So ‘why be bothered with’, facets of this life that don’t measure up to what is portrayed in movies and media? That about it? You took a lot of words to get to a remarkably silly place, I gotta say. Congrats!
Let me see if I have this straight: you argument is, if something isn’t as great as it’s been touted, but it’s maybe 50% as great, then why bother?
Is that really what you see as a nothing-left-to-discuss stopping point?
Imagine a guy tells me about a deal he got: he paid twenty bucks, and got put up in a five-star oceanfront hotel for two weeks; room service was included, along with free drinks down at the hotel bar, plus use of the heated indoor pool whenever he didn’t feel like walking out the door to the beach, and so on.
Interested, I look into doing likewise — only to find out that, nope, sadly, I can only get something half as good as that: they’ll give me that same five-star treatment for twenty bucks, sure; but it’s twenty bucks for each one-week stay.
Do you figure I stomp off upon angrily saying “why bother?”
That analogy doesn’t really match up to what I’m saying in regards to love. Considering that you don’t even get the five star treatment to start with.
It began with asking how love works or what it is, but didn’t really end with a clear answer but rather just variations on what I heard before. Asking why bother with it then I still don’t know the answer and it doesn’t seem like I’m getting clear answers for that either.
If love is that poorly understood and it isn’t like the movies then why do people go for it? To make that same instance of attraction last for years to come?
Even when it came to my analogy and who you are falling for I don’t get a clear answer. I stated that you fall for traits but not the person and you mistake the person for the trait. Kind, smart, funny, strong, these are temporary states and not permanent. So it can be said that what you are falling for is just a temporary performance and not reality (like a wave). I know that people fall out of love when people change.
Then change the analogy the other way, if you like: let’s say that — contrary to what I’d been led to believe — they don’t provide free room service, but they do still give out free drinks at the hotel bar; and that the indoor pool isn’t heated, but the beach is still just as one would expect. Is that experience as grand as it was made out to be? Well, no. But is it still something I’d go in for? Well, yes.
Now, if I saw a movie that made it look like the deal was drinks and room service and a heated pool and the beach right at your door — well, then, sure, it’d be kind of like you’d said, in that I’d maybe remark that this sure isn’t how they made it look in the movies; but, even after agreeing that it’s only half as good as it was made to seem on film, reckon I’d still say, well, that’s still something I’m okay with.
What planet are you from?
Love is not unconditional but when it’s good and mutual and lasting, it’s the closest thing to unconditional acceptance, trust and understanding that there is between two (on average) consensual adults.
As to why it’s imperfect – that’s because people are imperfect and life isn’t fair and shit happens in life that you don’t expect and often don’t deserve. If you’re going to bitch and moan about love not being like it is depicted in a RomCom movie then love isn’t for you, so by all means feel free to avoid it at all costs. As a matter of fact, feel free to minimize all human contact. But for the love of god, quit whining about how the entire human species is some inscrutable mystery to you. Love, like much of life, is messy, imperfect, unpredictable, sometimes disappointing, and it doesn’t come with a fucking manual or an explanation.
You know, the food I buy never seems to be as good as they say in the food ads on TV.
So I think I’m just going to stop eating.
After all, food doesn’t last anyway. You just eat it and it’s gone, so what’s the point? And sometimes it doesn’t taste so good. I only want to eat 100% perfect food. If it’s not perfect, I don’t want to eat it.
Also, I don’t understand intellectually why food tastes the way it does, and nobody can explain it to me in a way that I can accept. And if I can’t understand it intellectually with my limited human brain then it must be an illusion. All these people eating food and saying how good it is are simply deluding themselves. Everything in the world must be understandable by my intellect, or else I have to conclude that it doesn’t exist.
The reason the answers match what you heard before is because the answers you heard before are right - love is when your brain had decided that it cares about somebody else. This caring is an empathic caring - you are happier when they’re happy and less happy when you know they’re less happy. To some degree the mere state of being around them tends to make you happier, just because on average people are doing okay and your brain enjoys seeing that.
As for why people bother with it, it’s because it makes them happier. People like being happier. (Present company excepted?)
Movies give false expectations how how love works - what it makes you feel, when, how long it lasts, what you have to do to perpetuate it, and so on. If you use movies for a guide on how to get love, you’re basically screwed. Yet people still go for it for two reasons: one, some buy into the false advertising (and get screwed), and some stumble onto the real thing and enjoy it, because they like being happier.
It’s sort of how in commercials the food advertised will give you an orgasm, which is a lie. However in reality the food is still good, so you’ll eat it despite the lies about it.
If you only fall for the traits you are shallow. It’s entirely possible to learn about the person behind the traits, and fall for that - such that your feeling is unchanged even when they get a few wrinkles or give up professional line dancing.
Isn’t the whole reason why we pursue it because we make it out to be more than what it is? That the dream in our heads that we seek isn’t the reality that love is?
Some even say that there isn’t such a thing as love and it never existed
Love is not something that happens as a result of intellectually thinking about it. Love is something we FEEL SPONTANEOUSLY.
If you don’t spontaneously feel love or affection, then you lack a normal human faculty, and there is probably nothing anyone can do to help you.
This is similar to a person who is tone-deaf and can’t enjoy or understand music. Thinking about it intellectually will never make him not tone-deaf. Trying to understand intellectually why people enjoy music will never work. People enjoy music spontaneously, not as a result of an intellectual process. Love is similar.
Love and affection has nothing to do with the movies or with any other depiction of it. It just happens spontaneously for 99.99% of human beings. This has always been the case throughout human history. Even animals feel love and affection.
If you do not feel love or affection, and have never felt it, which seems to be the case, then unfortunately I think you have to accept that you have a major disability.
Yeah, I mean, I looked at the ingredients for a cake that everyone claims to be fantastic. You know what most of it was? Fucking flour! Where is the cake in flour? Flour is not remotely cake-like. You can’t explain that, therefore there is no cake.
If the human experience as foreign to you as you claim then I can’t explain it to you. Best advice I can give you is to observe and copy the behavior of mentally and emotionally healthy, happy, thriving humans around you.
Some say incredibly stupid things.
The reason we seek out love is that it does make us happy. That’s the reality. The dream in our heads isn’t real - love is real.
I fell in love with my wife, and married her, and have lived with her for almost thirty six years, because I thought it would make me (and her) happy. Turns out I was right. And we make each other happy in ways I didn’t expect. New ways, different ways - not the way Hollywood said I would, but other ways. I now know things about her that I didn’t know forty years ago. I love those things too.
The thing is, finding out that love is different from what I was told doesn’t make love unreal - it makes it real. What I thought about love was incomplete. Now that I know better, I know what love is better than I did before.
“What you think about love” before you experience it isn’t more than what it is - it’s less.
People bother with it because it is real, and makes you happy, and it makes the other person happy.
That’s the clear answer you need.
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, it doesn’t seem to be the answer he’ll accept though.
There seems to be an expectation that a thing can be deconstructed into components which will each be as meaningful as the whole - or will at least be meaningful in proportion to their percentage contribution to the whole.
But I think very few things work like that - even simple things; if you take apart a clock, it’s just a collection of gears; the concept of timekeeping is nowhere in there; if you smash a bottle into a hundred pieces, you now just have a collection of useless fragments - none of those pieces is in itself a container for liquid; if you deconstruct the thing that humans call ‘love’, it comes apart into a variety of fairly mundane components such as biological urges, social conditioning, etc - none of which contains even a glimmer of the phenomenon that people claim love to be.
In short, the OP doesn’t understand or accept the concept of emergence.
I think that everyone is being too hard on Machinaforce. Love is a difficult concept. You see a romanticized ideal in the movies and when your own relationship doesn’t match up, you wonder if you are really experiencing love.
It further doesn’t help that when you ask someone and you get an answer like, “Well, if you were really in love, you wouldn’t have to ask the question. You would just know immediately!” People who say that are the ones that have been married for 40 years and look back at when they first met their spouse, remember the wonderful feelings that they had, and then retroactively apply “love” to that feeling. And I don’t dispute that is a correct statement, but it is unhelpful to recognize it in the moment.
To further complicate things, lust or a weekend fling with someone that you have a great time with but are incompatible for a long term relationship (e.g. one wants children, the other doesn’t; she likes threesomes with other guys; you aren’t into that, etc.) evokes very strong feelings which mimic love in all respects.
Then if one dares ask a friend how it can be that he is in love with two women, he will invariably get the response that he does not love either of them. Taken to its logical conclusion, once you have loved someone and the relationship fails, you cannot then ever be in love with anyone ever again.
So, its confusing and not so easily explained.
If this was his first thread, you’d have a good point. If you still hold that position after reading his other threads, then more power to you.
Generally speaking, you make an excellent point. It took me quite a while to come up with a firm definition for the word love - and while it happened it was made extremely clear that my fiancee at the time had a different definition. People come into relationships with widely different definitions and expectations and any or none of them might find their expectations met.
Of course, if the statement is that love doesn’t exist, that’s not saying that you’re not confident you know what it is and what it feels like. That’s saying that everyone out there who does claim to feel love is faking it.
“once you have loved someone and the relationship fails, you cannot then ever be in love with anyone ever again”
Do you really believe that is true?? I’m curious…I found myself feeling as if I was in love with two people.
I was always “taught” that it shouldn’t be that way. When you are “in love” with the right one…you will just know it.