What is love?
What is love? If you ask someone on the street, they will tell you that it's essentially a kind of secular magic. Perhaps not so secular, given how it was Christianized when it was made universal -- but we're talking about the dirtier love that happens between people who bond and have sex and perhaps rear children. It can't be defined, yet it's the most important thing in the world. Isn't that weird? Aren't important things usually those that affect people to such an extent that they can say what they are? Alzheimers is important, because it wrecks your functionality in the world and your livelihood. When asked what Alzheimer's is, do we says it's ineffable? Hardly.
What's funnier about love is that for something so supposedly ineffable, it has real social effects, tangible ones. Usually, these effects include men falling in love with women, and then after producing children for them (or, often, some other man separate form the 'provider' producing children for them), giving them a livelihood. Love is a kind of glue that keeps men attached to women. It's a kind of story, whose spiritual significance is that men should stay attached to women because mythologically, the 'reward' a man receives for doing so is something beyond value, 'love.' Of course, love is literally beyond value, which is the funny part: you can't feed an empty stomach with love, and at the end of life, no love is going to save you. Hence 'love' is an excellent narrative for accomplishing its social goal, precisely because it requires nothing of anyone yet claims supreme importance for itself.
Hypothesis: Love is a heterosexual social mechanism primarily designed for lower status men to aim at women. All other variations on love are outgrowths of, and analogies to, this. Its primary function is to bond lower status men to women in order to provide them incentive to mate with (or think they are mating with, while being cuckolded by stronger/better men), and provide for, those women. Women are recipients of love, men are givers of love. Women, strictly speaking, do not love men; and homosexual couples love one another only insofar as they are imitating the heterosexual mechanism through the universalization of enlightenment ideology that is ignorant of its historical roots. We see this through the fact that in heterosexual relationships, by and large, love is one-sided. Men do sometimes fall over themselves for women; women consider this to be above them, and do not show the same outward affection toward men, and often times don't even really seem to be that interested in them, beyond the social value that a relationship with a man affords.
The reason that women do not love men is quite simply that they do not need to. Women have wombs and sex appeal, and so are intrinsically valuable -- men already want to mate with them, and so women do not need to be given a metaphysical incentive to seek men. Rather, men seek them, and all they have to do is accept (or 'settle for') a man that propositions them. Hence, a woman is something to be 'attained.' Men aspire to women; women deign to be with men.
Higher status men also, by and large, do not love women, at least not in the same way that lower status men do. This is because higher status men, being of superior stock, already can mate with women whenever they want, and there is no narrative required for them to want to settle down with women and accept their poorer lot in life, because they don't have a poorer lot (they are genetically successful). Lower status men, however, are prone to unrest, and are by and large disposable unless they protect and serve women. Few lower status men would do this if they did not believe that women had an intrinsic, magical worth. Since they have no material worth for a man (a woman will not protect you, provide for you, or likely even care about you), she must attain a mystical quality that goes beyond any facts -- she must be the object of 'love.' This placates the lower status men so that he performs his duty willingly, with the belief that he is getting something out of the relationship, though no one can say what this is.
Later outgrowths of the notion of love, such as universal spiritual love, and so on, are just imitations of this basic function that love serves. Properly speaking, women and homosexuals don't love, because they don't need to be duped by it in order to serve a social function. To the extent they do, it is because love has been socially transformed into something that everyone believes themselves to have a 'right' to, not realizing that this is not some beneficial 'thing' that we all ought to pass around, but a historically contingent social mechanism that serves a very specific purpose in binding heterosexual men to women (by heterosexual here I don't mean any ineffable essence of sexual attraction to the opposite gender/sex, but socially and functionally heterosexual, i.e. someone who thinks of themselves as a breeder and attaches large self worth to putting penises and vaginas together and rubbing them).
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All of the above is descriptive and contains no value judgments. If you find any of the above repulsive, you cannot blame me, because I am only reporting how these gender roles and love in fact work regardless of any opinion of them.
What's funnier about love is that for something so supposedly ineffable, it has real social effects, tangible ones. Usually, these effects include men falling in love with women, and then after producing children for them (or, often, some other man separate form the 'provider' producing children for them), giving them a livelihood. Love is a kind of glue that keeps men attached to women. It's a kind of story, whose spiritual significance is that men should stay attached to women because mythologically, the 'reward' a man receives for doing so is something beyond value, 'love.' Of course, love is literally beyond value, which is the funny part: you can't feed an empty stomach with love, and at the end of life, no love is going to save you. Hence 'love' is an excellent narrative for accomplishing its social goal, precisely because it requires nothing of anyone yet claims supreme importance for itself.
Hypothesis: Love is a heterosexual social mechanism primarily designed for lower status men to aim at women. All other variations on love are outgrowths of, and analogies to, this. Its primary function is to bond lower status men to women in order to provide them incentive to mate with (or think they are mating with, while being cuckolded by stronger/better men), and provide for, those women. Women are recipients of love, men are givers of love. Women, strictly speaking, do not love men; and homosexual couples love one another only insofar as they are imitating the heterosexual mechanism through the universalization of enlightenment ideology that is ignorant of its historical roots. We see this through the fact that in heterosexual relationships, by and large, love is one-sided. Men do sometimes fall over themselves for women; women consider this to be above them, and do not show the same outward affection toward men, and often times don't even really seem to be that interested in them, beyond the social value that a relationship with a man affords.
The reason that women do not love men is quite simply that they do not need to. Women have wombs and sex appeal, and so are intrinsically valuable -- men already want to mate with them, and so women do not need to be given a metaphysical incentive to seek men. Rather, men seek them, and all they have to do is accept (or 'settle for') a man that propositions them. Hence, a woman is something to be 'attained.' Men aspire to women; women deign to be with men.
Higher status men also, by and large, do not love women, at least not in the same way that lower status men do. This is because higher status men, being of superior stock, already can mate with women whenever they want, and there is no narrative required for them to want to settle down with women and accept their poorer lot in life, because they don't have a poorer lot (they are genetically successful). Lower status men, however, are prone to unrest, and are by and large disposable unless they protect and serve women. Few lower status men would do this if they did not believe that women had an intrinsic, magical worth. Since they have no material worth for a man (a woman will not protect you, provide for you, or likely even care about you), she must attain a mystical quality that goes beyond any facts -- she must be the object of 'love.' This placates the lower status men so that he performs his duty willingly, with the belief that he is getting something out of the relationship, though no one can say what this is.
Later outgrowths of the notion of love, such as universal spiritual love, and so on, are just imitations of this basic function that love serves. Properly speaking, women and homosexuals don't love, because they don't need to be duped by it in order to serve a social function. To the extent they do, it is because love has been socially transformed into something that everyone believes themselves to have a 'right' to, not realizing that this is not some beneficial 'thing' that we all ought to pass around, but a historically contingent social mechanism that serves a very specific purpose in binding heterosexual men to women (by heterosexual here I don't mean any ineffable essence of sexual attraction to the opposite gender/sex, but socially and functionally heterosexual, i.e. someone who thinks of themselves as a breeder and attaches large self worth to putting penises and vaginas together and rubbing them).
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All of the above is descriptive and contains no value judgments. If you find any of the above repulsive, you cannot blame me, because I am only reporting how these gender roles and love in fact work regardless of any opinion of them.
Comments (58)
(The above is also descriptive and contains no value judgements...)
Likewise for women -- just look at any heterosexual relationship. In answer to the question of whether the man loves the woman, the answer will be maybe, with there being a higher chance the lower status the man is. As to the question of whether the woman loves the man, the answer is likely no. Women simply do not show the same kinds of exaggerated affection for men as the other way around, for the simple reason that they do not need to, and so the institution doesn't apply to them. They are in some sense literally above it, and for them men are fungible as accessories of social status and protectors, whereas it 'benefits' low status men to idolize women and hypostatize their female traits into something like worship. Emotionally, women are generally in a superior relationship over men in romantic dealings for this reason.
Also, the idea that people do something 'for no reason.' Pure ideology -- of course that's what the system wants you to think. There's no reason for this! It's magic, it's eternity! The way things currently are isn't contingent on anything! That's how they always were!
I would guess a biological/evolutionary theory of love would make the mother-child relationship primary and all other "loving relationships" are a by-product of the mother-child attachment. We could probably extrapolate from the mother-child relationship to your theory insofar as the closer the roles of the male and female approach the mother-child relationship (high-status woman, low-status man), the stronger the love claim.
Can we? If we admit that the notion of love is susceptible to empirical observation, we've robbed it of its significance on its own terms. Love survives as a social notion precisely by being unquantifiable. There are no data metrics we can use to record it, precisely because if there were, it wouldn't be love we were studying.
The only way we can empirically study love is not on its own terms, externally as a social mechanism that it claims not to be.
Quoting Soylent
That seems possible, but I haven't thought about it. I'm interested in the notion of romantic love specifically, but maybe there's some deeper connection there. Though parental 'love' is weird because as compared to romantic love it's just so obviously self-serving and conditional on certain criteria, in ways that I think even those who buy into love would admit. Romantic love tries to be 'higher,' to be instituted for no reason whatsoever (see coolazice's post above), even though of course this is bogus, but parental love doesn't even pretend to be mysterious in that way, the familial link is totally obvious to everyone.
Erotic love feels good, and it generally is good. Reciprocal love validates the individuals in the pair. Other loves (filio, agape, storge) are also good--maybe they are more of a virtue than erotic love, but erotic love is indispensable.
Much of what we are taught about love is baloney--saccharine clichés. There are, for instance, some practical reasons for lovers to be faithful in the relationship. Sexually transmitted infections are unpleasant. Having several lovers at one time is exhausting and immensely time consuming. (Love demands more than sex.) I don't believe that strict sexual fidelity to one person is essential to love, though fidelity in love certainly helps relationships last. (That is, the primary loved partner always comes first.)
I agree with TGW about gay marriage -- it's something that those who are most interested in assimilation and parity in relationships want. I lived with my partner for 30 years without marriage. We stayed together because we wanted to stay together. Marriage wouldn't have improved on that. I liked the idea of the socially unsanctioned relationship. Liked it better that there wasn't official approval.
I feel the same way, even with outright unknown relationships ('on the DL'), that's even better. There's something liberating about knowing that a relationship doesn't come about because it's socially expected that it should. That's a variable that you simply cannot, ever, remove from a heterosexual relationship, and in a way it cheapens every heterosexual relationship no matter how 'sincere.'
Such displays are, at most, mere moments which draw attention. Relationships themselves are run on a much more mundane sort of care, one which is not about how someone its the greatest treasure, but rather one which sees the well-being of other people as important. Love, in the sense you are talking, is not the connection found in any relationship (which is unsurprising; it is not a connection at all) and so cannot be the presence of a relationship. Men don't love women either. They've just fallen for the illusion that they do. (just as we might say some women have fallen for the illusion that men love them, that relationships are constituted by a man making grand gestures towards you).
The sort of values and interactions you are talking about are not the presence of any person's (man or women) feelings or relationship. Rather, it is noting an expression of social interaction: that many men are seeking women and, as such, many women don't have to make a "grand gesture" to draw the attention of a man. On underlying level, you still believe in love. You actually think those men are performing grand gestures are gaining something of absolute value (women), while those women are of no material value to men (and so women are "tricking" men into an materially exploitative relationship, where they don't have care for the man). The truth that love has never existed and relationships are not constitute on that basis has eluded you.
You are so worried about the doxa of human relationships that you are ignoring what they are.
In early Christian teaching there is a quality of selfless love called 'agáp?' which is said to be the quality of love of Jesus and therefore the kind of love to aspire to.
In Buddhism there are different qualities of compassion used in various contexts - Karu??, one of the four 'divine abodes', two of others being metta, compassion for all, and mudita, rejoicing in the well-being of others. (The last is like the opposite of Schadenfreude.)
Love is, of course, all those things and more, and generally, the most important thing you can have. It doesn't mean you don't need a lot of other things to survive, but to survive without it is not worth much.
I had a post a while back describing the general term of love as encompassing the idea of "care". Caring for someone strongly is love. Romantic love adds in an element of sexual attraction or sexual relationship with another. So romantic love = strongly caring + sexual attraction and/or relationship.
If this is the definition of love, I am not sure what to make of your claims in regards to this. What you seem to be describing is an interesting one-sidedness. Essentially you are claiming that in heterosexual relationships, females will not show affection for males at anywhere near the same levels that males will show females. I think this has to be broken down. In the initial phases of courtship, I think you have a point that males display more interest in the female. Whether this is cultural or biological, I am not sure. However, if a female is smitten or her interest is "sparked" (whether right away by the male's "higher status" or through the courting of the moderate or lower status male), you seem to imply another layer which is that females do not have feelings of care or sexual attraction or desire a sexual relationship with someone they care strongly for once the courting has taken place. Do you really think females have no ability to care for someone that they also want a sexual relationship with? In other words, do you think that females are not capable of romantic love? Or do you believe that females do have strong feelings of care and sexual relationship, but they simply don't display it?
My claim is that by and large, men care for women, but not vice-versa. There are individual exceptions to this, but there are men who care for women because they are men and their partners are women, while the reverse is not true. In other words, romantic care and love, from a social standpoint, is heterosexual and unidirectional.
So when a comedian says something like this:
Like all comedy, it's simultaneously a joke and not a joke. This is not to say that women are deficient; it's to say that love isn't what people claim it is.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I agree. The bread and butter of a relationship is ultimately things like paychecks, child rearing, and obedience.
I think that women are under no social pressure to love or care for their partner, like men are. What that means is that a woman can love a man, and some do, but if she does it is due to emotional idiosyncrasies. Whereas there are structural reasons that men love women; they love women because of the social roles allotted to them. In other words, women only love when they are loving people; but men are often led to love because that is what is required of them as men. It's like the divide between personal bigotry and systematic racism.
From a social point of view, heterosexual relationships are constructed such that from a woman's point of view, a man is fungible and reducible to what he provides for her; but the man, in order to keep the relationship going, because the women provides nothing materially for him, has to be given a spiritual significance to make her attractive. So the women cannot be fungible, but must be intrinsically valuable while the man is disposable. Hence the man aspires to the woman, not vice-versa, and love originates in men towards women, not vice-versa.
Can you explain what you mean by structural reasons vs. idiosyncrasies? Are you saying men are pressured into caring for women more than women are pressured into caring about men? If this is the case are you saying that most women do not necessarily care about their partner, but accept them being around because they get the benefits of care that men display? That is if you accept my definition of romantic love being care + sexual attraction and/or relationship.
So my claim is that men love women because they are men and women are women (for structural reasons). The reverse is not true. If a woman loves a man, it is because of her personal traits independent of her gender. In other words, love from women directed towards men is always in spite of these structural biases, not because of them.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think this doesn't get quite to the heart of love, which involves far dirtier and more mundane things, like the transfer of money, the rearing of children, and various forms of socially accepted obedience (accepting, in the case of men, that your female partner has a serious say in who your friends are, what you wear, and so on).
Ok, I see what you are saying now.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Do you think this is due to biological or cultural reasons?
Quoting The Great Whatever
But is what you are saying more to do with living arrangements, cultural expectations and the like? In other words, can't the mundane things be more of a byproduct of love (i.e. living together in the same space, being legally bound by a marriage, etc.). What you describe is a mix of cohabitation and marriage agreements, but not necessarily love proper which may be the impetus for cohabitation and marriage arrangements.
Also, what is your answer to the question from the previous post: If this is the case are you saying that most women do not necessarily care about their partner, but accept them being around because they get the benefits of care that men display?
My point is though, that is all the doxa of a "male role," not actual interactions between people. In this respect, men are expected to care for women (the provider of the household) in ways women are not meant to have any part in. The problem is this all social smoke and mirrors. It has nothing to do with actual relationships and people who care for one another.
When I say you appear to still believe in love, I mean you are confusing this social expectation for who and how people care for one another. In practice both men and women care for each other because they are concerned for the others well-being, which makes the supposes insight you have to relationships here spectacularly irrelevant. For any functioning relationship, where a man and a woman care for each other to the extent which constitutes their relationship, the doxa of who has social value has become moot.
So many of those lower class men, who you deride as being tricked into giving-up their stuff, genuinely care about the well-being of their female partner. They commit time and resources because they care about the well-being of their partner. Rather than being manipulated in the service of falsehood, these men are making the decision to help those whose well-being matters to them a great deal.
Thus, the whole structural trend you are supposedly identifying is profoundly dishonest about human relationships. What many men do, provide time and resources to the female partner or family, is misrepresented as having nothing to do with genuinely caring about a female partner and his children, when a lot of the time that's exactly what it is. (sometimes concurrently with someone buying into the doxa that a man must provide for his female partner and family. Just because a man mistakenly places his identity as man in providing for his family, it doesn't mean he doesn't care for them and provide them with resources out of concern for their well-being ).
You are confusing actual relationships for doxa which surrounds them.
We're all disciples of Schopenhauer here, aren't we? Culture is biology, it's all will.
Quoting schopenhauer1
No. If you like, there is a demand these arrangements be met, and love is a vehicle through which this gets done, or these things are actually part of love to begin with.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes. By and large, I think women merely put up with men and do not really care for them.
The world is all smoke and mirrors. If you want to understand the world, you have to understand that.
This is what I'm talking when I say you have fallen for the very illusion you despise. You think caring is defined in putting someone on a pedestal, by making your own value and identity based on their presence.
No matter how much a woman cares about a man's well-being, you will say it doesn't really exist because she doesn't consider herself a failure as a women if she doesn't provide for him. You are thinking the "love," the falsehood, which you despise so much, is the only way humans can care for each other.
[quote=The Great Whatever]The world is all smoke and mirrors. If you want to understand the world, you have to understand that.[/quote]
A more beautiful expression of your equivocation of the world with doxa would be hard to find.
Good point. Evolutionary psychology can also be invoked for those who don't like the Schopenhauer metaphysics aspect.
Quoting The Great Whatever
So in other words, it is all to propagate the species. So do you think that women care only enough for there to be offspring to take care of? Similarly, do you think that men care more intensely so that the situation for offspring can occur in the first place?
Maybe, but they don't experience it that way in their individual psychology. Men experience it as love for the women, women as love for their children. (I also think that structurally, men have no reason to care for children, and do not as much as women do; the fact that men don't much care for kids is part of why love needs to entrap them into a situation that doesn't benefit them). That is the function each unwittingly performs, though, yes.
And of course the ultimate goal of breeding is to breed more suffering.
Couldn't this be studied in such a way to verify this behavior scientifically? It makes sense in a theoretical way, but this seems like something that can be verified by testing. Of course, even then, it would have to be multiple testing, across cultures, probably over many generations. That would have to be a very extensive research project.
I didn't think it was controversial that men are less attached to their children than women, on whatever metric you care to use. Or am I wrong about that?
I would tend to agree with you in that most women tend to be this way. Very machiavellian. But men tend to also objectify women instead of seeing them as people.
Quoting The Great Whatever
According to your perspective, the world is all smoke and mirrors. This doesn't strike me as a very strong argument.
I am not sure. You might find a lot of instances where fathers are very concerned about the well-being of their children. Although it seems to be true that fathers may be the most likely to leave a mother and child, this may be due to maladaptive strategies of evolution. I've heard of a theory where females are more selective with mates because they want to see if the potential mate is willing to stick around in order to take care of the child. Poor choice selection means more of a chance the offspring won't survive. So, though there might be a tendency for bad fathers, this is not the ideal choice for females who want to see their offspring thrive.
But see, this just shows you the very theoretical nature of evolutionary psychology. A lot of it is "just so" theories and hard to pin down what is an adaptation, or what is an "idiosyncrasy" as you might call it. There are many variables, biases, and cultural contingencies that make even an accurate hypothesis hard to distill. A lot of the mating game rituals have become their own runaway stories. Something was written down long ago, it became a trope, and the trope manifested as real in the culture, and the culture became the trope to a slight degree. What was originary and what was the trope becomes muddled. Then the trope is considered originary when it perhaps is not. Then, a reaction against the trope poses an opposite theory, but that is even worse as it is a reaction to a false original theory to begin with, and on it goes. Again, this comes down to the fact that much of it cannot be verified it "feels" true.
I say this as someone who admires a metaphysics that is also unverifiable (empirically). This I realize, but the difference is I fully understand that metaphysics proper is almost impossible to verify empirically and so is sort of a known unknown. Unlike this, evolutionary psychology can subtly try to assert a point as empirical when it is not quite empirical.
Right, this is why the 'beta male' or provider needs love to entice him. Women are 'mixed maters.' One class of men fathers the children, and another class raises them (the ones that love the women).
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't really care about the evolutionary history, though, I care about the synchronic function of these social roles, which you can observe happening right now.
But not all "good fathers" are simply fathering someone else's child. Quoting The Great Whatever
I don't know though. Don't some (many perhaps) women cry and show emotions of pain when they lose a significant other via breakup, death, or long time away? This seems to show care.
I think I agree with you more on the idea that women have a tendency to not be invested with care early on in the mating process. This also is consistent with the idea of finding an ideal mate. Certainly, some women will cheat (just like some men), and maybe even desire (unconsciously) to sleep with some more alpha dude.. However, just like men who may "settle" for someone who is more caring (a good long term trait) over some other trait, so might women realizing the risk of hurting a "good thing" even if sexual attraction is there for someone else.
In fact, though people certainly give into their instincts to mate with some new, attractive mate that comes along, I'm willing to bet many or most people in a committed relationship are also willing to weigh that against the odds of losing out on someone they know they get along with. In many cases, this idea would not even cross their minds. Now, there might be trade offs, but the opportunity cost might be too high for most people to want to leave someone they have invested so much time and energy with. Additionally, the longer the couple stay together, the more they know about each other adding to the sense of care, creating a kind of feedback loop for care. The more you know, the more nuances there are to care about in the significant other. This again, creates a relationship with a high capital (someone who knows the nuances), that is difficult to build again and would be a loss of time, energy, and interpersonal knowledge on possibility of something that (though might seem shiny, "alpha", attractive, etc.) might be worse off or not work out.
Sure, but cuckolding is an important structural reproductive phenomenon, and a lot of male and female reproductive identity don't make sense without it.
As to the good fathers, of course there are some good fathers, just as there are some loving wives. But a father never loves his children because he's a father, whereas a mother does because she is a mother. This is what I mean by the difference between psychological idiosyncrasies and structural phenomena.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Everyone cries when they lose something that causes them pain at its loss. But you can't tell from the crying whether it's because you've lost a person or an asset.Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think it's unconscious. People don't want to have sex with ugly, unfit, etc. people, that's just a fact. Lots of marriages are sexless, usually as a result of the woman's lack of interest, not the man's. Sexual attraction just isn't required for marriage, and most men aren't that great looking. Sexually, men seem to like women more than women seem to like men.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Notice that that doesn't show care for the person, though, any more than weighing the consequences of breaking the law shows care for the law.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, it works the other way too. Familiarity breeds contempt.
But you are now conflating marriage with love. Can you have a relationship beyond the social construct of marriage where both parties are mutually caring for each other, or is it your contention that if marriage was taken out of the equation, women wouldn't want to be with men at all? Also, wouldn't this be a phenomena that could be tested in some way? Has it been?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Again, wouldn't this only apply in regards to marriage and children rather than strictly relationships?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Does this assertion apply in regards to strictly romantic relationships without necessarily marriage and children?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Again, does this apply without marriage and children? I would imagine that it isn't an idea of punishment or obligation, just a loss of someone who you care for and who cares for you, for an unknown person who might not care at all for you, no?
Quoting The Great Whatever
This is true, and I wonder how much early human ancestors having shorter lifespans have something to do with largely avoiding this in early humans.
Don't get me wrong, TGW, you have some good points, but my skeptical side wants to call to attention the more nuanced aspects of this area of human behavior. As Schopenhauer explained, romantic love is probably the most important phenomena to the species. It is also one of the most explicit examples of Will in action. The pursuit of love causes so much angst, tensions, drama, etc. The illusion that everyone seems to tell themselves is that the pain in pursuing romantic love is worth the rewards, but for many reasons you bring up, the system is set up to almost always not be the case. It is a major part of suffering in the human experience.
I wouldn't accept it. Asexuals can have romantic love.
My point is that romantic love is played out differently and involves different behaviours, particularly involving sex, but the psychology attachment that accompanies romantic relationships is derivative of the more primitive and primary mother-child attachment. Love as a romantic feeling piggy-backs on the already developed mother-child attachment. Evolutionarily, we don't need love in order to have sex, but we need mothers to protect and care for children, and children not to stray from mothers for the species to survive. If evolution started to favour romantic love for species survival, it could be a mutation of the mother-child attachment rather than an independently developed faculty and maybe even sexually selected by the female.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Some would call it pseudo-science, and as such, I must admit that the evolutionary development of romantic love and the mother-child attachment may be completely independent of each other.
Notice it is a definition of romantic love as opposed to other kinds of love. You can care about someone deeply in a Platonic love, but that wouldn't be romantic. You can maybe argue that the rare case of seeing the "beauty" of someone as Socrates explained in the Symposium, but that also brings with it a whole metaphysical package that goes along with it such as the existence of Forms. I can expand the definition of beauty as well, though that is rarer. I would also argue that might be a more Platonic love that is afforded to non-asexuals as well. It depends how you want to slice the definition. Certainly, it is a rarer form that may or may not be categorized differently depending if you want to include beauty in the definition of romantic love.
Yes, and you can have romantic love without sex and sexual attraction. The aforementioned relationship between asexuals is a case in point.
According to the wonderful Wiki:
TGW, way to go, never let the truth ruin a good story!
Here's the link, in case you want to inform yourself further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattributed_paternity
You are wrong about that (and some other points) because you are generalizing far too broadly. Some men clearly do not like, do not care about, and do not want to be around to nurture, support or defend their children. What percentage? Some. I don't know how many. It would not take a an incredibly difficult research project to find out.
Are all women attached to their children equally, and more than any man could be? No. Some women would rather not raise the children they have. Some men make better mothers than some women. Some children are unlucky enough to have parents who are both either hostile or indifferent to their children's needs.
Some men are clearly attached to, love, adore, and want to be around their children a lot. What percentage? Some. I don't know how many. It would not take an incredibly difficult research project to find out.
I predict that our researchers would find that the statistically averaged man and woman have slightly different levels of attachment to each other and to their children, but that individually their attachment levels would fall within a range adjacent to the central tendency. You would't find many men and women who were several standard deviations away from the average. (This is true for all sorts of things.)
Do men and women actually love each other for the person their partner is? Yes, most heterosexuals love their partners a good share of the time as authentic persons. No person loves their partner unequivocally and unconditionally 100% of the time. For one thing, that kind of love takes time to develop -- it doesn't show up on the honeymoon or maybe even by the 10th wedding anniversary. For a second, people are just too irritating at times. It's surprising that more married people are not killed by their partners. If married couples stay together for a long time (like 25 years) they have a good chance of arriving at love that is at least closer to unequivocal and unconditional.
Over-generalizing about gay men is as prone to bad results as overgeneralizing about straight men. Most gay men fall into the area close to the average and either side of it. How many partners do gay men have? Some have 2,000 in a life time but most don't (happily or not). One variable is how quickly they settled down. I find it very difficult to imagine either what it is like to find a man and stick with him for 50 years without having sex with anybody else, or why one would want to do that. It's surprising that more gay men are not killed by their partners. If I had it to do over again, I would still play the field for a decade or so first. But, none the less, some gay men have met each other at work, church, the bar, the furniture department, or wherever and stayed together thereafter. (Mercifully, that is not the norm -- yet, anyway.)
Numerous studies have found that gay men's emotional and intellectual capacities for love and caring, achievement, insight, mental health, and all that are quite solid. They can behave in ways that many heterosexuals find appallingly libertine, and still be healthy people. Are gay men all that different from straight men? Why don't straight men have tons of sex before (or after, even) they marry? Well, some do -- but for the most part, straight women don't let them get away with that approach. Gay men don't have straight females around to put a break on free range sex. Straight men do.
(Also, note that the mixed mating strategy involves not just misattributed paternity, but cases of known cuckolding as well as non-cuckolding where the offspring is not the husband's, such as men marrying single mothers).
"Every one sees that love is a desire, and we know also that non-lovers desire the beautiful and good. Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers. When opinion by the help of reason leads us to the best, the conquering principle is called temperance; but when desire, which is devoid of reason, rules in us and drags us to pleasure, that power of misrule is called excess. Now excess has many names, and many members, and many forms, and any of these forms when very marked gives a name, neither honourable nor creditable, to the bearer of the name. The desire of eating, for example, which gets the better of the higher reason and the other desires, is called gluttony, and he who is possessed by it is called a glutton-I the tyrannical desire of drink, which inclines the possessor of the desire to drink, has a name which is only too obvious, and there can be as little doubt by what name any other appetite of the same family would be called;-it will be the name of that which happens to be eluminant. And now I think that you will perceive the drift of my discourse; but as every spoken word is in a manner plainer than the unspoken, I had better say further that the irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred-that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love." Phaedrus
Love, according to Plato here, is a force and I agree with that. For Plato that force is the result of the conflict between reason and desire. Love has its roots in our primal species desire, to reproduce. That primal desire is played out in society's concept of the correct forms of physical engagement.
I think love can be a form of narcissism where the lover loves the beloved because they see in the beloved them self. The desire for the beloved here is the imaginary love of ones's self, in spite of differences. The lover's desire is for the beloved to reciprocate, to desire the lover. The lover's impossible desire is to be whole, this is the excess that love adds to a relationship, which is beyond the basic force of sex, and it is rarely obtainable.
As I said to TGW before: The illusion that everyone seems to tell themselves is that the pain in pursuing romantic love is worth the rewards, but for many reasons you bring up, the system is set up to almost always not be the case. It is a major part of suffering in the human experience.
[quote=Schopenhauer]Why all this crowding, blustering, anguish, and want? Why should such a trifle play so important a part and create disturbance and confusion in the well-regulated life of mankind?” But to the earnest investigator the spirit of truth gradually unfolds the answer: it is not a trifle one is dealing with; the importance of love is absolutely in keeping with the seriousness and zeal with which it is prosecuted. The ultimate aim of all love-affairs, whether they be of a tragic or comic nature, is really more important than all other aims in human life, and therefore is perfectly deserving of that profound seriousness with which it is pursued.
As a matter of fact, love determines nothing less than the establishment of the next generation. The existence and nature of the dramatis personae who come on to the scene when we have made our exit have been determined by some frivolous love-affair. As the being, the existentia of these future people is conditioned by our instinct of sex in general, so is the nature, the essentia, of these same people conditioned by the selection that the individual makes for his satisfaction, that is to say, by love, and is thereby in every respect irrevocably established. This is the key of the problem. In applying it, we shall understand it more fully if we analyse the various degrees of love, from the most fleeting sensation to the most ardent passion; we shall then see that the difference arises from the degree of individualisation of the choice. All the love-affairs of the present generation taken altogether are accordingly the meditatio compositionis generationis futurae, e qua iterum pendent innumerae generationes of mankind. Love is of such high import, because it has nothing to do with the weal or woe of the present individual, as every other matter has; it has to secure the existence and special nature of the human race in future times; hence the will of the individual appears in a higher aspect as the will of the species; and this it is that gives a pathetic and sublime import to love-affairs, and makes their raptures and troubles transcendent, emotions which poets for centuries have not tired of depicting in a variety of ways. There is no subject that can rouse the same interest as love, since it concerns both the weal and woe of the species, and is related to every other which only concerns the welfare of the individual as body to surface.
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The stats may not be perfect, but they are all we have to go on. I have found Wiki is not much good for philosophy but for science, statistics and so on it seems OK, so generalizing about the virtues of Wiki would not seem to be much good either. If you have different or better stats then by all means bring them forth.
In most cases that I know of personally where the children belong to a mother who has separated from their father and 're-partnered', the father still has en emotional interest in his children, in being seen by them as their father, and continues to fulfill his share of financial responsibility for their upbringing. The kinds of cases you are trying to portray as general seem to be, in fact, the rare exceptions not the rule.
As much as I think you display elements of pathology sometimes, I think you have stumbled on something true and greatly important. So for that, my congratulations. Indeed, love is more often than not a tool of control over men that women wield. In modern society, because man has been deprived of all weapons that he has by nature, it is not uncommon to see even fine specimen of men become the slaves of women. Notice that a man can be the most handsome, the strongest physically, the most charismatic, but if he refuses to be enslaved, if he refuses to let down his dignity - women will give him a very hard time. Long ago, men like Julius Caesar and Napoleon had a very easy time with women, because they were enabled to use the means that Nature has provided them in their conquests. But in modern society - they would be loners.
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.
Homework assignment for tomorrow: compare and contrast the Clod and the Pebble.
I agree with you wholly about "Quoting The Great Whatever.
After all, heterosexual love is, by definition, an inequality. A man x who loves a woman y necessarily holds y in higher esteem than himself - something to be attained, protected and hopefully mated with.
You got zombied. The Great Whatever got banned a couple of years ago.
Thanks. S/he makes sense though.
This is the case only in societies infected with the romantic-love disease and with too much easy money floating around. Elsewhere, these things are always arranged, and very much so as a business transaction.
You want a wife? Then pay the marriage gift. You want a one-night stand? Then pay the rental fee and for the room. If you want something, you will simply have to pay for it. How hard can that be?
(Of course, I do not recommend to marry or even co-habitate with anyone in a divorce-rape jurisdiction. I live in SE Asia.)
Furthermore, I would never see or ever talk with a woman who does not want to be with me, because I only ever see the ones who do. Hence, I do not give a flying fart about what arbitrary women may think about me. Since they are not candidates who were pushed through a particular arrangement procedure, they are totally irrelevant. If I need a woman for any such purpose, I just ask a local friend to do the legwork. Over here, they love doing that anyway. He may even bring his favourite niece! It is simply a question of "getting HR to thoroughly filter candidates" first.
I do not date and I do not participate sexually in societies where people date. What kind of situation are you constructing if you start out by putting her on a pedestal? These guys actively transform themselves into a bunch of losers.
Seriously, if you are good at business negotiations, and you can pay the reasonable price, then why wouldn't you get exactly what you want? You don't need to be a "higher-status" man for that, and frankly, it is not even particularly costly. Like with any business transaction, all you need to do, is to shut off and shut down all avenues for bullshitting, upfront. Prevent the system from allowing that, and you should be fine!
You showed nothing that proved this to be fact. This is solely just your opinion on how YOU see men, even if you adopted the idea.
But I have a question... Do you not believe that there’s such thing as high and low status women or does that just go for men?