You’re never going to understand love on an academic level. Stop trying. Nothing anyone says here is going to give you the epiphany you are hoping for. It’s something that you must experience to understand. It’s clear that you have never experienced love and because of that, the emotion can’t be communicated to you using words on a screen. Just go out and live your life.
OK, now this is important. Does anyone, as a consequence of the above or similar viewpoint, claim ‘waves are not real’?
I mean, if they do, they’re wrong, but I doubt anyone actually does claim that. You keep on trying to apply the ‘not real’ label to a range of different concepts where it doesn’t really fit.
Machinaforce apparently doesn’t feel love or affection himself, so he imagines that nobody else does.
This is like someone who is tone-deaf thinking that nobody else really enjoys music, they are all just faking.
Analogies have limits. You’ve exhausted the limits of the waves on the ocean comparo. If you can’t feel love, then how do you know what love means to those who do? You’re just talking out your ass and using “they” as the authority on I don’t even know what.
Mystery to you, ostensibly. People who are born color blind don’t go around insisting that red, blue and green don’t exist. Love, like every other emotion on the spectrum of human experience, exists. Regardless of your attempts at sophistry or unsupported claims to the contrary. Accept and deal with it.
Also, who ruled that something must always be durable or persistent to be worthwhile?
Nothing lasts forever - that, for me, is a very good reason to dive in and enjoy it (rather than wait your whole life trying to analyse it to the atomic level)
A friend of mine has no sense of smell due to a childhood accident. He likes food alright, and of course needs it to live, but he will never understand how people can get so excited about their favorite dishes, or how they will go out of their way to get a certain meal.
Of course, he realizes this lack is within him and people aren’t faking it when they go on about how much they love food.
People aren’t as deep as oceans. With an ocean you can reasonably say you’re only able to see superficial surface activity that tells us nothing about what goes on beneath, but with a person their actions reveal themselves to the core, given enough time and close contact.
It’s possible to have superficial relationships with people which tell you little to nothing about them, sure - I have those sorts of interactions with the people working checkout at Walmart. Their actions tell me basically nothing about them, largely because I don’t care to pay attention. But real relationships provide enough exposure to see to the bottom of the puddle.
I’m not sure you’re getting the analogy.
As for love, the whole “experiencing it” but doesn’t really help my understanding of what It is. Telling someone that they just have to experience it could mean that it could take any form and they wouldn’t really know. It’s the same kind of logic you hear those mystics or monks say about spirituality, and I don’t even buy that. To me it sounds like a cop out.
I know that the movies and books and the like don’t really capture what it is, more like the fairy tale version of what people imagine it to be like. Unfortunately that’s all I have to go on and it’s apparently not reality. With that I don’t really know what love is like or supposed to be.
Just because you personally don’t know what something is like doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I don’t know what combat is like, but I know people who’ve been in combat and I believe they really experienced the emotions they relate.
Also, love is very different from the depictions you see in romantic comedies or novels. I’m sorry your depression is blocking you from that experience but, just like my friend who can’t really taste food, at least give people the courtesy of belief when they talk about feelings you are personally incapable of.
You’re looking for an intellectual, cerebral way to recognize and understand powerful/overpowering emotional states. Words crumble and fail when applied to trying to answer the question of what love is. Emotions are much more forceful that rationality and logic, to us humans generally. So when/if you experience love, the emotional truth/understanding will answer all these questions you have about the nature of love, you’ll realize that an academic answer would have been a 2 dimensional answer, at best.
It IS an experience phenomenon. Describing it in technical terms is possible, but all you get from that will be a technical description, not the experience.
There’s nothing unique about this quandary. I could give you a full technical description of chocolate, but that would not tell you what happens when you taste it.
Nothing in our universe is special because of the materials of its construction. Even the brain that you are using to perceive and understand these words, is just an arrangement of ordinary hydrogen, carbon etc. It’s the arrangement that matters. You’re taking it apart and declaring the parts are ordinary. We know that.
Is there anything that you actually like, or enjoy, or cherish? Anything at all? Please name it.
Solipsism and logorrhea.
I think you’ve sufficiently abused the analogy to the point where it’s become meaningless.
But just the day before you were the expert on what buddhist mystics and monks said about love. Now you’re “not buying it” and playing the “cop out” card? You can’t have it both ways in these discussions. It makes you sound disingenuous.
It’s like that sense of attraction that you claimed you experienced before getting bored. But deeper and more lasting. Don’t dwell or obsess over it. Your life isn’t over yet.
I understood the analogy to be an attempt to repackage your problem with the idea of loving a person you can’t truly know, because you can’t know every nook and cranny of their mind. It’s arguably the most legitimate concern that your faux-solipsistic approach can bring to the problem - love itself is an emotion held by the emoter, which is the one thing that can’t be disputed by solipsism, but the idea that you could only be loving an illusion is a legit concern when you deny that anything else exists - or, failing that, deny that the existent thing you’re loving is what you think it is.
If that’s not what you meant by the analogy, then I have no idea what you meant by it, because that’s the only sensible interpretation I can see of it in this conversation. If you meant something else, explain it without the analogy.
Love is a powerful emotion of concern and care for another person. If you care about anything, then you have experienced an emotion that could be considered a weak, watered-down form of love.
It’s not their definition of love but rather what they say when questioned about their experience with anything spiritual. They take personal experience as proof of some truth of reality when it isn’t.
The same can be said for love for me and based on a few writings from some philosophers. Love seems like an illusion or deception we place upon ourselves that makes things other than they really are and blinds us to the negatives. I may love my dogs when I see his cuteness but that blinds me to the daily reality that I have to care for him which can be less than pleasant. The same with my relationship. I mistook love as thinking it could work but it blinded me to key differences.
I had people tell me that sometimes in a relationship one person doesn’t always love the other equally or sometimes people are quite different. While I can accept the first the second sounds like a raw deal. It reminds me of how I let love for another blind me to important details, to the point that I cannot justify loving them (not like I can control it).
It is hard to get over the movies and the stories because they make love seem better than it is and it’s easy to seek it out as a result. But the reality is less than fairy tale (obviously) and makes me wonder why people bother if it isn’t like the movies? Before people used to be (and still are) in marriages arranged for them, but now we base it on a volatile chemical feeling?
Not going down this rabbit hole with you.
Seems to me the issue is not with “how love works” but with your unrealistic expectations. Adjust them and you’ll be a better man for having done so.
I beg your pardon, nobody ever promised you a rose garden. Right along with the sunshine, you’re going to get a little rain, sometimes. So let go…
Most movies and stories are fictional accounts. If you get all misty eyed at the end of Serendipity, then maybe you’re just the sensitive type who cries watching romantic comedies. Nothing wrong with that. Just don’t leave the theater thinking that’s what you can expect out of every romantic relationship. You don’t leave Harry Potter movies believing in magic, do you?
What are you saying???
Harry Potter is quite different from the “more realistic” romance movies. Though they are still fictitious in some sense.
But if love and relationships aren’t the way they are in the movies then why bother with it? I hear the statistic of a divorce rate over 50% thrown around, maybe there is something to that end.
The more I think about it the more foolish it seems, makes me wonder why they portray them the way they do in movies.
What, exactly, do you want out of this thread?
If you want to be alone, be alone. No one is stopping you.
Maybe start your next thread asking, “Why isn’t life like in the movies?”
Otherwise, I think we’re done here.