Why the Lover Whispers Sweet Nothings

By the way:

Something I told a whino in a thread he started asking why it his girlfriend confuses him:

"Genitals- that's all she sees. She likes them, she needs them but the problem is she is forced to deal with the human attached to them- you.

Her being repulsed by your personality and turned on by your jimmy simultaneolsy is what makes the human male and female the disasters they are."

 

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Golems, five-fingered changelings...
Wouldn't you say though, that those acutely aware of this are gazing in the right direction? Or are they just as susceptible in spite of knowing?

That is... any research on why it is so?

 

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I said I would be back and so I am. Sorry for the delay. The connection here likes to go out unexplainably every now and again.
Without any further delay, let's get on with it.

Firstly, we have already managed to seperate the topic into two or three different subtopics. instead of saying we are digressing, I intend on adressing all of them, since all are interrelated and, imho, essential to the main.
Infact, it would be difficult to talk about anyone of them without hinting at the others.
As i see it, here is what we have:
what is love.
where did it come from/why did it evolve.
what is the nature of 'sweet nothings'
those and a few others that have had but one line here or there.

Secondly, most of you seem to speak about the subject as if it were a concrete one. I hinted at this in mentioning wes's name. Love is a subjective matter. In short, a matter of perspective.

In my typical fashion, i will start from the end and go towards the begining.
(though in truth the last subject hints at the first.)
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Love is subjective.
True enough, I can only go by my own personal experience and my subjective observations of others. Despite this fact, or perhaps because of it, I have never seem one 'mold' of love.
In some, what they would express as love is almost totally a dependant condition. A devotion to someone that plays itself out in much the way that gendanken has portrayed. It acts as an opiate with witch they sooth the anguish of their empty lives and smooth away any wrongs done to them by the object of their affection. Strangely enough, these people will, even when angered at the other and wanting nothing more to do with them, forgive the other if they are given even the smallest glimmer of hope.
In others, the romantic flame holds, against all odds, throughout the years and manages to remain as fresh as the day it was kindled. What can I say about them? They are happy, and thus, a lucky few.
There are those who once felt that same fire, only to have its burning slow with time yet not die. These people find a more concrete connection. The love they knew when young is reforged into something that can withstand almost anything. It comes with familiarity, trust, shared hardships, and learning the other person.
Etc, etc, etc...
The variations go on and on.
The one thing they all have in common though is a title. Love. anyone of these people would say that they are in love.

Yet gendanken seems to be raising a question based not on a shared love so much, but rather a romantic love felt by one person, even if it is not known or recipricated by the object of their desire.
Yet, even there we are lead down a similar path. Why do they deel this way, and why do they act in the manner they do? Yes, we could chalk it up to a coping mechanism, but can we honestly say that we know that that is the case?
no.
Love is subjective. It is personal. Most importantly, its emotional. When i say someone has made me angry, all of you would assume that we speak of the same thing. (we have to for sake of communication, but that is another topic.) However, the very real fact is that you cannot know what it is I, or anyone else for that matter, feel. Our emotions may have similarities, but it is unlikely to the point of impossiblity to say that we all have the same feelings, and mean it in the truest sense of the words.

Because of this one simple fact, this topic and psychology as a whole is nothing more than guessing blindly at the contents of a room we cannot see into. Let us forget that fact though and continue on with the topic, remembering only the most pertanent fact of all of my babbling above: Love is subjective.

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The nature of sweet nothings
As more than one of you have pointed out, sometimes "It's just pillow talk, baby." In otherwords, there are alot of reasons to tell someone how wonderful they are, how beautiful, smart, witty, funny, and endearing you find them. How you know that they are the person you have been searching for and why you want to spend the rest of your life with them.
The truth is just one of many.
Many times these things are said with the soul intention of getting in someones pants.
Sometimes the speaker actually believes these words....
and then they get to know the other person.
Sometimes, our romeo believes them but, alas, as the wise gendanken has so perceptively pointed out, they are nothing more that a subconscious mechanism, be it coping or otherwise.

Gendanken wishes to examine the subconscious reasons, and there are a few that I am familar with.
An easy one is that it is a learned behavior. Something inside the person tells them to say such things and act in certain ways because it is what they have grown up witnessing.
Some do it as a way of coping with life. They give themselves a reason to continue in an existance that they find unbearable. The reason? that suffering shows how much you care, and thus they can bear the unbearable simply because they are in love.
The idea that gendanken put foreward is also true among certain individuals, especially romantics. They want so much to be in love that they are in love with the idea of being in love and not the object of their affection. In this case, the sweet nothings serve to remind the object or their affection of their devotion, but also to remind the devotee that they are in love with the person. "if you tell your self something long enough...."

In the last example, the sweet nothings actually echo freud's concept of transferance in a sence. The romeo isn't actually in love with their respective other, but rather the idea. The idea requires an object to devote one's self to though, so the romeo finds some one to play the part. the devotion that the romeo feels towards the idea of being in love is then transfered to the person he has found to fill the void.
It's kinda sad really, but whatever gets you through the night i guess.

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Where did love come from?
Gendanken finds the whole idea odd. Fenris thinks it's mainly in primates and evolved to protect the young.
Firstly, lets make a distinction between mating for life and love. one is an emotion and the other simply an act. you cannot say that one equates to the other.
now fenris proposes an interesting idea, and if i am rememberig correctly, he advances it primarily for primates mainly humans.
the stumbling block here is that he has tried to find the reason for the cause by pigeonholing the symptoms.
You have to examine what the casuse of those symptoms are in order to find the root of it.
in this case, we are dealing with an emotion. to figure out why we love, you must also figure out why we hate, why we fear, and why we mourn. they are all interconnected.
Insofar as that most emotions tend to have their basis in survival instincts, I would wager that your idea is not entirely wrong. However, examine the animal kingdom and you will see many variations of love. Some species mate for life, and a few tend to die shortly after their mate has.
On a different note, a male lion defending his pride is just another variation of the same thing. He will fight to the death to defend it and maintain it. While love isn't what one would normally think of, look at the behavior and look at the behaviors associated with love.
The only true difference, and the real root of love, is the ability to conceptualise abstracts. it is in that sole act that anger is raised from a flashing of teeth to the ploting of revenge, where fight or flight reflex is changed into phobia, and where the urge to defend young and mates is transformed into the horrible, beautiful experience we call love.

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Well, that is about all i am going to say for now.
I am goign to take a little break and then go back and hit some individual points.

sorry for the length.
-meph

 

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Well, to explain the casual language, I will say this:
Why complicate things. Wes and I are familiar with each other, so i can communicate in a way with him that may not be perfectly clear to others. Sorry if you had trouble following. Basically i was just simplifing some things.
Look at it as me drawing a picture of a circle instead of using the formula for one.

At first glance, one would think that, and to a certain extent it does. However, there are two major points that you have failed to take into account.
Firstly, I make reference to a certain type of person. Your 'theory' seems to be more of the all incompassing type. The people I describe would fit into your theory, and be examples thereof, but I would never hold your theory true for all people.
Secondly, the individuals I speak of would rarely, if ever, dissect their feelings. To them the idea borders on a religeous one, and emotion is, more or less, something to be taken on faith.
Perhaps the second point is a purely semantical one, but i can only reply to what you have written.

Funny.
I stand by my words. They would not intend for the words to be an opiate.
To my line of thinking, the conscious reason for saying them would be somethign simple, such as expressing one's feelings or trying to win 'fair juliet's' heart.
Are you telling me that you are say that they consciously decide to lie to themselves? That they decide to trick themselves into 'loving' someone?
That would be a new one on me.

Ahh.. so you are not refering to love really, but rather the psychosis of a certain type of person. Generally the romantic. Understood.
But, I would caution that you think through the idea of them being conscious opiates. It doesn't fit well with any conventional idea of psychology.

 

Mephura,

That is really nice of you, making an effort to organize this conversation.

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I mostly agree with what you've said, but I would like to make some comments:


1. Love is subjective.

a) Certainly. But individuals grow up in a certain society so the actual love they feel is shaped or influenced or governed by subtle social mechanisms. It is for this reason that there is a 'code of love' that makes love recognizable. To give red roses is simply understandable -- but how far does this social code go?

We can understand love as a language -- with all the properties and subtleties of a living language.


b) The subjectivity of love apparently has to do a lot with the PERSONALITY of the lover. "If one's strong, one loves the more strongly," wrote Henry James.

Personality traits show esp. when it comes to love.


2. "To love" and "to be in love" are two fundamentally different things.

"Love" is the mature and sure strong kind inclination towards someone. "To be in love" is the state of infatuation. "Being in love" is just one of the ways that lead to love.

Infatuation or "being in love" is led by subtle and subconscious mechanisms, such as *projection* and *idealization* (you can fill in the blanks yourself).

Infatuation or "being in love" is the relationship to the twisted image (=idealizations and projections) the infatuated has of the other person.

"Love" is the relationship to the other person such as she/he is in reality (without the idealizations and projections).

It is typical that infatuations end with frustrations and disappointments. If the person in question in the process of this learns about the projections and idealizations he/she made about the other person, then he/she can overcome them, and truly love the other person for what they are.
If he/she doesn't see past his/her projections and idealizations, then the cycle of infatuations and disappointments continues.

This is where the factor of personality steps in: When infatuated, we are in touch with our "inner self", with that part that leads us into becoming infatuated. Someone with a healthy personality basis will rethink his/her projections and idealizations, and act as they see fit in a given context.

Romantics are those people who refuse to do that.

While I completely agree that we certainly are in no position to know what exactly goes on in the other person's mind, we still ought to keep in mind that the other person is not a complete stranger, as if they were from another planet. In this sense, some generalizations are possible.


3. The nature of sweet nothings

This may seem off base -- but observe yourself talking to your pet. What do you think the animal feels? Does it understand the words? I don't think animals understand our language, but they surely understand the *emotion in the voice*. The act of talking can be something purely physical, just like touching.

Now, humans could read the phone book to eachother -- with the right voice, the emotional message could be the same. But, reasonable creatures as we presume ourselves to be, we like to put some meaning into what we say.
What those words will be, depends on our personality, context, etc. etc.


4. Where did love come from?

It could be that the a main clue to the origin of emotions is *dialogue*.
As far as I've read, cognitive scientists believe that the origin of having a sense of self derives from the ability of having a dialogue (in the phylogenetic sense). Once it is established that there is an I and the other, dialogue is possible. The sense of self emerges with the ability of dialogue.

Once this is possible, empathy, feeling the emotions of others is possible, and also insight into one's own thoughts and emotions.

Certainly not. But in a society, all instincts are shaped and organized in ways that ensure good survival for the species. The way they are shaped and organized in a pride of lions is different from the way this happens in humans, chimps, birds, ...

The explanation with the dialogue and empathy seems to be answering for that. If someone hurts your neighbour, this, for a *social* species, means that indirectly your own survival was threatened or dimished in one way or another. Hence you react emotionally. Of course, in a complex society like the human, the whole thing gets far far more complicated, with lots of abstractions, but I think the basis is just what I said -- empathy.

Why did people massively cry at Lady Di's funeral? I myself watched the funeral on tv, massively crying for hours. There are several explanations for that, like "massive hysteria" and such. I say that it was just plain empathy, only on a grand scale -- that was enabled by the use of the medias, esp. tv. I empathized with all the people there at the funeral. If people see people crying, the original emotional respond to that is -- crying, out of empathy.

 

I hope the explanation with infatuation having a lot to do with one's personality can help against this.


As for speaking about "our wonderfully pathologized Christian-based society" and "I found how simple it is to do away with negatives by throwing them at a Christian": I can only speak for my society. I don't know whether things work the same with the Inuits or the Chinese. It's not like I said "Hah, it's the Christians who brought up this shit."

Let's be more specific here:

1. Once speaking of female bodies, we have to keep in mind that they carry the "mystery of birth". Birth and everything connected to it is tabooed in some way or another in every culture. As a woman, you are "special".

2. As for the beauty of the female body: It is of extremely short time. Birth used to destroy it, and make it ugly. In women, the process of physical degradation was appalling. They degrade due to something that ensures the existence of the species! Isn't that just horrible?! This is a duality anyone would find hard to cope with.
(Why do you think Mary had to be a virgin mother? Anything, as long it keeps away the immediate defilement of real life.)
Women are beautiful -- but only until the first "use". After that they are damaged goods. Hence they are regarded as a commodity, hence each man gets 72 virgins in Islamic heaven ...

It is this painful duality that made a patriarchal society treat women as second class people: on one hand, they are needed to "make new life", on the other, they are a quickly "corruptible" commodity. Having the well-being of your society depending on quickly corruptible commodities is downright scary.

This is a compensation for the ugly truth. A woman can't escape being a woman, she can only deny it (and she has been taught to deny it!). To demand from a woman to give up what she's doing -- you call it "its this idea of Self, a lie, that she uses to justify her making him miserable, and this to me is the ugliest behaviour in the kingdom", it is the same as to demand from a nobleman from a noble family to give up his title. -- The nobleman didn't choose to be born in that noble family; and no matter what some anti-royalists say, he can't deny his roots. Nobody can.

The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the Moon ...

I hate to be simplistic: But maybe it is a simple Yin and Yang thing, that we, in our highly cultural madness, covered with artful words -- only to later let it become true, what was first a sick phantasy of a few ravished. Self-fulfilling prophecies ...
We are confined and condemned to the discourse of love practised in the society we are born into.

Ah, I think at least modern Westernes have some very twisted perspectives of "sacrifice". When I get up several times a night, each night, to do what my cat desires -- fresh water, food, going out -- this is *not sacrifice*. It is love. If I would call those actions sacrifice, what I feel for my cat woudn't be love -- it would be pity and mercy. The most disgusting emotions ever. I guess we can say that the romantic lover doesn't love -- he *pities* and has *mercy*.
Ah, humans are hard to *love.*

 

That's interesting. Comparing my posts elsewhere...

(Jenyar):"That's the seed that gave us the reference point from which to judge ourselves in the first place, and that gives meaning to the language we call morality. It's called love."

(Jenyar): "I'm arguing for dialogue..."

Well, in Timothy it is said childbearing is a mode of salvation ... so it ranks pretty high as a blessing. A woman who did not have children was incomplete and cause for jealousy (cf. Sarah and Hagar, Lea and Rachel). Mary was a virgin because Jesus did not have a biological father - the birth itself made her "unclean" for a while, by Jewish law, so virginity would hardly have helped in that department.

...because their identity is lost, as Mephura indicated.

Even empathy driven by an instinctive need for survival borders on pity, loss of identity or condescention. It can be just an empty form of love.

This is significant. What makes love more than an impulse brought about by the need for reproduction, or infatuation, is choice. And choice is informed, as Rosa says: dialogue is required. People date, they get to know each other; men can make decisions based on more than beauty and reproductive ability (whatever that means), and women can make decisions based on more that virility and good DNA (fortunately).

When love is a choice, reason becomes involved, and with that comes responsibility, trust, and all the other ingredients we asssociate with a healthy relationship. Anything less threatens to objectify relationships to a point of meaninglessness and selfishness.

The sacrifice of love is the ego. A lover must find himself in his beloved as she is - if he sees her as an object separate from himself, some thing or some ideal he must mold to become more like him or reject, he is raping her personality - and vice versa. Communication makes love a "third person" - a holy place where both individuals are one unit, where they stand a better chance for survival.

 

I indicated such a thing??
perhaps i am just forgetting somethign that i typed (it was rather lengthy after all). where did i link a womans identity to virginity?

You have touched on a key point that I have yet to address. It would seem that some here are equating love to simple . very different things.

I agree with what you say about the molding. too many times have i seem just such a thing happen, and i have even been guilty of it myself. You show some true insight into what it is that i am saying.
for that i thank you.

 

Must, must, must, must. Must.

Does?

No.

 

But Does=magic...

 

... and magic, per definition, does not happen.

 

You said above:

Firstly, you seem to be describing a senario in which the actual identity of the person doesn't matter. Ie, they don't care who they 'love' as long as there is someone.​

 

I just ended a relationship of three years. I'm not really sure why, but I decided I was done. She was a lot of firsts, and I always wondered if I was in love with her, whatever that was.

Well, I figure I always loved her, and I still do in fact. Love is weird. She loved me more than I could ever love her, and I figured it wasn't fair for me to continue fucking with her. Or I was bored. It doesn't really matter any more.

What's interesting though, are all the things that remind me of her. Innocent little phrases, certain songs, certain emoitions. Going through certain motions and I stir up memories of her.

I haven't gone all Freudian on this though. I figure that this, eh, current mood, is very natural in a much more general sense.

Human language is the expression of emotion and ideas. Certain words connotate ideas and emotions not intrinsic to the words. A colored person used to be the PC term to call a black person. It's late and I can't think up more examples. Sorry. Euphemisims, though, work on the same basis. Army speak is an excellent example.

Emotions get attached to words. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the attachment.

With love, it's simple association between actions and past reactions. It doesn't neccesarily have to be sinister or plotting or controlling; it's simple human behaviour.

Wow, it took a lot of words to get to my simple point. Doh.

 

Oh I disagree, I disagree categorically! It happens. People have just become desensitized to the miracles that happen every day. I have seen love like that... I have loved like that. I have lost myself in another person and found myself again anew.

It does happen.

 

Association and recognition. We recognize things like love and beauty not by their manifestations, but by their "spirit" (to which emotion, longing and "nostalgia" is linked)

 

If something is accompanied by a strong emotion (positive or negative), we remember it much more than if the emotion was weak.

It's matters of cognition.

 

Man.


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Doest the lady protest?

 

No, I do not protest, just the message had to be at least 10 characters long.

And yes, I am pissed very pissed. Men. They have it so easy.

 

Oh we do? I didn't notice. She ran off to Portugal with a conductor. Now she's touring with his orchestra - the perfect marriage of love and ambition. I could never compete with the latter.

But as I said: what amazed me was how much I turned out to gain because I didn't try to change her. I surprised myself many times during the relationship, and I came out knowing that I could do it. I don't know her anymore, but I know myself much better.