the book of psychology: Intimacy, Commitment, and Passion. Also, in an ancient proverb love is defined as a high form of tolerance. And this view has been accepted and advocated by both philosophers and scholars. Love also includes compatibility. But it is more of journey to the unknown when the concept of compatibility comes into picture. Maybe the person whom we see in front of us, may be least compatible than the person who is miles away. We might talk to each other and portray that we love each other, but practically we do not end up into any relationship. Also in compatibility, the key is to think about the long term successful relationship, not a short journey. We need to understand each other and must always remember that no body is perfect.
Be together, share your joy and sorrow, understand each other, provide space to each other, but always be there for each others need. And surely love will blossom to strengthen your relationship with your matter of affection.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
William Shakespeare.

 

[AlphaCentauri]

Love in Four Acts:

What is Romantic Love?
by Nick Yee

In a strange way, romantic love is the least understood part of the human psyche because we are content in believing that “it just happens”, that it is something so sacred that it clearly resists rational understanding, or that it is an entirely different experience for everyone such that it is impossible to articulate. Indeed, social psychology textbooks talk a great deal about the factors that impact relationship formation (proximity, familiarity, shared attitudes etc), but they typically do not have a lot to say about romantic love as something separate from platonic friendships. But perhaps underneath the mystical, maybe even mythical, glow of love’s façade, there is something that we can articulate and talk about meaningfully. And perhaps understanding romantic love empowers us rather than corrupting love through deliberate exploration. This is a story about romantic love from four different intertwined perspectives: fairy tales, Jungian psychology, collected interviews, and biology. This is a story about what four different perspectives can tell us about romantic love.

It makes the most sense to begin with a clarification of terminology – what do we mean by “romantic love”? Almost 3 decades ago, in 1978, Elaine Hatfield wrote a seminal book on the topic of love - teasing apart passionate and companionate love. She defined passionate love as "a state of intense longing for union with another" and companionate love as "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined". Around the same time, Dorothy Tennov was trying to answer the same question in her book "Love and Limerence" and, similar to Hatfield, quickly differentiated between the “love” that is sincere concern and caring as opposed to the “love” that is fiery, euphoric and ephemeral. But Tennov realized that there is something more irrational and complex about this latter kind of love than what Hatfield described. Tennov coined the term “limerence” for the latter so as to be able to discuss it as a concept separate from “love”. She noted that “love” is an emotion that is acted on, while “limerence” is more of a transformed state that people go into (the difference in the proverbial “I love you, but I’m not in love with you”). After interviews with hundreds of individuals who were "in love", Tennov put together a list of the symptoms of limerence:

1) Intrusive thoughts about the object of passionate desire (the “limerent object” or LO)
2) Acute longing for reciprocation
3) Mood becomes dependent on the LO’s actions
4) Inability to react limerently towards more than one person at the same time (except when limerence is at low ebb)
5) Unsettling shyness and fear of rejection when in the presence of the LO
6) Intensification through adversity (up to a certain point)
7) Acute sensitivity to any act or condition that could be interpreted as favorable
8) An aching of the “heart” (a palpable heavy sensation in the front of the chest)
9) Buoyancy (a feeling of “walking on air”)
10) An intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background
11) A remarkable ability to emphasize the positive traits of the LO, while rendering the LO’s negative traits as “endearing” to the point where it is perceived to be another positive trait. --- (pg. 23)
​

 

[AlphaCentauri]

The central paradox of limerence is that someone who is actively limerent feels like they are experiencing the most unique, rapturous experience in the world even though limerence seems to have fairly universal characteristics (at least in Western cultures, although it could be argued that traditional Asian cultures do understand limerence but don't use it as a basis for marriage). In fact, as Tennov noted, there is a very well-rehearsed cultural script for falling in and out of limerence: the initial buoyancy, the ensuing anxiety and self-consciousness, intense distraction and euphoria, usually followed by a devastating disillusionment. Everyone knows this script.

And one reason why we know this script so well is because we’ve been hearing about it since we were children. We have all gone to bed as a child with the freshly-told fairy tale story still bubbling in our mind. Marcia Lieberman has criticized fairy tales as conditioning girls into becoming submissive women who believe that beauty and docility are the only traits that are rewarded in life, but in her essay “Some Day My Prince Will Come”, she also points out something very interesting about romantic love itself. Most fairy tales end with the “happily ever after” clause, but these same fairy tales almost always have the protagonist come from a broken family. Either one of the parents is dead, missing, or there is an evil step-parent. These fairy tales imply that romantic love leads to happy marriages and yet all the families that they portray are broken. The paradox of love in fairy tales is that everyone ends up happily ever after, but no one seems to be happy. The “happily ever after” of love is always emphasized, but never shown.

What does it mean to grow up with stories with such a strange juxtaposition of what romantic love is? But in fact, these symbols and themes still surround us as adults. The prince and princess merely change forms and show up on TV sitcoms, movies and fill the roles in novels, plays and even songs. The same story is being re-enacted over and over again for all ages.

In his book “We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love”, Robert Johnson shows how we grow up to believe in the irrational assumptions of the fairy tale script of romantic love. As a Jungian analyst, Robert Johnson is interested in exploring the cultural archetype of romantic love to uncover its psychological essence and meaning. Like Tennov, he differentiates romantic love from sincere love – “Romantic love is not love but a complex of attitudes about love – involuntary feelings, ideals, and reactions” (pg. 45, original emphasis). Johnson points out a central ideal of love that Tennov doesn’t emphasize and it is this:

When we are “in love” we feel completed, as though a missing part of ourselves had been returned to us; we feel uplifted, as though we were suddenly raised above the level of the ordinary world. Life has an intensity, a glory, an ecstasy and transcendence (pg. 52)​

For Johnson, romantic love is a kind of primal religious experience – both revelation and rapture - that is a fundamental part of our collective unconsciousness. The tragedy of our cultural understanding of romantic love is that it makes us place unreasonable demands on our romantic partners because we believe that they have “the responsibility for making our lives whole … making our lives meaningful, intense, and ecstatic” (pg. 61).
The cause of the problem is that when we are in love, we become “entranced, mesmerized … with a mystical vision – but of something separate and distinct from [our] human selves” (pg. 51). We see our romantic partners as idealized, god-like versions of who they are. And we are euphoric with this vision instead of the other person. For Johnson, the paradox of romantic love is that “it never produces human relationships as long as it stays romantic” (pg. 133) because we are in love with our own fantastical creations instead of the other person for who they really are.

More tragically, “we assume that the single ingredient that we need for ‘relationship’ … is romance” (pg. 103) and that a relationship without this heady, fiery kind of love has very little worth to the point where “if a direct, uncomplicated, simple relationship offers us happiness, we won’t accept it” (pg. 134). The tragedy derives from the simple fact that romantic love always fades, and most people do not know how to derive a sincere, human relationship from one that is fantastical and rapturous. And if they learned anything from fairy tales, they learned that a relationship without romantic love is worthless. All their lives, they have had a vision of what love would be, and they now believe that their “true love” must then still be out there waiting for them. Many people are stuck forever in this wash-and-rinse cycle of romantic love because they believe that fiery romantic love can be everlasting.

The romantic couples who have been together for half their lives have something quite different from romantic love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – “it represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama … or an extraordinary intensity in everything” (pg. 195). In a strange way, this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives.

Yet if romantic love or limerence is so destructive and irrational, why does it happen at all? Tennov briefly ponders the possible biological underpinnings of limerence in her book. As an evolutionary adaptation, limerence might be a reaction to a set of physical attractiveness or genetic fitness cues. Prima facie, it makes a lot of sense that we become intensely attracted to highly desirable sexual partners, but that is lust – an intense erotic reaction, which is different from limerence – the set of responses and attitudes that can be independent from sexual desire. When we are in limerence with someone, we want to be with them and we want them to like us. When we are in lust with someone, we just want to have sex with them. There is an important difference between the two. It makes sense for us to lust a highly desirable sexual partner, but why would we become limerent over them?

 

[AlphaCentauri]

The answer may lie with the size of our brains. Our pelvises have decreased in size over the past few million years while the size of our brains have increased. The problem is that babies cannot fully develop in the mother’s womb otherwise they would be too large to be given birth to. The compromise is that human infants are born “pre-mature” so they can finish developing outside the womb. But this leaves both the mother and infant highly vulnerable in the small tribal hunter-gatherer environment. This is particularly because human infants cannot cling onto their mothers the way all primate infants can (a consequence of hairlessness and shorter arms). In fact, the only way a human infant can survive in the ancestral environment is if both parents are present. Limerence is perhaps an evolutionary adaptation that creates an irrational emotional attachment to another individual for the likely duration of conception, birth and child care. This duration is around 2-3 years, which is also how long marriages usually last – long enough to bear one child and for that child to be old enough to walk.

Of course, Tennov is probably right that limerence is triggered by some set of traits that imply genetic fitness (such as physical attractiveness) which differ from person to person. For example, it has been shown that we are attracted to or repelled by the natural body odor of other individuals to differing degrees. Research has shown that we are typically not attracted to the body odors of close family members (another incest safeguard) or people whose genetic makeup is very different from ours. We typically find individuals who are in the optimal middle area most erotic-smelling. The underlying theory is that the pheromones in our body odor are a signature of our immune system blueprint, and one reason why sex exists to begin with is to increase genetic variation against the constantly evolving viruses and bacteria. It’s essentially an arms race between us and viruses that forces us to increase the genetic variation of our offspring or perish. In short, limerence as an evolutionary adaptation is plausible.

Many of us have at one point or another been imprisoned by the painful, irrational clutches of limerence gone bad. But in a culture where romantic “love” is often presented in entirely paradoxical ways, it is inevitable that many people are unable to untangle limerence from love. Romantic love and all its implications are deeply rooted in our culture, and perhaps these irrational reactions have evolutionary underpinnings, but that does not mean we have to be imprisoned by them. For as long as we project god-like idealizations onto our romantic partners and demand that they make us happy as the fairy tales describe, we will never truly love them as human beings. Limerence may be a wonderful way to begin a relationship, but that relationship will never get anywhere unless both individuals are willing and able to see each other for who they are. In the end, the basis of a stable relationship is founded on a love that emerges not in spite of but because of the other person’s flaws and weaknesses, because ultimately it is our imperfections that make us human. We can seek out limerence with angels, but we can only find true love among mortals.

Notes:
1) One of the things that started Tennov on her study of limerence was her discovery of natural non-limerents - people who do not experience limerence and not because they are actively denying their own emotions. Tennov documents several individuals she meets who have never been limerent and are confused by the media portrayal of this set of emotions and attitudes. A biological underpinning actually does allow for a spectrum of "limerent reactions" with individuals on both ends of that spectrum.
2) Robert Sternberg has a triarchic theory of love, composed of 3 factors: Intimacy, Passion and Commitment, and in his paradigm, you need all 3 to have "consummate" love. While this may seem to contradict what Tennov and Johnson say, this may be caused by Sternberg's more mild conceptualization of Passion which does not include the more irrational, emotionally-charged, drama-ridden elements that Tennov and Johnson describe. Sternberg's Passion is better described as warm romance.
References:
Hatfield, E., & Walster, G. W. (1978). A new look at love. Addison-Wesley.
Johnson, Robert A. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Harper San Francisco. 1983.
Lieberman, Marcia K. "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale." In Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Methuen, 1986, pp. 185-200.
Tennov, Dorothy. Love and Limerence. Scarborough House. 1979.
Thornhill, Randy, Gangestad, Steven W. The scent of symmetry: A human sex pheromone that signals fitness? Evolution & Human Behavior Vol 20(3) (May 1999): 175-201

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Long, but worth the time.

 

[Epiphany]

Love in Four Acts:

What is Romantic Love?

​

by Nick Yee

Thanks for sharing such beautiful stuff.

 

[AlphaCentauri]

Thanks for sharing such beautiful stuff.

The romantic couples who have been together for half their lives have something quite different from romantic love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – “it represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama … or an extraordinary intensity in everything” (pg. 195). In a strange way, this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives.

Limerence may be a wonderful way to begin a relationship, but that relationship will never get anywhere unless both individuals are willing and able to see each other for who they are. In the end, the basis of a stable relationship is founded on a love that emerges not in spite of but because of the other person’s flaws and weaknesses, because ultimately it is our imperfections that make us human. We can seek out limerence with angels, but we can only find true love among mortals.

Well, wouldn't say 'beautiful'. But it's a deadly reality. Very enriching though. Do read everyone.

True love exists. But not in the way we imagine it to be. The meaning of it cannot be learned unless it is lived.

I must admit I learned a lot too from the article.

 

[Epiphany]

Well, wouldn't say 'beautiful'. But it's a deadly reality. Very enriching though. Do read everyone.

Beautiful in a way how different the approach is. Not like the usual opinions about 'love.' Enriching, for sure.