Love, the Truly Unique Emotion?
I'm starting to write this piece at 11 pm on Valentine’s day and I’m currently sitting alone in my dimly light dining room on my laptop about to attempt to write about love. I find the irony fitting choosing to tackle love on its “holiday” because I find love to be extremely fascinating. Love is the dominant positive emotion often being the driving force of well-being and happiness for our lives. However, a lack of love, especially during adolescence, leads to increased suffering through psychological disparities. Johann Hari makes the claim that our minds have basic needs for functioning just as our bodies do and love is right up there on the list of psychological basic needs. No one would disagree with the importance of love in all of our lives, but what makes love unique is being the only emotion living in both realms of positive and negative. Poets have been writing for centuries on the pleasure/pain duality caused by love. When other positive emotions are affected, they simply morph into other emotions. When happiness is lost in a person, we call that sadness. When anger is lost in a person, we call that calmness, so on and so forth. However, when we lose love, we blame love. We think of love as a driving force leading to pain and suffering when the connection of love is lost or severed. I never really understood that because we mainly learn through “compare and contrast” of our experiences. When love is found and lost we simply compare the joy of having love in our lives to the absent of joy from no longing having love. Emotions naturally gain stronger meaning and value based on how strong the compared experiences are. A recent personal example of this is just the other day our house lost power for 20 plus hours and when the power finally came back on, I was happier than ever and understood more than ever how much I’d taken having power for granted. What I’m getting at is all the pain we’ve (as an evolving culture throughout the decades) have felt and have written about in regards to love simply is the mere absence of love.
The duration of these moments affects our understanding of love and how we learn it. If one is having a lovers quarrel which causes tension or a potential loss of love (often being moments of frustration, irritation, anger, sadness or all of the above) and if the love is rekindled or the quarrel has been remedied the love is strengthened by now having the experience of potentially losing that love which in turn strengthens the love by comparison. This stands true for a shorter duration of love’s absence, but when the duration continues for a longer span of time the loss of love becomes romantic sacrifice. Romantic sacrifice is the idea of forgoing personal happiness in the name of love in the hopes of strengthening love. I find self-sacrificing for love to be extremely ironic. The thought of continuing to remain unhappy in a personal emotional context because of love seems counterproductive to the emotion of love itself. This is a product of the notion of unconditional love. Unconditional love doesn’t hold in a romantic context. Viewing romantic love as conditional can only strengthen happiness and reduce pain for both parties involved. Of course, compromises can be made, but it should never cause one to suffer in doing so. Love is an emotion with a heavy withdraw and a stronghold of the mind. I’ve had friends remain unhappy for years for what they’ve convinced themselves to be love. Romantic love should never put someone in a place of suffering, but we as a culture have a common misunderstanding of love. A big factor in our cultural misunderstanding of love is the heavy focus of physical attraction while downplaying the role mental attraction has on the longevity of love. This misunderstanding stems from our societies current method of courtship.
Love is also unique in our method of finding it. We randomly roll the dice with each other until a mutual attraction is found. Once a mutual attraction is found it becomes a game of showmanship until a comfort-ability is established and lastly, continuing to be together until one day boom the L-bomb is dropped and congratulation love is found. We fantasize about love at first sight but are thrown off with dropping the L-bomb too early in the courting process. Courtship is romanticized in film and literature, but in reality, men often involve their egos and self-esteem into the equation which women equally enjoy and disdain. Most culturally desired courtship qualities border on the line of negative qualities which makes courtship difficult to navigate. Confidence is a thin line from arrogance. Being forward is a thin line from being pushy. Flirting is a thin line from being creepy, etc. The courtship process seems like a tight rope act without a safety net until a few trips back and forth on the tight rope have been taken. I’m not even sure how to approach someone who I may be physically attracted to because of the high number of trial and error going on already. As I’ve seen too often with my female friends, they’re braided all the time by men making advancements. I see this and think how annoying it must be to deal with and I simply don’t want to put a person in that situation especially on nothing, but the hope of a mutual attraction. I’ve experienced a situation where I was not just asked out, but asked out by someone I had no attraction to, or interest in, and all of a sudden I was randomly put into a situation where I had to decline an offer I’d been forced into which was difficult because rejecting someone isn’t an easy thing to do nor is being rejected an easy emotion to handle or understand, but I politely declined and was met with sass. That honestly surprised me because I was then called stupid for passing up what they said "was a rare opportunity" and I had to double down, which successfully turned me into the bad guy. That moment I experienced first hand how uncomfortable those situations are and can be, so from that moment on I had no desire to put another human being through that. However, in order to really build a connection a first encounter must happen, so I find myself in a personal catch 22. Which is why I started to focus on mental attraction over physical attraction. Physical attraction, of course, has to be there in order to have a spark, but the level of physical attraction can alter the importance of mental attraction which creates the starting pathway to romantic sacrifice and this is the trouble with overvaluing physical attraction. Although physical attraction is necessary, mental attraction only strengthens physical attraction while equally increasing the longevity of love. I’ve spent a large amount of my time focusing on mental attraction in the goal towards working to build a solid foundation because in love happiness and longevity is the goal.
In conclusion, I view love as one of the most powerful forces guiding happiness and reducing suffering in all of our lives. I see the uniqueness in love in regards to how we search for it, how we account it for our pain and suffering as well as our joy and happiness and how we sometimes value the idea of maintaining love even at the expense of our own personal happiness. Love should never be suffering. Making romantic love conditional to one’s happiness shouldn’t be frowned upon and mental attraction should play a larger role in our culture than physical attraction. Pain associated with love isn’t love in itself, but the emotions connected to the loss of love or am I the only one?
The duration of these moments affects our understanding of love and how we learn it. If one is having a lovers quarrel which causes tension or a potential loss of love (often being moments of frustration, irritation, anger, sadness or all of the above) and if the love is rekindled or the quarrel has been remedied the love is strengthened by now having the experience of potentially losing that love which in turn strengthens the love by comparison. This stands true for a shorter duration of love’s absence, but when the duration continues for a longer span of time the loss of love becomes romantic sacrifice. Romantic sacrifice is the idea of forgoing personal happiness in the name of love in the hopes of strengthening love. I find self-sacrificing for love to be extremely ironic. The thought of continuing to remain unhappy in a personal emotional context because of love seems counterproductive to the emotion of love itself. This is a product of the notion of unconditional love. Unconditional love doesn’t hold in a romantic context. Viewing romantic love as conditional can only strengthen happiness and reduce pain for both parties involved. Of course, compromises can be made, but it should never cause one to suffer in doing so. Love is an emotion with a heavy withdraw and a stronghold of the mind. I’ve had friends remain unhappy for years for what they’ve convinced themselves to be love. Romantic love should never put someone in a place of suffering, but we as a culture have a common misunderstanding of love. A big factor in our cultural misunderstanding of love is the heavy focus of physical attraction while downplaying the role mental attraction has on the longevity of love. This misunderstanding stems from our societies current method of courtship.
Love is also unique in our method of finding it. We randomly roll the dice with each other until a mutual attraction is found. Once a mutual attraction is found it becomes a game of showmanship until a comfort-ability is established and lastly, continuing to be together until one day boom the L-bomb is dropped and congratulation love is found. We fantasize about love at first sight but are thrown off with dropping the L-bomb too early in the courting process. Courtship is romanticized in film and literature, but in reality, men often involve their egos and self-esteem into the equation which women equally enjoy and disdain. Most culturally desired courtship qualities border on the line of negative qualities which makes courtship difficult to navigate. Confidence is a thin line from arrogance. Being forward is a thin line from being pushy. Flirting is a thin line from being creepy, etc. The courtship process seems like a tight rope act without a safety net until a few trips back and forth on the tight rope have been taken. I’m not even sure how to approach someone who I may be physically attracted to because of the high number of trial and error going on already. As I’ve seen too often with my female friends, they’re braided all the time by men making advancements. I see this and think how annoying it must be to deal with and I simply don’t want to put a person in that situation especially on nothing, but the hope of a mutual attraction. I’ve experienced a situation where I was not just asked out, but asked out by someone I had no attraction to, or interest in, and all of a sudden I was randomly put into a situation where I had to decline an offer I’d been forced into which was difficult because rejecting someone isn’t an easy thing to do nor is being rejected an easy emotion to handle or understand, but I politely declined and was met with sass. That honestly surprised me because I was then called stupid for passing up what they said "was a rare opportunity" and I had to double down, which successfully turned me into the bad guy. That moment I experienced first hand how uncomfortable those situations are and can be, so from that moment on I had no desire to put another human being through that. However, in order to really build a connection a first encounter must happen, so I find myself in a personal catch 22. Which is why I started to focus on mental attraction over physical attraction. Physical attraction, of course, has to be there in order to have a spark, but the level of physical attraction can alter the importance of mental attraction which creates the starting pathway to romantic sacrifice and this is the trouble with overvaluing physical attraction. Although physical attraction is necessary, mental attraction only strengthens physical attraction while equally increasing the longevity of love. I’ve spent a large amount of my time focusing on mental attraction in the goal towards working to build a solid foundation because in love happiness and longevity is the goal.
In conclusion, I view love as one of the most powerful forces guiding happiness and reducing suffering in all of our lives. I see the uniqueness in love in regards to how we search for it, how we account it for our pain and suffering as well as our joy and happiness and how we sometimes value the idea of maintaining love even at the expense of our own personal happiness. Love should never be suffering. Making romantic love conditional to one’s happiness shouldn’t be frowned upon and mental attraction should play a larger role in our culture than physical attraction. Pain associated with love isn’t love in itself, but the emotions connected to the loss of love or am I the only one?
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