Maintaining Love in the family
I was reading that 80% of marriages end up soon after in divorce and that 10% are unhappy that they are married. I see this as a great tragedy that breaks down 90% of all families. From philosophy, what are some rational characteristics of love? How then could it be possible to keep love from leaving the household? All these questions on love can be discussed on this post.
Comments (41)
I think there’s a lot that goes into this, including what “love” looks like in other countries/time periods, so don’t consider these thoughts as exhaustive, but here’s what comes to mind.
1. Tolerance. Everyone you get close to will hurt you, maybe even intentionally. Understanding this, and learning to see people as people, goes a long way to minimizing personal emotional damage in a relationship.
2. Forgiveness. Kinda goes hand-in-hand with 1, but probably needs stated explicitly.
3. Realistic expectations. Love is not the Hollywood or Disney version you’ve been raised to believe it is.
4. Selflessness. You have to realize that the other person’s feelings are just as important as yours. You have no right to try to control or manipulate them, regardless of how bad their actions may hurt you. Either accept it or move on.
5. Patience. Disregard social/religious pressures to marry too early in life. You can’t realistically vow to love your partner for better or worse if you have never seen them at their worst. It takes time to get to know someone, and for people to reveal themselves fully to someone else. It also takes time to heal.
6. Openness. Let your likes/dislikes and needs/wants be known. Your partner isn’t a mind reader.
7. Respect. There should be certain lines that are never crossed. Violence is the most obvious, but also things like not using their vulnerabilities/insecurities against them, demeaning them, or disregarding their opinions/dreams/etc. Personally, I also think simple manners and politeness are important.
8. Sex. I’m not one to advocate for celibacy until marriage, but your infatuation with your partner should be recognized as such so it isn’t confused for love.
And made by hand and muscle and patience, not by machine. If you think love is a feeling you have rather than a labour you work at, there is not much hope for marriage or for child rearing.
Can we get a show of hands?
There are problems for which there is no solution. Someone wiser than me said that interpersonal relationships are like those established by hedgehogs on a snowy mountain. If the hedgehogs wander away, they will freeze. But if they get too close, they will hurt each other. Love is the deception of nature to force us to reproduce.
if it's is deception then I am surely fooled!
-Do you accept Mary in health and in sickness, in wealth and poverty until death do you part?
-Yes, no, yes, no, no.
I agree that @Pinprick’s list outlines what should be characteristics of all relationships, regardless of whether we classify it as ‘love’. This often leads to sexual compatibility and/or physical attraction seen as the distinguishing feature of ‘love’ within a marriage. I would say that a sexual aspect to any relationship intensifies the implications of the other seven - we don’t have anything to smooth over the sharp edges of our personality or to shield us from the damage we inflict.
For me, the idea of love is pure relation: if we could understand fully how the world works, theoretically speaking, then we could love the world fully. That includes ourselves. But we partition our relation to the world because some aspects may be beyond our capacity to understand - right now, under certain conditions, yet or ever.
Love is not a resource one is able to use in this way or that. If you accept it as your only guiding light then who knows what will happen next. Maybe some really terrible things.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. What is the reason you are dismayed by this?
Quoting Thinking
Personally I disagree. I guess the principle cause of all things is the faith of believing we can change the reality to better.
Love and it’s forms are overrated marketing to be honest...
There's no love in this world. You can only love yourself. If you want love, you need to start spiritual practice. Because you're not going to find it on this planet. You'll find a lot of crap with the label of "love" though, but it's cheaper than the crap you buy at Walmart. At least you'll get something out of that purchase, not so with "love"
Exactly.
Love is a Platonic Form that exists in the spectral realm, however, in it's imperfect form it takes the form of self-satisfaction, egotism and narcissism while here on the material plane.
Not a single person on planet Earth knows "love" the way you describe it. Many Sages know love in it's true sense. Sat Chit Ananda. But not in this false sense. It's basically a fraud created by capitalist marketing. There's no content to it. Emptiness.
What if give love but I don’t receive it back? Sometimes love is overacting. I guess the properly word here is “respect” because this is the truest cordial representation between individuals. Love can be sometimes so toxic
I will call it maturity. I understand your point. That period of time where you start accepting or respecting yourself and also the path of life starts having another point of view. Yes, we can call it intuition, because as you said intuition is somehow intelligent.
But... love is not here too. I can’t believe in love but in myself or intuition. I think theses concepts can survive separated from each other.
Love is an abstract aspect. Someone live it others don’t. If you are living a feeling related to love congratulations because this is rare to perceive. It looks like a primary perception when you feel it. Everything looks good but love can end up hurting you a lot.
I have not discovered love yet. But I am not searching of it yet because I do not believe in it.
I get your point. But it sounds so positivism. I do not deny love because I don’t receive it. I just deny it because is an abstract concept created to explain weird perceptions we have about others in our life context. Call it love or whatever but it could end up being so hurtful or toxic because when you are in love with someone you are not being objective with him/her because you are acting blind because of love...
I don’t understand what is beautiful about this.
It is true that you would have to have a massive speed and purity in thought even just to understand a piece of what Love is and is capable of. Since love's intelligence is highly intuitional and more direct and vastly quicker than slower thinking and rationalizing. Love is, however, Rational and is possible to be understood somewhat by the mind. So it is best, if you can, to take Love as it is and experience it, live it, bathe in it if you must. For no matter how keen your mind is it is impossible to fully understand Love.
I think the fear of Love comes from the lack of some amount of understanding of it and also lack of experience,
Yes. This kind of love is flawed. Then, it also depends in which person we are talking about. Love is so abstract than there are people who will never experienced it. This is why I want to point out that probably love is like a lottery. Those who win the abstract concept of believing in love is amazing and unique.
Probably this is the reason why I do not believe in love. I felt hurt and pain. I don’t want experience that trauma again in my life. Personal decision
That's a claim. I have no way of testing if it is correct. I can only go by what I experience and notice, problematic though that may be. Regardless, I am not making a claim that I fully understand love or even that I understand it a great deal.