The Nature Of Love

I suppose given that I've been single for pretty much the entirety of the last eight months, this is a topic that has weighed on my mind to a significant degree. I've also during this time seen a relationship with one of my children go from bad, to worse, to nearly nonexistent. All the while having a relationship with my other child become all the stronger for (or in spite of) this.

So it appears to be time to blog about the nature of love, as I see it.

I am of a mind that entirely too many people bifurcate their approach to this. Perhaps this is to make sense of it in some greater context, but I can't see doing this anymore myself.

At seeming odds? The concepts of romantic "love" as opposed to every other kind of "love". I suppose it is down to individual interpretation exactly what that label means. As I strive, perhaps inexpertly, for self awareness and intellectual honesty, I've come to decide on my own definitions.

Love. Love to me is a connection, a social bond. Conceptually it defines your willingness to set aside your own feelings, or comfort, or what have you for someone else's sake. It is a state of being that is mired deeply within ones feelings, and yet sits atop a foundation of reason and critical awareness. One of the most basic ways to define how this works is to understand reciprocal altruism. When looked at through the sterile lens of social anthropology or even game theory, people often make the mistake of assuming that having a genuine and rational awareness of how our deepest social bonds function somehow cheapens or demeans them. The matter is compounded with recent work in cognitive neurology which is beginning to show structurally within our brains how different and yet interconnected love and lust are.

Such people are too proud of themselves in my view. :P

We now have a greater structural awareness of how love works in the brain, and unfortunately not all the news is good LOL. What we generally call love, especially as it relates to significant others and offspring, is not dissimilar to addiction. In fact many of the biochemical mechanisms involved in reinforcing such "love" parallel cognitive neurological studies of methamphetamine addicts. Brain region to brain region.

This does make some intuitive sense, and certainly many psychologists would agree here as well. Near obsessive attention and affection given to ones children is not necessarily "harmful" in any sense. But couple that with equivalent attention given to an adult you are also "addicted to" doesn't always work out now does it? I can say from personal experience I've encountered quite a few women who were single mothers who, although doing a masterful job of raising and protecting their children, were also so socially maladjusted as to be impossible to cope with...even as friends.

It is entirely possible for love to be "positive" and still not be particularly healthy, at least in the broader sense.

Lust at its most fundamental  is a very primitive impulse. And as many decades of study show, it plays a far more convoluted role in human behavior than many of us realize. It isn't just for baby making, far from it.

The lust to love transition, that all of us go through and have gone through, actually follows a similar pattern neurologically to our other types of love, the only significant difference is its tendency to lead to a greater parallel of neurological activity when compared to drug addiction.

As human beings, a fundamentally social species, we need social *and* physical contact with our fellow humans to survive. Not just to live well, but to actually survive. This is true among most mammals, and especially so among our fellow primates. But it is by far the most true among humans. Humans are arguably the most social and sexual creatures on the planet.

Our social conventions in regards to sex and procreation over the last 100,000 years or so remained fairly consistent up until about a century ago. Males basically ran everything, and women and their collective progeny operated within a framework largely designed by our evolution. Though much of society still thinks things work this way, they really don't anymore. And a century, perhaps isn't enough of a timeframe to really dethrone the remaining 99.9% of our collective experience.

It is perhaps because of all of this (and realizing the truth of it) I have decided to put my own sexuality within it's own separate domain, if for no other reason than to take it off the table of what my ideas about love are.

As I said earlier I love all sorts of people. One of my best friends, Brian. I'd take a bullet for him. Help him with anything he needed at the drop of a hat if it was something I could do. He knows this. And I know he'd do precisely the same thing for me. He's the kind of guy I can tell literally anything. And I'd have to say I love Brian. This in no way diminishes or conflicts with the fact that I'm not in the slightest attracted to his hairy ass (and besides his wife Ari would probably object vehemently).

I love my children, my mother, my brother, and a small host of friends. Genuinely love. And many of them are women, with genuine 100% Lady Parts®.

And (thankfully perhaps for the viewing audience, as it'd be a bit creepy) I'm not banging any of them!

Lust only really becomes complicated because of how primitive it is. Attraction and "chemistry" (which to me is merely a phrase people use to make that primitive shit sound better..oh the hubris of humans) occur. They are "events", not "decisions", and there is nothing you can do about them whatsoever except decide to succumb to them or not.

Lust then becomes a two stage process.

1). A choice to act upon that lust..and that choice *can* be a conscious, if not entirely rational one.
2). Finding a partner willing to return the favor.

We tend to expect more of lust, but this is a mistake in my view. Lust merely is what it is. And it is NECESSARY. But it's just part of a physiological process that puts you on the path towards something more meaningful. It is not the path in and of itself. At all.

I think this distinction is where most people screw this up.

Comments?