It's actually three, and therein lies the roots of our suffering.
I've always found the question "do you love me?" difficult to answer. Our culture and language assume there is only one kind of love that exists between two adults (whatever their sexual orientation). But the problem is that it simply doesn't match our physical reality.
Here is an excerpt from an article on the Economist:
Helen Fisher, a researcher at Rutgers University, and the author of a new book on love, suggests it comes in three flavours: lust, romantic love and long-term attachment. There is some overlap but, in essence, these are separate phenomena, with their own emotional and motivational systems, and accompanying chemicals.
Because they are independent, these three systems can work simultaneously—with dangerous results. As Dr Fisher explains, “you can feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic love for someone else, while you feel the sex drive in situations unrelated to either partner.” This independence means it is possible to love more than one person at a time, a situation that leads to jealousy, adultery and divorce
It's as if we only had one word for hunger, fatigue and thirst, and worse, we actually believe they are the same thing. So we'd feel frustrated or even guilty when we still feel hungry after drinking all we can. We'd have people who get ostracized by friends and family because they've got all the food and drink they need and it's wrong to catch a nap on the side.
Sounds absurd? What do you think?
I think the claim that long-term attachment, romantic love, and lust, can all be felt independently with different objects, is correct. But that doesn't exactly make them independent. There are complex caulsal relationships between the three, and other emotions that come into play.
Given time, lust frequently gives rise to romantic love, and given time romatic love tends to cause long term attachment. Not always, of course, but often, and this has consequences.
You might wonder why, say, a spouse who only feels long term attachment himself should care if his wife sleeps with some other object of lust. After all, the fact that she feels lust towards someone else does not imply that she feels any less attachment to him.
But, that is just the situation at a particular moment. Lust often turns to romantic love, and romantic love often turns to long-term attachment, so given time this guy is going to lose what he cares about, even if it is just long-term attachment.
The other problem of course is that, while it might be realtively easy to feel lust without feeling attachment, it may not be so easy to feel either romantic love or long term attachment without feeling jealousy, pain, and anger, when you get cheated on. These three types of love may be independent of each other, but that does not mean they are independent of all the other emotions we are subject to.
Comment by Dr. Strangelove — April 16, 2006 @ 6:50 pm
Hey, good to see you back.
Yes, I totally agree. These three emotions are separate in origin, but they are not independent.
So love is not a simple emotion, and it's not even three emotions, it's a word representing three separate emotions which interacts with each other in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways.
Now, if only we were free to explore these complexities by acknowleging that it is simply unrealistic to lump everything under one neat category, we might have less material for the Jerry Springers of the world.
The fairy tale goes, boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl loves boy, they get married and have kids and live happily ever after, til death do them apart. Well, I know that there are people who are genuinely happy living in that arrangement. But I also believe that they are in the minority and that this willful denial of the vast complexity of the human emotions called love is the root of much suffering.
Comment by Ethlite — April 17, 2006 @ 6:45 am