riverstwilight

Interesting sidenote: "3) Attachment (the sense of calm, peace, and stability one feels with a long-term partner) driven by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin." When women climax, they experience a rush of oxytocin. Men do not have the same rush. That's why women are more likely to feel love for someone they have climaxed with while men are less likely to feel that same kind of love after a climax. Moreover, men do get some oxytocin, but not in the proportions as women. Just to make the subject more complex, after climaxing, every person gets different amounts of different hormones at depending on different factors. So, not all women always feel more loving towards their partner after climax and some men do feel more loving. Etc.

Which is what I've been saying. Hormones are the chemicals having the reactions in the brain. I would just like to point out that this is describing three different systems that do not happen in the chronological order of lust, then attraction, then attachment. They are three different spectrums of reactions, such as I listed in my post describing spectrums. Exchange the word love for attachment and add in attraction as the third overlapping spectrum and I stand by my points. "the sense of calm, peace, and stability one feels with a long-term partner" That is an example of what the hormones cause you to feel, not an exclusive chronological point in a relationship in which those hormones are released. They are released throughout the bonding process. So, a person can be feeling lust, attraction, and attachment at the same time. Generally speaking, most people are to varying degrees. Imagine each feeling has a slider bar on a spectrum and those slider bars move indepently of each other and are constantly moving back and forth along their spectrums. That's why emotions get so crazy and why love is never an easy subject to talk about. It's tied in with all kinds of other things too.

I apologize. I get carried away and forget that my definition of a fun discussion is not the same as everybody else's. I also forget that most of my friends have PhDs in this stuff and enjoy the technical details as much as I do. I am the least educated of my friends, so I think of myself as being not very bright until everybody around me is looking at me like somebody pushed the talk button on the walking encyclopedia. I really didn't mean to pedantic or pretentious. I'm really sorry if I came across that way. That was not my intention at all:tears:

Ok, I can clarify this way...maybe: Love is a spectrum of emotions and experiences. The song is over at the beginning of the spectrum here: X The love you are describing is more along the middle and later ends of the spectrum thus: X-------X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X So, while you would say that love starts here: --------X Science and I would say that love starts with the intial chemical reaction that the brain registers as love here: X-------- Then, lust gets added to the discussion and there are two spectrums overlapping, which muddies the discussion. So, rather than worry about dealing with two spectrums, most people cut out the overlapping part and say that everything at the beginning of the spectrum is lust and everything closer to the middle and end is real love. It's an oversimplification that makes discussions easier to handle, but it completely invalidates the feelings of the people who get the love reaction long before they get the lust reaction (because everybody's brains work differently and we all get these chemicals floating around in different measures at different times for different reasons.) So, I'm not saying you are wrong or that I disagree with you. I'm saying that I'm using different parameters to talk about something we basically agree on, but are seeing from completely different perspectives of experience. I've just described the parameters I'm using and one possible set of parameters that I think you MIGHT be using. Did I ever mention that I'm a romantic in the classical sense with a firm grounding in realism? I <3 science and poetry.

Love cannot come from a photograph. However, love comes before pair bonding. Love is the chemical reaction that facilitates pair bonding. It's often triggered by body language and the way people use language. The brain recognizes familiar patterns and says, "Yes! This person is part of my tribe and is safe to bond with." Love doesn't come from a bond. It helps form a bond that grows into a deeper love and that deeper love is what our culture idealizes as the ultimate goal of pair bonding. You can't love a total stranger. You can love someone whose body language and use of spoken language makes your brain go ONE OF US! ONE OF US! That's why part of the body language of the initial flirting stage is mirroring. Also, lust does not always come before love and it doesn't always come attached to love. It most certainly can and frequently does, but frequently is not the same as always. (My inability to apply the concepts in a way that results in a pair bond does not mean I do not understand how things work...which is no way related to the preceding except for the fact that I've realized where the communication is breaking down and I know I can't fix the part that I wish I could.)

So, because the love didn't last you assumed it was lust? and/or You later learned the difference between love and lust and determined that the previous experiences had been lust rather than love? Even as a teenager I knew the difference between love and lust and could tell when the two were mixing into a powerful cocktail of desire, which always sucked for me. So, my experience of this kind of thing is different than yours. I still love the people I loved as a teen. Only now it is more accurate to say that I love the memories I have of them as they were. Still, I am proud of the boy, who lived across the street, that I used to buy fireworks and cherries from because he has a band and has recorded an album that seems to be building some small scale national recognition. He plays small gigs regularly. There was lust mixed in with that love, but even though the lust is long gone, the love remains. I am happy for the first person who ever showed a glimmer of romantic interest in me. Circumstances prevented that from becoming a relationship, but I'm still happy for how his life is playing out. He married a girl who looks like me, so I'm confident that our near romance isn't just in my head even though we never had a chance to tell each other directly how we felt. I didn't get to spend enough time with him to lust for him. But this may be where our connections are crossing. Where other people seem to lust easily and only love with time, I love more easily and only begin to lust when I feel safe. On very rare occasions, I feel safe quickly, but usually, it takes a long time. Could that be because most people are more afraid of feeling love than they are of feeling lust because lust doesn't make them feel as vulnerable? Lust makes me feel more vulnerable, so I have it under lock and key. Love doesn't make me feel as vulnerable, so I feel and express it quite easily. People seem to have a very difficult time understanding that about me, so it causes a lot of problems. It seems like most people start romances with sexual interest cues in their body language, even if they do wait until they get married before actually doing it. oh. Well. That explains a lot. Y'all keep talking. I'll be over here feeling stupid that I never figured that out sooner. That's a very reductionist view of brain chemistry. They are two different reactions with similar, but distinct results. Understanding the way something works only removes the meaning if you choose to remove the meaning, precisely because things only have meaning when we give them meaning and only lose it when we take that meaning away. Personally, I give the chemical reaction we call "love" a great deal of meaning. Just, obviously, not the same meaning other people give it. So, yeah. I'll just be over here.

I agree with this too. However, it can be very frustrating when you use the word to mean one thing and people think you meant something else. Worse yet when they tell you that it isn't even the right word for what you are feeling when you know it is. The love I have for the people I interact with here is not the same as the love I have for the friends I know intimately, but it's still love even if I never get to hang out with you in person and never get to find out who you really are. Even if love comes mixed with other emotions such as attraction or lust, it's still love. Scientifically speaking, love is nothing more than a chemical reaction in the brain that is triggered by anything and everything from familiar patterns of body language to familiar scents to knowing a person intimately. That chemical reaction has meaning because we give it meaning. Sometimes, we give it more meaning than it deserves. Sometimes we entirely undervalue it. It's all a matter of context and perspective. Love is just a word. It derives it's meaning from context. I love my favorite food. I love my family. Most people would in no way misunderstand my meaning of either usage because most people understand the context of each. You aren't going to marry every person you love. You're going to marry the one you get to know intimately, who also gets to know you intimately and agrees that your lives fit. That's one kind of love in a world where we use the word to mean many things. For the record, I love Mika. I'll leave it to your imagination to guess which meaning of the word I'm using. (Then again, in this crowd, it would probably be better if I didn't )

My thoughts exactly.

I'm so glad sharing my stuff helps other people with their stuff. That's the only reason I do it at all.

Me too

I used a specific example of someone I am a little bit in love with to illustrate my meaning, but since I haven't actually told that person (and would probably never have the proper context for such a disclosure to that person, in which case I'd never tell that person) I didn't want that person to end up reading about it on the internet. But rather than keeping my head and simply deleting the example, I got all flustered and deleted both posts. I have some strict rules for myself about how and when I communicate certain things. Those rules are what allows me to keep other people's secrets, avoid gossip, and to be sure that I tell things to the people who need to hear them rather than having those people find out those things in other ways. I'm very direct and will always tell people what I'm thinking if I have the proper context for it. The proper context for telling someone I love them is knowing I can trust that person to understand what I mean when I say it because it means different things based on the context. It can mean, "You are wonderful and I would love the opportunity to find out if we could build a meaningful relationship," or simply "You are amazing," or "You're someone I want to spend the rest of my life with," and everything else along that spectrum of interacting with someone whose chemistry makes my chemistry all glowy and happy. In the example I sited, that person is not likely to ever have the opportunity to get to know me well enough to know which of those things I meant, so I wouldn't have the opportunity to tell that person. Right now, the only thing it means is that the person's words and body language are similar enough to mine that I feel the person speaks my language and I would love the opportunity to find out if that person actually does. I'm ok with the fact that I may never find out because I enjoy this love for what it is and not what I wish it could be. In this life I will have many loves like this. I will have other loves that will fan up into short relationships that turn out to not work for one or both of us. Eventually, I hope, I will have a love that will turn into a relationship that works beautifully for both of us and that will be the one I hold onto. In the meantime, simply loving people feels nice and I'm not going to say it doesn't mean anything just because it doesn't result in a relationship. It has meaning because it means the world to me.

I told you I keep backups now And this time I didn't mention the thing that embarrassed me so last time. I just wish I wasn't so long-winded! I really can't help being honest, but I do try to have some discretion about when and where I share

You do really love people you don't know. You just don't have a relationship or a meaningful connection with people you don't know. Love doesn't start when you get to know someone. It starts when you see someone who fits patterns in your brain that makes your brain say, "This person speaks my body language and is part of my tribe," so that your brain releases happy chemicals that facilitate emotional bonding. Getting to know someone is what makes a pair bonding last beyond that intial burst of love and makes that love into a substantial connection that lasts. That doesn't mean that the initial love is meaningless. It just means that it isn't a meaningful connection with another human being. It's the spark of connection. It could get fanned into a flame if the other person feels the same way or it could burn like an ember in the person's heart while that person goes off and builds flames with someone else. Sometimes, it's lust. Sometimes, it's love for the person. Sometimes, it's love for how that person makes one feel. Most often it's some combination of those elements. Usually, it is actual love. Problem is that loving someone doesn't mean that you'll have the opportunity to build a connection with that person. Loving someone doesn't mean that it would be healthy for you to be with that person. Loving someone is a good thing, but it doesn't always result in a relationship. Sometimes, all you get is a moment to love someone who never knows about it. That's life. I don't get a lusty vibe from the melody or the lyrics. For me, it feels like a song about that moment when a person decides whether to enjoy the ember of unexpressed love or to take a risk and find out if that love can be fanned into a flame or if the other person will crush it by being cruel. I've chosen not to tell people because they wouldn't or couldn't return my feelings. Plenty of circumstances get in the way of building relationships with people: proximity, lack of time, other relationships in either person's life, etc. I've chosen to tell people and been treated with cruelty for it. I've chosen to tell people and receieved appreciation and respect for my feelings, but not had them returned. I'm still waiting for that first time I tell someone and the person feels the same way. The hardest part about telling someone is that many people think that love is an all or nothing deal, that if you love someone you have to love them entirely right from the start. That's impossible. You can't fully love someone until you fully know them. It's an unrealistic expectation. That first admission of love is simply a chance for two people to begin to know each other. Sometimes, that love grows and they choose to spend the rest of their lives together. Sometimes, they find out that they aren't a good match and they move on. Sometimes, they find out that they are wonderful friends, but not good for each other in other ways. Relationships develop and fail to develop in all kinds of different ways. This song isn't about all that. It's about that moment just before that. It's about that moment of possibility when you love someone, but don't know if that person is going to love you back. At least, that's how it feels to me. It feels to me like someone is singing it to me and for the first time in my life, I feel like someone sees me the way I see the people I love. I know Mika isn't singing it to me specifically, but it's nice to feel that way. I've been invisible my whole life and hearing that voice sing, "I see you," is like being told I'm not invisible anymore. When I listen to this song, I feel what it's like to be seen that way for three minutes. That means everything to me. It isn't a meaningful connection. It isn't a relationship. It's just something that I need to feel. That's valid and important even if I never experience that with someone. Sometimes, just knowing what a thing feels like is enough. Sometimes, just loving someone and never telling them is enough.

I was going to wait until the album came out before I tried to hear any of the songs, but my gut kept telling me I needed to hear this one. Someone, please remind me to have tissue when I'm in Seattle because this song rips me up. I've had a song I've been aching to hear for the last many years and I've searched everywhere for it. I haven't been able to find it because it hadn't been written yet. Now it's in the world and I can hear it whenver I need to. And I really needed to right now. I think my heart would break if I don't get to hear it live, but I know my heart will break if he does play it in Seattle.

I'm no quitter. I'm just old and have bad knees I won't be able to do much sitting because I'm going to be so excited, but I'm glad I'll have a seat when I need one.