Is it really love if it's unrequited? page 3

[Lewis]

Made me think - is "love" really love if it's not expressed and experienced two-ways? If someone doesn't love you in return

Englidh has a poverty of vocabulary in this area. The English word "love" does for 4 different Greek words. See the book "The Four Loves" by C. S. Lewis for more on this.

You mean, I think, eros -- sexual love. Don't confuse it with storge -- affection -- as one contributor to this thread does. Nor yet is it philia -- friendship. Still less agape -- a positive disinterested outpouring of goodwill. Again, read Lewis on this -- still one of the most interesting, intelligent & subtle meditations on the different loves.

I think there are problems with idealizing the "natural loves" (as Lewis calls the 3 other than agape). They're good as far as they go, but tendf to carry in them dark potentialities -- jealousy, posessiveness, the wish to dominate or assimilate. And where would I be if I made my beloved the centre of my world, so that her word became law for me? What if she said: "Get me jewels. Kill if you must. I don't care how you do it." ??

If I did I would harm others, corrupt myself, and collude in something that would do something rather horrible to my beloved to boot.

Eros can do things like that.

Macbeth & Lady Macbeth do something like that to each other, as far as I can tell.

So I shan't idealize eros. But if "the Lady of Cyprus" (Aphrodite) IS there, then there's something more than mere "interest" or even "infatuation" going on. If I feel an intense personal interest in someone, if I feel a sense of humility before her, if I really do feel that in some sense her wellbeing and interests are more important than my own (a rather conditionalband fleeting feeling but a real one) ... if all that, then, yes, I think its eros. I think that would be just what we mean by the word. It would be kind of irrelevant if she was actually thinking: "Well, he looks nice, and I do like him, and there's no-one better in the offing."

If you caught fire, you caught fire. That's what it's like.

[Scott F]

I just got back from "Les Miserable". Unrequited love is one of its themes.

Made me think - is "love" really love if it's not expressed and experienced two-ways? If someone doesn't love you in return, then do you truly know who they are enough to love them? Is it possible to know someone's soul from a distance, or is it a projection of your ideals and fears? Is unrequited love: love, infatuation, or just self-sabotage?

Thoughts on a postcard please

A stalker would agree with you

[YogaBare]

I'm in the boring and unromantic school of thought of this shit's all brain chemistry evolved over millions of years to help trick our bodies into doing things that optimize the ability of our genes to replicate themselves. No "ghost-in-the-machine," no "soul," no "soul mate," no "true love" in the Princess Bride sense. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

Well... if that were the case, wouldn't unrequited love go against everything you deem real? Surely "love" that had no possibility of actualisation / actualiZation would be detrimental to genetic replication, and therefore not congruous with our evolved brain chemisty?

Btw, there was a thread a few weeks back (I think about whether grains had a deeper meaning or something) where you gave your outlook that genesis of life was a result of DNA trying to evolve. I meant to say it at the time, but I thought it was really succinct. A lot of the time people just use different language, but the underlying outlook is actually the same. When I say "soul" I really mean "energy" or organic matter: the only intention of which is to reach a more evolved state.

[YogaBare]

I "love" my laptop. Or is it infatuation? Or self-sabotage?

I would say absolutely that love doesn't have to be returned to be love.

A parent loves their baby from the moment they are born- we have no idea at what point the baby loves the parent back. It's still love.

A person can love another person- in a romantic sense or not- and the love is genuine and real whether it's returned or not. Or how about after someone dies? They can no longer love you back- does it mean you all of a sudden don't love them anymore? I think not.

Not true for me. I did not love my child the moment they were born, but I did love my child the moment they were born. I guess it depends on how love is defined.

THere's different kinds of love. Paternal (parents for children and vica versa), fraternal (siblings, friends) and romantic. And umm... of course, the love we all have for inanimate objects..!

Sure, love can be unrequited with friends and family, but I was referring to romantic love.

[YogaBare]

A stalker would agree with you

Dude, I think if you actually read my questions literally you'd see that I'm doubting the unrequited love thing? Maybe a stalker with an identity crisis would agree with me...

[YogaBare]

In terms of Les Mis: Unrequited love means a person falling in love with another person VISUALLY from afar, but not ever meeting that person, but "in LOOOOOOVE" with them. Like totally "knows their soul" in love... for like a year.

In terms of Les Mis (and w/o giving too much away): the unrequited love was from one person towards their good friend.

Unrequited love is an intense feeling: longing, desire.

Love is actually quite different in overall feeling -- in my experience. I've experienced both.

So, I would say, No, unrequited love is not love. It is longing.

I just don't see it.

Romantic love is (among other things) communicating on some insanely intimate level and trusting your innermost feelings and insecurities and fantasies and pretty much EVERYTHING with another person. I just don't see how that's possible when only one of you is attempting to communicate/share on that level.

I think it is love, but it's the simplest, naivest and least meaningful kind of love.

It doesn't really have to be from afar either; you can know someone quite well and be in love with them without them feeling the same for you.

I think it's a shallow sort of love born out of loneliness and, as others have said, longing for connection and intimacy. Deep love has to be reciprocal and based on communication and connection between people. It's still an intense feeling though, one I've felt a few times and honestly not something I care to go through ever again. Its pretty awful, honestly.

I particulary agree with these statements, but - it got me thinking - it seems there are different kinds of unrequited love too.

As Uncephalized said - it's not always from afar: it can be for a friend / person you know well who doesn't feel the same. BUT, there's also this - what happens when two people were in love, and one person falls out of love with the other? The other still loves them, but the love is now unrequited.

Does this mean that the love is not real?

[Mr.Perfidy]

Isn't actual love necessarily unrequited? Asking nothing, expecting no return, no descent into any kind of conditional, contractual, quid pro quo shit? I love animals- when I see them I do things to make their lives easier in some way or better and I do not expect them to then come knocking on my door with thank you cards or to roll over and reward me with belly pets or anything.

[RichMahogany]

Well... if that were the case, wouldn't unrequited love go against everything you deem real? Surely "love" that had no possibility of actualisation / actualiZation would be detrimental to genetic replication, and therefore not congruous with our evolved brain chemisty?

Sexual selection's a bitch. There are examples all over the animal kingdom where one sex (usually the male) get really invested in competing for the affection of a woman (sometimes staking his life on it).

Natural selection and following the best interests of the genetic material itself gets quirky once there are two sexes (and there aren't in lots of cases). It gets even weirder in the case of ants and bees where there are workers and queens, but the workers share the same DNA.

Sexual selection is actually a really interesting, separate field of natural selection that I'm probably not knowledgeable enough to say much more about without getting myself tripped up. Maybe someone better educated in the field can fix up my minor flubs and help me explain what I'm trying to get across.

Btw, there was a thread a few weeks back (I think about whether grains had a deeper meaning or something) where you gave your outlook that genesis of life was a result of DNA trying to evolve. I meant to say it at the time, but I thought it was really succinct. A lot of the time people just use different language, but the underlying outlook is actually the same. When I say "soul" I really mean "energy" or organic matter: the only intention of which is to reach a more evolved state.

Thanks for the compliment. I was basically paraphrasing Dawkins, possibly even vaguely plaigiarizing him from fuzzy memory. I can't claim the succinctness of the explanation as my own in the least.

In fact, I don't think anything intends to reach a "more evolved" state, but rather that those things that replicate with near-perfect fidelity, along with sufficient fecundity (sowing of the "wild oats") tend to stay represented and become a gene pool. And genes that build "survival machines" (Dawkins again) better suited to doing so tend to gain representation in the gene pool over successive generations at the expense of things that do so less well.

So the "love" feelingsplex, to me, is a trick our genes build our brains to play on us in order to increase their chances of making it to the future. And no, I don't mean that a bunch of nucleotides sit around plotting, but the ones that are coded this way tend to out-survive the ones that are coded any other way.

Now I'm way above my own head though.

[YogaBare]

Your soulmate isn't the one who can love you the most, but the one who can make you feel the most.

I shared this with you before:

"it's very rare for a relationship to withstand the Earth's gravitational pull and where it's going to take people and how they're going to grow. I've heard it said that you can't really have a true love unless it was a love unrequited. It's a harsh one, because then your truest one is the one you can't have forever."

Limerence and unrequited love are different things.

What about people who make you feel intense hate? Are they also your soul mates? (Actually, I think yes, but I have unusual views on these things).

I remember that quote, but I don't know if I agree. I think true love is something that lasts... a bond that cannot be broken. (A two way one, for those who are still thinking in stalker terms )

Agree with you about Limerence, but perhaps it's just a sub category of unrequited love? Forgot about that term... I actually wrote a script about it before!

In a particular emotion state, it's possible, and it's still love. Unrequited love is a much broader subject than what's in Les Mis.

True, it was a superficial exemplification and the character who experienced it seemed like a culprit of idealisation.

why say it with flowers when you can say it by creeping outside her window?

LOL

[jojohaligo]

... and family, but I was referring to romantic love.

Yes, I know, I was responding to another comment in the thread.

So to respond directly to your original post, and I am sure I have already read this from others in the thread, but if we're talking about romantic love, where the other person is pretty much all you think about and seeing them makes you weak in the knees and you fantasize about what it might be like to be with them physically - then no, I don't think of that as love, but as desire and lust - or eros.