This is my first post, although I’ve been lurking around here for at least a year.
My question is, does true unconditional love exist? When we look at someone and feel that we love that person, is it something spiritual, or just chemical impulses? Is romance / passion real, or just something thought up by wacky society and manufactured by Hallmark? Why do we have friends? Lovers? Soul mates?
I’ll start the discussion rolling - If it is purely instinctual, then why would a mother, if given the option, willfully sacrifice herself to save her child? Wouldn’t it be more economical for nature to instinctually instruct the mother to preserve her own life and just pop out another replacement kid? In similar vein, why are there some people we feel we would die for, even if they were just a companion?
For clarification, I’m talking about love (not purely lust) between a human and a another living thing. Love for a good chocolate cake, an expensive car, or a good BM don’t apply here.
I would venture to suggest that the instinct driving the behaviour is not intending self-destruction, but rather safe rescue of the child.
That said, I think love (or at least sometime that looks like it and is not conspicuously driven by a biological imperative) can exist; I love working with children, there are a few children that I work with (who are not related to me any more than anybody else off the street) that I feel a distinct affinity for - something about their personalities, actions, etc makes them appear to me as lovable and I care for their happiness and wellbeing in a similar way (although probably not as strongly) as I do for my own children.
All anecdotal, of course.
As someone with no religious beliefs, I would say that evolution has crafted in us an emotion, or a suite of emotions, that we call “love”. Being highly social animals it should not be surprising that we have a range of emotions geared toward directing our interactions with other humans. It might well be that the “love” of a mother for her child is a different emotion than the romantic love felt by two adults for each other. Or that they might at least have some different components.
Of course trying to untangle love from lust is probably a monumental task, if it can be done at all. One thing we humans excel at is integrating various brain activities that in most other animals are compartmentalized. The idea that there are seperate emotions that do not intereact with each other is probably incorrect. But from what I’ve read on the subject, we’re just scratching the surface on understanding the science of brain activity and emotions.
I’m sure someone with strong relgious beliefs will have a different perspective altogether, though.
Interesting idea for a thread. I had a similar idea brewing inside my head the last few days.
I don’t think there is any one answer. To be sure, we are genetically predisposed to love, it is in our genes. Maternal/paternal love is probably the clearest example of this.
However culture also plays a large part. I think romantic love is largely a social construct. I actually studied something like this in uni, but i can’t remember details now. Romantic love is largely a western cultural idea, which has now pretty successfully been exported all over the world.
None of this makes love any less “real” though. So yes, i would agree true unconditional love exists.
I certainly would agree that the idea that people should marry purely for reasons of romantic love is largely a western cultural idea. And perhaps a modern era western cultural idea at that. However, it’s unclear that the entire concept of romantic love is a western idea. Are there not great love stories from traditional Eastern liturature as well?
Perhaps i exagerated a little. I don’t think romantic love is entirely a social construct, but largely is. As you say, other cultures, even before a lot of contact with western culture had the ideas of romantic love as well.
However i think that things like falling in love, love at first sight, being so in love that you can’t think of anything but your lover, and so on are largely social constructs. Other societies don’t have the emphasis on romantic love that western societies do, or at least they didn’t until recently.
I can rule out (for me) that love is purely sexual because I feel something which I would consider Love for - well of course my family - and also for some very close male friends.
It could still be some chemical reaction of course, something in the sense of, they are like me, they understand me, but I don’t think so.
Anyway, I think that unconditional love does exist, but it’s very hard and needs to be learned.
I love my pets. I’ll use them as an example because I think I can safely say that I don’t feel lust for my betta. And I would say a love for pets can be unconditional, though really that’s more a factor of what the pet can do. A pet can’t take over the world or commit crimes or practice genocide.
Lets not forgot that it is quite possible for there to be a difference between the genders in how the emotion of love manifests itself. We absolutely know that the two genders have different mating strategies in most non-human species, so there is no reason that humans should be fundamentally different. Throw in the clear sexual dimorphism (body size difference) that we exhibit and an impartial biologist would automatically assume that there would be a diference.
I didn’t mean to say they had to be completely untangled. I just wanted to filter out pure sexual desire, which we sometimes call love, too. Of course love can include some sexual lust. Hell, where would we be without it?
I have a theory: in the western modern world, since most primal desires (food, sleep, sex, shelter, safety) are taken care of for the majority of the population, maybe we can’t get that special person out of our minds because we have nothing else to worry about? I bet if we were to be suddenly transported to a remote jungle to fend for ourselves, those thoughts of “I just can’t live without Jack/Jane” would disapear pretty quickly. I hope I’m wrong, though. I hope there’s more to it. Can someone with religious beliefs take a shot at this? I need some faith!
Not so. I’ve seen my pets act pretty mean over the years. My cats like to torture small reptiles before finally killing them, just for fun, as they don’t even need to eat them. Nature is cruel, and it’s not just Man. That doesn’t mean you can’t still love an imperfect being, however. Everything is capable of cruelty and love, IMO.
I do not define “love” as an emotion. I use the “agape” definition of love: doing (not feeling ) what is best for the other. Love is what you do for someone, regardless of how you feel about them, if it is in their best interest.
The emotion most people call “love” can’t be unconditional: some condition always exists, such as relationship (parental, romantic, filial, etc.), or behavior of the recipient, or even mental/emotional state of the subject.
But I have a parent that made it his intention to always do the best for me he could regardless of how he felt at any given time. That’s unconditional love: the action, not the emotion.
Romantic love and sexual attraction always wax and wane or even go away completely. That’s when people have to decide whether to stand by any formal or informal commitment they may have made to the other party.
You’ve seen pets act pretty mean, but a cat still can’t take over the world. I can say I love my cats unconditionally, but the truth is that they are incapable of doing the acts that would destroy my love for them. It isn’t something about me that makes the unconditional love possible. It’s something about them.
It would be easy, to use a different example, to have unconditional love for an infant. An infant can’t do anything morally horrible. A child can. A teenager even more so. And by the time someone hits adulthood, they have the capability of being monsters.
I don’t think I’m capable of unconditional love for an adult. I don’t think unconditional love is healthy love. “No, dear, I won’t love you if you turn into Idi Amin. Sorry.”
I had a thread on topics similar to this a few months back (which could probably be found by searching).
I wish we could all arrive at a definition of “love” that would allow us to distinguish love from all the many things that we say it isn’t “just”–not just lust, not just infatuation, not just friendship, not just affection, etc.
As it is, I’m just not sure whether I have experienced the exact “thing” that is the subject of our discussion here.
Which makes me wonder whether the elusiveness of a definition for love is, somehow, the point.
Perhaps “love” is simply: the utmost positive “attitude” (…managing to avoid that word “feeling”…) that a given being can entertain with respect to something. It is thus something like “excellence.” There will always be a “beloved” among all the categories of things that are relevant to oneself: a beloved book, entertainment, food, country, vehicle…up to most beloved human being (self? lover?), and at the top something ultimate–for some, a god; for others, perhaps a guiding principle.
I see I haven’t managed to make this clear. Maybe the best thing to carry away from my little posting is the possibility that “love” might be a sort of logical necessity–that perhaps there must necessarily be something valued to the highest degree (in every category of kind-of-thing) if there is value at all.
Romantic love is a documented biological condition that lasts for anywhere between 18 months and 3 years. I would guess it evolved as a way to make it more likely that the male would be around long enough to help protect the infant child (no contraception in caveman days, alas.)
For a more detailed and thorough discussion, just wait for the Heinlein fans to show up
I don’t think you can really look at it that way. I could just as easily argue that the child that is saved will have even more opportunity to “pop out replacements”. It’s not like instinct is written by computer programmers; If a trait increases chances for survival, it will more likely get passed along. And selflessness is definitely a viable survival tool for a species. I remember reading that even lowly ants will sacrifice themselves to build a bridge out of their bodies to allow the rest of the colony to get across a body of water. The ones that form the bridge end up drowning so that the others may live.
Some species, like fish for example, seem to have evolved along the lines of “crank out as many offspring as possible, and odds are some will survive”, whereas humans and other mammals seem to have developed more along the lines of “crank out a few offspring and protect them so that they survive”.
That I don’t really understand. Forgive me if I’m wrong, because my understanding of this subject comes from just basic college and high school textbooks. Isn’t self preservation the back bone of evolution? Why would a creature that offs itself to save others be a good trait to pass on? Isn’t that contradictory? Plus, if the person dies from their unselfish act, they’d be less likely to pass on the trait. It’s as if something is looking out for the species as a collective. What mechanism in scientific nature allows for that?
To help get back on topic, I submit these two real situations:
Little Johnny and his friend Billy are eating ice cream on the lawn. Horrors! Billy drops his ice cream on the grass - SPLAT! Billy begins to cry. Johnny feels sorry for him and gives him half of his own ice cream. Everyone is happy again.
Jack and Jane are a happy couple. Jack just absolutely adores Jane. One day however, Jane quite suddenly dumps Jack. He is so crushed by this, he decides he’d rather off be dead. He then proceeds to accomplish the task of not living anymore with the aid of a revolver.
Both of these situations show examples of love, and in both, the unselfish party clearly doesn’t benefit from it. Why give up your ice cream? Why commit suicide over someone? Those acts don’t benefit the species, and yet unselfishness (the essence of love, in a sense) is still a prized trait. Does this show the existence of love, outside of the “scientific” arena?
Well, I would say that Johnny sharing his ice cream does benefit the species. Oh, not in this precise example, but if Johnny shares, both Johnny and Billy have something. If Johnny doesn’t share, Billy gets nothing. That could be the difference between life and death for Billy.
Your other example doesn’t really seem like an “unselfish” act by Jack. How is suicide unselfish? I can view it as morally neutral, but not a moral good.
I’ve read agruments that love is one of the simplest and most useful emotions, and that most mammals seem to experience it in one form or another.
The most basic form, of course, is the love that a mother feels for its offspring. Some argue that instinct alone may be enough to ensure that the parent builds a nest or home for her young and feeds it, but love is the icing on the proverbial cake. Love ensures that the parent * wants * to invest in the young. Because she loves her babies, the mother will want to cuddle, groom and reassure them.
Love between mates is also cited as the driving force behind sexual selection. In some species, it’s a one-night-stand infatuation, but in others, a life-long commitment. Love would serve to keep the mates faithful to one another, and would ensure concern on the fathers’ part that the mother get enough food during the time she’s caring for the young.
Love between pack-mates is the most commonly demonstrated, and agruably, the easiest observable. From pet owners who have antecdotal stories of dogs pining away after their “sibling” has died, to Jane Goodall’s observation of the chimp Fagan’s mourning after his mother died, animals are quite open with showing us that they do, indeed, grieve.
Some scientists do stick to the “furry robot” school, denying that animals are capable of emotions, and work solely off of a sort of instinctual duty toward their young. (Some still even deny that animals can truly feel pain.) Yet, there is a growing community of researchers who believe they can prove animal emotions. In one study, the chemicals released by the brains of women when they looked at their babies were found to be identical to those of chimp mothers who looked at their young.
The problem is, of course, that the majority of evidence for animal emotions is purely antectdotal. Researchers can tell us what they saw, but their observations are colored by their personal views on the subject. Where one may write that the subject appeared dejected, another may see it as the subject was disinterested.
Execpt for a few signing chimps, the animals can’t blurt out what they feel. Given that most animals communicate through body language, it takes a carefully trained eye to notice subtle changes in posture and what the significance may be. I’ve seen it argued that if some researchers were more familiar with their subjects’ behavioral cues, they would see more emotion.
