Excerpts from A General Theory of Love

Relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain… Prolonged separation affects more than feelings. A number of somatic parameters go haywire in despair. Because separation deranges the body, losing relationships can cause physical illness.

....

A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.

 

 

https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/08/23/david-eagleman-livewired-drug-withdrawal-heartbreak

I recently read The All or Nothing Marriage.  Here are some excerpts:

The major change over time is not an overall increase in how much Americans expect from their marriage, but rather a dramatic shift in the substance of their expectations.  In contrast to our predecessors, who looked to their marriage to help them survive, we look to our marriage to meet our needs for passion and intimacy and to facilitate our voyages of self-discovery and personal growth.

It took centuries for the love-based, breadwinner-homemaker ideal to become the dominant model of marriage in America.  It took only fifteen years to shatter that ideal.

Relative to marriages in earlier eras, marriages today require much greater dedication and nurturance, a change that has placed an ever-larger proportion of marriages at risk of stagnation and dissolution.

The proportion of spouses whose marriages fall short of expectations has grown.

The science is clear that holding strong destiny beliefs is perilous.  People who believe in romantic destiny tend to become unhappy quickly when relationships go through challenging times.  And, of course, going through challenging times is virtually inevitable in a long-term relationship.

Building a happy marriage requires that spouses successfully navigate a dense thicket of challenges and opportunities, frequently without a good map of the route ahead.

Love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.  Nobody would seek to be successful at playing the violin by waiting for the right instrument to come along, but many of us seek to be successful at relationships by waiting for the right partner to come along.  We would be better served by cultivating our ability to love--to become skilled, mature, and self-aware relationship partners.

A key feature of effective communication is understanding when our spouse doesn't want to talk and, more generally, understanding that he or she is entitled to some privacy.

We are not the same persons this year as last, nor are those we love.  It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

Achieving ambitious goals is hard work and helping a loved one do so can sometimes require criticism rather than warmth, challenge rather than comfort.  Therein resides the spouse's dilemma: As we seek to help our partner become the best version of him- or herself, to what extent do we employ critical feedback in order to motivate versus supportive feedback in order to nurture?

Mothers and fathers in dual-income households spent an average of 33.5 hours parenting the newborn.  If you're married without children, it might be difficult to understand how much the arrival of the first baby changes things.  Where would the two of you find an additional 33.5 hours per week?

Relative to femininity, which typically doesn't require social validation, masculinity is more fragile; it requires repeated demonstration and social proof.

I recently read "The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love."

Here are some excerpts from the book that I found interesting and thoughtful:

• For most of the five thousand years that marriage has existed, deciding whether you were in love with a partner did not matter, because until the eighteenth century marriage was primarily an economic agreement between families.

• The traits a partner possesses during the first couple years of dating are indicative of how the partner will behave as your roommate, your financial partner, your friend, and a parent.  The stability of traits can be good news or bad news depending on what kind of traits you chose in the first place.

• Partners consistently engage in "strategic self-presentation" by putting their best traits on display while concealing their negative traits... our partners are on their best behavior during the first few months of a relationship.  This makes positive traits the easiest to see.

• Potential partners likely know just how costly displays of emotional instability are when trying to attract a mate, which makes it more likely that they will do their best to conceal this trait.

• People's reactions under stress can be telling. Pay extra close attention to what happens in stressful situations and how a partner reacts to intense situations.

• There is no reliable association between physical attractiveness and relationship satisfaction.  If you are physically attractive, you are no more satisfied in your relationship than someone who is less attractive and if your partner is physically attractive, you are no more satisfied in your relationship than someone partnered with someone who is less attractive.  There is also no evidence to suggest that attractiveness increases relationship stability.

• The lingering tendency to choose a partner based on physical attractiveness is understandable, because 99 percent of human history, when survival and reproductive success were far from guaranteed, the advantages signaled by physical attractiveness yielded many benefits.

• Humans came to value two traits when basic needs and longevity were far from guaranteed: partners with access to resources and partners who looked healthy.  These traits were valued for thousands of years, across hundreds of generations... All species, including humans, tend to retain mechanisms of survival long after those mechanisms have lost their usefulness.  The preference for mates who are physically attractive and who have resources can be thought of in this way, because privileging these two characteristics made sense for most of human history.

• It is easy to miss good people because unlike visual traits such as physical attractiveness, desirable psychological traits are not well advertised. They are discerned when we are carefully observant of individuals' subtle and thoughtful behaviors.

• Having a lot of money is not a great predictor of relationship outcomes.

• Partners usually don't possess uniformly good or bad traits.  People often possess some good traits, such as being smart and funny, and these are often mixed with undesirable traits, such as emotional instability and low self-confidence.

• There is a continuity between the attachment style individuals form in childhood and the attachment style they display in adulthood.  There may be some fluctuations over time, but overall, the attachment style people have as children is usually the attachment style they have as adults.

• In the end, there are few things in life so worthwhile of careful study and judicious decision making as whom to love.  For there are few things in life so demoralizing as the disappointment accompanying a broken heart, and conversely, there are few things so elevating as finding love that endures.

A touching love story about two people who are very ill

https://www.wbur.org/modernlove/2019/05/01/jamison-hill-pedro-pascal

From the Highest Peaks to the Shadows of the Lowest Valleys

I don't claim to be an expert on love and relationships or even someone who is extensively experienced on the matter by any stretch of the imagination.  But, even with such restraints I do want to share the story of how my first true love and eventual heartbreak changed many aspects of me.

There is no logical place to begin. Perhaps the most important gift I have gained from the entire experience is that even though I can't define what Love means through words, I can confidently say I know how it actually feels.  The feelings manifest in many ways. Thinking of the person automatically puts a smile on your face, whether you are consciously aware of it or not. Making sacrifices for her no longer becomes a matter of whether you will pursue a particular course of action but how you will pursue it. The first thought is always the how and no longer whether. Your heart-rate rises and you're filled with excitement when there is an incoming message or a call from her.  You think she's beautiful even when she looks like a complete mess.  When she's sick, you want to drown her in hot tea and soup.  When speaking to her, all you can think about is how to bring out another beautiful smile. Her smell is intoxicating. The softness of her skin sends chills down your spine.  Her voice is melodic. You want to get lost in her hair. Her lips feel like clouds? What the FUCK is this absurdity?  You mistake her eyes for gems. Her mind is an endless book you crave to be lost in. A never-ending forest perhaps? Her jokes are so terrible that they break some weird threshold and actually become hilarious.  Her childishness and optimism are unashamedly infectious. This feels drug-like. This is unreal.

Of course, as beautiful and true as the above Disney-esque bullshit is, there comes a certain point when you start taking her for granted. You've never experienced the surreal level of happiness that genuine Love can bring and you become afraid of losing it.  This fear leads to paranoia. This paranoia leads to insecurity. This insecurity leads to needy and suffocating behavior.  The more you go down this path, the more you push her away. The farther away she gets, the more intense your fears become, causing her to fade even more.  The beast you've created relentlessly gorges on itself. It's indifferent to your suffering. You start second guessing all your thoughts, words, and actions.  You start questioning her behavior and words at every chance you get. Why is she calling less often? Why is she providing less and less details about her life? Why is she progressively becoming more and more closed off from you? Why does she keep fading away? You've become hopelessly obsessed.

You're now a burden. Regrettably, you haven't realized it yet.  You won't ever realize it until it's too late.  She's already gone but you're in denial. You don't consciously realize it but you are. You definitely are.  Her presence is a mere shell of her former self.  She's already made her decision. There are several close calls and half-hearted attempts at concluding the journey.  You keep hoping it will continue but you ultimately realize that the end is in sight.

Then, it finally happens. She's made her decision and there is no going back.  You are surprisingly calm and you're relieved that you don't feel worse.  But, you foolishly have absolutely no idea how big of a loss you have suffered. Your mind is taking pity on you and letting you swallow the pain one spoonful at a time instead of forcing you to deal with all of it at once.  Soon, the symptoms begin.  You can't sleep. You can't eat. You've lost motivation to do anything but the essentials.  It takes all your willpower to crawl out of bed. You force yourself to eat primarily liquid food because everything else makes you nauseous.  You read anything and everything about the pit you have found yourself in, hoping it will allow you to understand the pain and make it go away.  You even see her in your dreams and there is absolutely no escape.  You are reconstructing and replaying every relevant memory and conversation with her. You are stuck in the universe of What Ifs and you see no escape in sight.  You try to predict the milieu of realities that could have been possible if you hadn't said X or hadn't done Y or behaved in manner Z.  Every time you reconstruct a memory, the more warped and inaccurate it becomes, eventually transforming into a incomprehensible blur. As expected, none of it works. Mere distractions. Nothing more.  This quite literally feels like going through drug-induced withdrawals. Sooner or later you realize that you're experiencing similar physical and psychological states as someone who is dealing with the death of a loved one or an addict coming off of an addiction.  That realization finally allows you to understand just how deep of a hole you are currently in and how long it's going to take to climb out.

Time passes at an excruciatingly slow pace but it still passes. The random bursts of bawling become less and less frequent.  You find yourself getting busier and busier in hopes of distracting yourself.  To your pleasant surprise, these distractions are becoming permanent and you are becoming progressively more active and diverse.  You start to entertain the possibility that you are coming out stronger from this situation than when you entered it.  This thought is the first one in months that is truly making you happy on a more consistent and permanent basis.

The recovery continues and you finally have the spare mental and emotional resources to devote towards brutally honest introspection.  You own up to the mistakes you made and how you can better yourself as a person. You slowly but surely start to understand how wonderful she was and how absolutely foolish you were.  You were in the presence of a gift and you squandered it. Owning up to all the ugly things you have done is both painful yet liberating.  You almost start being... thankful for what you went through.  You finally ask yourself if knowing what you know now, if you would go through the whole experience all over again.  Without a second thought or hesitation, you admit to yourself that you in fact would.  You understand that through the process of being completely broken down, you reconstructed yourself into something more stable and powerful. More confident. More interesting. More passionate and emotionally honest.  More comfortable with accepting uncertainty and letting go of whatever isn't under your influence.  You realize that you are forever changed, for the better. For the first time in many months, it feels euphoric to see with such clarity. You understand that your journey From the Highest Peaks to the Shadows of the Lowest Valleys was not wasted and you became a better you in the process.

The assumptions we hold

On the surface, the new film "Her" by Spike Jonze seems to be a scifi-esque tale about a lonely and detached man (named Theodore) falling in love with an A.I. (an operating system named "Samantha"). However, much like many other thought-provoking films, there is much more to the story here. The director guides the viewer through a journey where he is prodded into questioning his core assumptions about love and relationships.

There are many themes covered in the film. One of the major ones deals with the physical connection between two individuals and whether such a connection is a prerequisite for true love.  By her very nature, Samantha is unable to satisfy Theodore's physical needs because she does not have a physical form other than being a small tablet that Theodore carries around with him wherever he goes.  All he can "feel" from her is a voice originating from the tablet and nothing more.  Given Samantha's lack of a physical form, Theodore still manages to fall in love with her and develop intense feelings.  At this point, we are forced to directly address our assumption about physical contact in the context of relationships.  In the modern age of communication technologies that allow us to essentially be in perennial long-distance relationships, where there is no physical contact or connection of any form, is it not possible to fall in and stay in love with someone?  Are the romantic feelings in such a context somehow less genuine or intense than in a "traditional" one where both people are in physical proximity? At the very core of a strong romantic connection is a strong mental bond between two individuals.  Without such a bond, the physical connection, no matter how intense, will eventually fade away.  Once the intensity of the physical attraction for someone wanes, there is nothing substantial left to keep the momentum going other than the person's mind.  If the mental attraction is not present, the connection between two individuals will most likely be shallow and short-lived.  Given this observation, it's not difficult to imagine how Theodore can develop such intense feelings for someone with no physical form.  The relationship that develops between Samantha and Theodore goes directly to the core of a strong romantic connection, a genuine and deep mental connection.  This point is exactly what the director is trying to get at. What ultimately constitutes a genuine and deep romantic bond between two individuals?

Assuming that true love can develop without a physical form, another theme the film covers is how love can eventually fade away for reasons not related to a lack of a physical connection.  The director uses the relationship between Samantha and Theodore to explore one of the ways that romantic feelings can weaken and eventually disappear.  Whenever two people enter into a relationship, there is often a period of growth for both individuals as they learn from each other.  This mutual growth provides novelty and intellectual stimulation, keeping both individuals interested.  This is exactly what happens between Theodore and Samantha. Samantha absorbs information at hyper speeds and learns extremely quickly. She learns about human emotions and relationships from Theodore because this is something unique he can offer that Samantha can't simply learn from the internet or other electronic sources of information that she has access to.  However, since Samantha learns so quickly, she eventually reaches a level of knowledge and experience that is far beyond what Theodore can keep up with or offer. She starts interacting and "speaking" with other operating systems that are like her and have learned as much as she has.  Much like in human relationships, this is where the decline begins. Samantha is growing and constantly becoming more complex while Theodore stays relatively stable. As a result, Samantha eventually outgrows Theodore because he has remained static while she has been dynamic and in a state of constant growth.  The director uses this decline to explore the death of relationships. Whether the connection is between two humans or a human and an A.I., if both sides are not in a constant state of growth and increasing complexity, the more dynamic individual will eventually lose interest and seek someone with similar attitudes about self improvement and growth.

The film goes on to explore many other themes dealing with happiness, the role of technology, emotions, and human behavior in general.  However, the emphasis of the film is on questioning our assumptions about love, relationships, and how intense romantic feelings can both develop and eventually fade away, even in non-human contexts.

in love with our stuff

I am always perplexed by how much people LOVE their possessions and how they seem to have an almost "unhealthy" attachment to them.  I put the word unhealthy in quotes because I am making a judgement call here and some might view such behavior as normal or even beneficial.

I would like to share a recent journal article that I read about this topic.  The ideas discussed by the authors were really interesting and they made me reconsider my own ignorant views on the matter. The article is from the Journal of Consumer Research:

"Truly, Madly, Deeply: Consumers in the Throes of Material Possession Love."
Author(s): John L. Lastovicka and Nancy J. Sirianni
Source: Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 38, No. 2 (August 2011), pp. 323-342

The authors study the relationships individuals have with their possessions and provide hypotheses on why certain individuals get so deeply attached to their belongings.  The possessions considered are automobiles, computers, bicycles, and firearms.  By using interviews and quantitative analysis, the authors arrive at several conclusions for answering the all important WHY question.  Individuals get attached to items to make up for what the authors call "social deficits."  Lonely individuals that lack true friendships or a romantic relationships compensate and cope with their loneliness by getting attached to their possessions and forming "relationships" with the items.  They nurture and take care of their products by spending time, energy, and money on them.  The relationship with the items brings them happiness and a more favorable alternative to loneliness.

The authors believe that we have an innate "need" to value and to find things or people that we can care for.  When we attempt to fulfill this need through people, either through friendships or relationships, we have the chance to be rejected. This rejection can lead to loneliness, pain, disappointment, and social isolation.  Perhaps one way of dealing with this is channeling that energy towards inanimate objects instead.  After all, objects are "safe" and they can't reject us. This can provide comfort and ease.  Additionally, objects can become anchors for a person's identity and as a way of projecting that identity for others to see.  Possessions can also provide a sense of control since they can never talk back or reject you

I used to have a negative view of such "obsessed" people but the authors touched upon ideas that made me reconsider.  Consider the alternative to dealing with rejection and isolation.  Individuals can turn to drugs, alcohol, even further isolation, and anti-depressant medications with unknown and risky side-effects.  Additionally, is being attached to objects really that bad?  From an environmental standpoint, such behavior can actually be beneficial and promote sustainability.  We might actually throw away less stuff and promote a culture of constant reuse.  Also, what about meeting OTHER people that have similar passions and love for prized possessions like you do?  This can directly fight against isolation and allow an individual to meet and connect with others like him.

Personally, I get attached to objects because they bring back memories or they are associated with people that I care about.  There is nothing inherently special about the object itself, it's the kinds of memories that the object triggers. These memories can bring me joy, pride, sadness, and numerous other emotions.  For me, losing the object is almost like losing those memories or losing the person that object is associated with. It's irrational and emotional but it allows me somehow stay connected with people that I care about but rarely get to see.

Ultimately, this issue isn't as black and white as I originally thought. I guess that's the common theme with a lot of topics before we actually do some research and consider new perspectives.

(image url: http://apollokidz.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/loneliness.jpeg)