After you have just finished having an especially awesome, mind blowing- toe tingling orgasmic session of sex with someone you care about and your brain vapor locks and you end up sputtering “I love you”.
Don’t do this.
Love is an addiction to a person.
Love is like oxygen.
Love is a stranger in an open car.
It lifts you up where you belong.
Mapping.
Last year I looked for different brain related podcasts and the word of the day seemed to be mapping. For instance, the brain maps which parts of the universe is you and which parts aren’t. That’s the physical body I’m talking about. If a person’s brain mapping goes wonky, they can do things like calling the nurse in panic to report that someone snuck a dead leg into their bed.
They can see that the leg is attached to them, but the brain is telling them that it’s not them. They give priority to the mapping. Mapping is strong.
Our brains map other people into our lives. It might be attractant chemicals that draw us to other people, or it might not. But once they’re in our lives, our brains change to map around them. Those are physical changes in nerve structure. If the person mapped is suddenly gone, the map will still be there, and you’ll feel their absense. My Dad’s been dead for years, but my eye will still be caught by the titles of books that he would have liked to read. The map is still there.
Sometimes you don’t cry when someone you love dies, but then you feel the sadness later, when they’re not where your map is still showing them. If your first response to getting good news is to call someone, and that someone is no longer there, then for awhile good news will be a sad or unsettling thing for you.
Many people who praise love associate it with being happy. But how happy love makes you depends a lot on how happy you get in general. If the happy isn’t strong in you, you can love someone without feeling that surge.
Chemicals. Brain mapping. Predisposition to social structures, perhaps. And other things. There are always other things.
There’s two pretty different meanings that people seem to attach to love. Personally, I refuse to use the word love to describe one of them, but society does, and I think that’s where a lot of the “it’s complicated” stuff comes from. To put it simply, love is an act of selflessness. Now, of course, it’s a continuum, wherein at the extreme end is a willingness to do anything for that person at any cost to oneself, unconditional love, below that are varying degrees of conditional love. In such, I think to say that one loves someone else is an expression of some degree of willingness to perform such an act, should such a situation arise.
Now, as for the feeling “love”, that’s where it gets complicated. It usually involves an amount of emotional attachment, wanting when that person is not present, and in the cases of romantic “love” it involves lust as well, and it’s almost always very pleasant. The problem arises in that acting out of this emotional state, typically to prolong the pleasant feeling, can sometimes result in non-selfless acts, obsession, jealousy, etc. and that’s why it gets confusing. It’s not uncommon to have one and not the other. An example of the former and not the latter might be a sibling that one generally doesn’t get along with, and of the opposite would be stalking.
Now, specifically to the OP, that emotional state is really quite common. Every time I’ve had a crush or been infatuated, I’ve had some variation of that. With my good friends, I have a variation of that. If you don’t generally feel more pleasant around friends or around some member of the opposite sex that you think is attractive and whose company you enjoy, as some others said upthread, you may have some sort of disorder and you should get yourself checked out.
It’s All You Need, and it is something You Can’t Buy.
And, like smut, you know it when you see it.
But, in its purest form, it is what you feel when you hold your baby for the first time.
I’m not a smart man…but I know what love is.
In scriptures and as I have found to be true, Love is God. When we act in Love we are acting as God. How we chose to react on a emotional level are our free will decisions and the gods which we chose who to walk with, or without gods we have apathy and a lack of emotions.
Love can be seen as a river flowing through us. We are not to dam up the river, as it causes stagnation. Love is meant to flow from God through us to others.
Typically when we have a chance at Love many people will be repulsed by Love, so not allow themselves to experience it. But there is commonly a time when one gives in and allows this Love to enter, it is usually a point of giving up a degree of self sufficiency in a cry for help from the heart. The reaction from the person receiving it is usually ‘why are you being so nice to me?’. They are experiencing what God always wanted them to have.
What is love?
Five feet of heaven in a ponytail.
So that’s who wrote the book of love. I was wondering.
Not to mention a buildup of Love Toxins.
Fortunately, there are many websites selling Love Cleanse.
Does anybody love anybody anyway?
I do this too. Intellectually, I appreciate my family and friends, but I don’t usually feel it on an emotional level. It takes an occasion to bring it out, weddings or graduations or something. I also feel quite sad if I really think about life without them. On a daily basis though, there’s just not much emotion.