Your point?
Well I can’t comment on individual circumstances, I mean, of course there are exceptions to every rule. But suffice to say a cruel mother is much more likely to continue to be loved by those who were the victims of her cruelty than a cruel partner. The love has different requirements in each circumstance. Emotional vulnerability, trust, emotional risk, etc. are much more prominent in romantic love than familial love.
And when someone says “I love you” as a partner, they mean “I love how life feels when I’m with you”. That means different things for different people, but the foundation is always the same. I think hahaha. It’s inherently selfish but it doesn’t matter if it’s a simulation or just a chemical cocktail manifestation, it’s what we experience.
“I love you” as a family member, you know, I’m at a loss for words. I think that can be a complicated concept that I am currently having difficulty expressing. Let me think more about it.
Ok then, I have a follow up. Why do why love that things about someone? Well I’m not sure if it’s why or how.
Why love certain characteristics? I thought that was the only easy part of the question - because I do, that’s why! 
If you mean how did I get to be the kind of person who loves the things I love about my wife - I don’t have answers beyond general things like “genetics” and “experiences”.
Love doesn’t work. You work and your partner works to form a union, to form a family of two or more, to survive, to be happy (mostly), to prosper or at least get by. It’s hard work and sometimes it doesn’t work. But when it does its awesome (with random pitfalls and bad times).
sinjin, with the same guy since 1972.
Yes, you need a “you” and a “me/I” for an “I love you” to be meaningful. If you want to debate the meaning of those terms, start a different thread and have at it. For the purposes of this conversation, stick with your original question about the meaning of love.
BTW, I noticed you didn’t answer my question about ever having experienced first hand the feeling called love.
Are you seriously now asking why we love/enjoy the sensation of feeling good about ourselves when we’re around certain people?
This conversation just jumped the shark for me.
Good Luck with your carefully cultivated angst!
Well, I already gave my definition of love earlier: it’s when the happiness of another person is essential to your own happiness. Thus you want them to be happy, and you are happier knowing they’re happy. So, yes, it’s “just” feelings, or more specifically a way that their presence and status effects their feelings. A person can do actions due to their feelings of love and desire for the other person to be happy, but those actions are expressions of love, no the feeling of love itself.
When a person seriously says “I love you” they are attempting to convey to you their feelings, so you will understand that you’re an important person to them. They may also be hoping to evoke a similar statement from you, or it could just be for your information and edification.
And unconditional love for family has been recorded as being likely to spring up in a parent upon seeing their child - though I won’t say it always springs up. It can also gradually develop from prolonged amicable contact, as may-or-may-not happen among family members and close friends.
Not why like in “why bother” more like “why or how does it happen?”
Thank you for checking in, Sally Field.
For me, romantic love is magic. It just happens. When it does happen, you know it but you can’t explain it.
Hey, you can’t spell “existentialism” without “ex”.
If you’re a physicalist, love works because we have evolved hormones that flood our body with what our brain recognizes as ‘positive’ signals when we have sex. Prior to that it’s largely hormones that tell us we want to have sex. By continually engaging in sexual activities we create a Pavlovian response so that when we see that person we get pleasurable feelings. We describe that feeling as love. Over time those hormones no longer affect us the same way and we describe that feeling as ‘falling out of love.’ Sometimes those feelings can be replaced by hormones relating to security and attachment and then we talk about ‘settling into a relationship.’
I’m not a physicalist, so I have other opinions on the matter.
Explaining love to someone who has never felt it is like explaining the color “red” to someone who has been blind from birth.
Technically you cannot explain redness. I know what the color red is because I see it but if asked to explain it I could not.
In regards to how love works, the article seems to give strong support for the “chemical” force that it is and not so much the feel good mysticism that society makes it out to be. The prairie voles they tested showed that by inhibiting the chemical areas that facilitated bonding you could in a sense prevent “love”. Which tends to blow a hole in the I guess metaphysical notions of it. Data says it’s chemicals that influence us outside our control and we rationalize it. The airy value we give it is something that we pretend exists.
Not a welcome development and I don’t like to pretend things to be real, especially something I placed great value in all my life (probably due to societal values and then finding it to not be what I thought).
I wonder if this could have been asked in the general question thread, but I am not happy that the feeling I placed so much in is just chemicals that can (if we wanted to) be influenced through science).
I don’t like the “try to explain ‘red’ to a person born blind” example. If the blind person was reasonably intelligent and understood the concept of waves of electromagnetic radiation (most of the spectrum of which isn’t visible even to sighted persons), one could say “Well, when the wavelength is around 700 nanometers long, I can sense it, and we call that sensation ‘red’. The sensation is different when the wavelength is around 470 nanometers. We call that sensation ‘blue’. Think of the sounds you hear - you can hear something and think ‘trumpet’, and then hear something else and think ‘cat’, and even though you’re using the same sensing organ, you have no trouble telling one from the other. If you still don’t get ‘red’ and ‘blue’, try to imagine explaining ‘trumpet-sound’ (maybe you call the specific sound a ‘warble’) and ‘cat-sound’ (maybe you call the specific sound a ‘meow’) to a person born deaf. You could describe variations in sound waves and maybe they’ll get the concept, even if they have never and can never experience it directly, leaving ‘warble’ and ‘meow’ as arbitrary to them as ‘red’ and ‘blue’ are to you.”
It’s really, really weird to me that when you learn that something has a basis in physical reality you consider that to be evidence that the “something” in question is “not real”. It’s a physical thing! You can put it on a scale and it has weight! It blocks light! How could it not be real?
Yes, your mind is a symptom/behavior of your physical brain. That doesn’t mean that your mind isn’t real; it means your mind is real. It’s the behavior of something real. And, yes, your ability to feel emotions can be impacted by the application of chemicals or a baseball bat or a steamroller, the same way that you can mess up a mechanical clock’s ability to tell time by adding chemicals or a baseball bat or a steamroller. But that doesn’t mean that the (intact) clock isn’t telling time, and it doesn’t mean that your mind and emotions aren’t real. It just means you should probably be careful about what you do with chemicals, baseball bats, and steamrollers - if you want your mind to keep working the way it’s currently working, anyway.
There are people who don’t like the way their minds are currently working, and for them the ability to tweak it with chemicals is a godsend. See: psychotropic drugs.
I’m not saying that love (the chemical) isn’t real and neither it’s reactions on the body.
What I’m saying isn’t real is the romantic concept behind it that you hear in stories or from your friends.
Is fear real?
Is jealousy real?
Is anger real?
Is happiness real? (Ha. Look who I’m asking.)
Is anhedonia/depression/anxiety real? (Better?)
If those feelings are also chemical processes and real, why not love?
For the record, in my opinion love clearly isn’t a single chemical. It’s part of the overall mental state, which is running on the brain like a computer program runs on the computer. It can be effected with chemicals, the same way that the computer program can be effected by things like keyboard import and hammers, but it’s not like there’s a single chemical that you can extract from a brain to make it loveless and then inject into another brain to make it love someone/everyone/everything.
I don’t really understand what you mean by “romantic concept”. In the stories I hear, love is related to people’s opinions of each other. And people clearly do have opinions of each other - they recognize and remember other people and react to different people differently based on prior experience.
If one accepts that people can have opinions of each other, it seems odd to deny that they could have favorable opinions of each other.
More like the story we build around it, not the emotion. It’s not something you actively do but something that you feel that isn’t in your control