Love Resembles Addiction
nautil.us
nautil.us
http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/pdf/NeuralBasisOfLove.pdf
FWIW, I can recall crushing hard on girls up through college, with exactly the same drug-like intoxication that the article describes. But as I got more secure of myself and comfortable in my own skin, the crushes moderated. When I met my wife, there were no massive can't-stop-thinking-about-you highs, no obsessive yearning, few intrusive thoughts. It just felt natural - we enjoyed being together.
This was really disconcerting at first, like maybe it wasn't love after all, but I checked with a number of friends who were happily married for long (sometimes >10 years) periods. Very often, they mentioned the same feeling of not having the trumpets and whistles blow, and instead they grew together and found that love developed later on. Indeed, the people who were always "truly, madly, deeply in love" were usually broken up 2 months later.
I've heard a theory circulated round that when we feel that huge deep rush of intoxication, we're actually reading our "completion" into personal characteristics that the other person possesses. We're not so much in love with them as in love with the idea of being with them. And that limerence persists as long as the idea does, but eventually we all have to face the reality that we are not our partners, and we are not going to somehow become more or better than ourselves just by being with them. That huge mind-blinding rush of dopamine when you meet a new person might be an antipattern, because it blinds us from seeing the real them.
If people enjoy being together, love develops eventually.
May be true, but it really depends on the definition of "works out well". In particular, there's still a very strong taboo against divorce in most of India, so "remains married" isn't a good proxy for "high-quality relationship".
I think that is really messed up. Marrying someone is one of the most important decisions you can make in your life, especially if you're planning to stick with them until you die.
I think you need to spend at least a hundred hours (preferably, even more) together with a potential mate, before deciding whether you want to spend the rest of your life with them. A hundred hours together could be a 60 or 70 dinner dates, and weekends spent together, which you could do in less than 6 months.
Everyone puts on a show in the first couple of dates, and it takes a little while to get to know who a person better / for who they really are.
If more women enter the workforce hopefully a Women's Rights Movement will take off. Maybe it will induce a sexual revolution and do away with arranged marriages in Indian society.
I was about to link to the recent NYTimes article [1] posted to HN which said Indian women were leaving the workforce ( workforce participation slid from 37% to 27% ), but looking at the linked data now it looks it stayed at 27 % [2]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/world/asia/indian-women-la...
They were all serious Christians though. They also went to lengths to ensure there was absolutely no sexual contact whatsoever before marriage -- e.g. by avoiding being alone in a room with their fianceé; always meeting/dating in public places, etc.
I will admit, American Christians do fall outside the majority cultural norm in this country, and I was writing from that perspective.
a sexual revolution and do away with arranged marriages would probably destroy culture and replace with consumerism - everyone focusing on being attractive, rather than being virtuous.
As a kid, I knew what he was getting at, but even then, I knew I would never have those funds.
(My parents fights were legendary. My mom was at fault early on. later it was my father's fault? It was a verbal battle, the minute he walked into the door.)
I am sure this happens widely and in many cases, the woman's consent isn't even taken, post-wedding is when the first conversation takes place. I agree this is unacceptable but in most metros, with less-conservative households, expectation is that they take their time before having a final say.
Edit: sexual compatibility is very important.
I've dated/slept with someone I just wasn't compatible with sexually and it wasn't for lack of trying or lack of patience, there was years of that.
Actually I would say arrange marriages have a higher chance of success simply because people who know you well decide to give you in marriage to someone else whom they know kind of well.
You don't know if these people in arranged marriages have high-quality close relationships, and whether their hearts are really knitted together.
The goal is to try to get to know the person to such a degree that you can decide intelligently whether you truly want to spend the rest of your life with them.
I personally think dating for 3 years or more is excessive, and prefer something shorter. But I would, at the very least have an intense dating period of 6 months or more, before deciding on something as important as marriage.
3 months and 3 years and 3 hours are not so different, although they provide some false comfort.
If you really are serious and want to build a long term relationship, the safest step to take is bring a list of questions and a polygraph.
Part of is growing up and part of it is more awareness of human nature, and part of it is a lot of reflection. So in a dating relationship, the more time spent with the person, the better. Its also important to learn something about their past relationships. With my ex I wasn't really listening when she said that she was the problem in all her past relationships.
I figured that was all in the past. But in my experience, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. IMO, people only change under extreme circumstances.
"Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but take this polygraph maybe?"
I think I'll pass on that approach...
Also, the more chance you have to become alcoholic.
> there were no massive can't-stop-thinking-about-you highs, no obsessive yearning, few intrusive thoughts. It just felt natural - we enjoyed being together
This pretty much describes how I've felt while dating girls I've liked. I've never really had or experienced the "drug-like intoxication" obsession-love, and I'm glad I'm left out of it.
I'm intrigued by your theory of why that it might due to a desire for "completion". I don't know if you're right, but it definitely is an interesting theory.
The girl I've been with for the past seven months I've never really felt intense feelings for. But I really enjoy her company, and it's been much easier to keep the relationship going than previous ones, which always felt like I had to make serious effort to keep it going beyond a month or two.
It used to really bother me that I didn't feel intense feelings of love and worried that maybe sometime I'd have to end things, but things keep going really well, and as we've shared more experiences together and mutually support each other, I've been having those thoughts less and less.
Or perhaps addiction is like romantic love. (Also noticed the first comment for that article also mentions this).
Evolution probably had good reason to select an addiction center in the brain because, well ... those that didn't have and didn't fight for their loved ones, didn't start wars because of it, didn't care as much, somehow haven't made it this far. So that machinery seems to serve a purpose.
Having said this it is a really interesting question what could be the evolutionary force driving romantic love. My pet hypothesis is that it holds couples together long enough for their children to be too old to abandon.
I think dozens on pop songs say otherwise.
Jazz: "Like someone in love" "you go to my head" Pop: Kelly Clarkson's "Addicted", Kanye's "Addiction", Kesha "You're love is my drug" (and those are just the "K" artists!)...
'when the cause and cure is you.'
that illustrate the situation pretty well.There's also cross-tolerance ;)
But cocaine can be far more intense. Once you burn out those dopamine channels, they don't come back. You lose, more or less permanently, the ability to love, or even care very deeply.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/health/views/31mind.htm...
But for sure, one should be careful with drugs that down-regulate receptors, especially those that do so long-term or permanently. As cocaine does. Receptor down-regulation is the mechanism for biological addiction. Cocaine is less addictive than nicotine, ethanol or opiates. You need considerable high-dose exposure to do serious damage. But once it's done, you're screwed.
Is this a certainty? Depending on how we define the dawn of "love," it seems at least vaguely plausible that it occurred after the first human consumption of coca. Of course if we're specifically talking about isolated cocaine then you're correct for sure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_Duncan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Blake
I moved continents to be with her; 8 years together, married for 4.
Then suddenly, early last year, it all fell apart as quickly as it started. Finalizing divorce next month.
It was crazy, but I feel blessed to have experienced it. We're still good friends, but the thrill is gone, well and truly. I was actually relieved when she said she was having an affair. Good, I thought, better you than me; now let's end this.
> “Last Thursday, a guy I went to college with, Mark Rife, committed suicide. As I understand the story, three years ago his wife Sarah died due to complications from a fall off a 75 foot waterfall. She fell; he dove in after her. Against all odds, they thought she had recovered. Life had returned to some degree of normal; but then six months later, she died in her sleep. Mark was devastated.
> In a video he left behind, Mark describes leaving Sarah’s funeral, driving who knows where and simply wanting to die — but he remembered the time they watched the film Juliet and Her Romeo, a film he loved, and he remembered Sarah’s question: “Do you think Romeo would have still killed himself if he’d waited 1,000 days?”
> So, Mark went on a 1,000 day odyssey, with funds from Sarah’s life insurance policy, to give him time to see if his choice would still be the same. Would he still want to kill himself? Mark traveled, explored, met knew people. He says he “followed every impulse.” Mark had been a pastor in Hawaii, and he left his life behind.”
Full story here: http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/the-1000-days-of-mark
I still feel rage when I think about what tumblr did:
> Mark kept a detailed blog of his 1000 day adventure, which we may never see because Tumblr took it down immediately after his suicide. I do not know whether or not this was at his family’s request, but it is distressing because he clearly wanted us to see his work. He painstakingly blogged, created content, made videos. In his suicide video he says that the website explains, “a bit more of my process, how I came to this conclusion.” To keep the blog censured is not the way to honor his death. God forbid we face the reality of a man’s decision to die when we could all just be re-blogging that picture of a squirrel in a ballgown instead.
Thankfully Vimeo kept his videos online: https://vimeo.com/27856790
The blogging could have just as easily led to "I waited 1000 days, and I decided to live on for Sarah. She saved my life."
Perusing it, perhaps it's confirmation bias but I can't help getting the sense that he's already the suicidal type... Fatalism and what I'll call "inflexibility/overcommitment to a cause" pervades it (hint: not a survival trait), and the looming 1000 day deadline ensures he will never get a chance to actually move on.
[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/01/suicides200801?curren...
I started two relationships like this - straight up addiction. It doesn't end well. It took me two times to figure that out for some reason.
Though those experiences made me appreciate the relationships I had after those though.
I have been lucky to have experienced it once and now, 8 years later we still have it in us.
Of course it doesn't manifest in endless nights of looking into each other's eyes, but we still cherish that period as a gift from God himself.
Yes it does resemble an addiction, although maybe it's worth reversing the terms - addiction is actually like "true" love.
Everything in our lives just clicked - we'd just moved to the beautiful city of Barcelona, it was spring time and flowers were in bloom, we had money, more than we could spend and we traveled around and experienced each other through Europe - Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Brussels, Stockholm, Athens, Vienna, ...
Every week in a different city, weather was always great, the food and wine were fantastic - but all that beauty around us was pale in comparison to the look in her eyes.
That look - when this beautiful girl looks at you like you are everything for her and you feel like she's everything for you - like you are the perfect drugs for each other - that is a powerful and fulfilling experience.
That's what it feels like to be blessed.
Our daughter is the result of that love and we often joke that our love was actually the effect of her coming into this world.
Drugs don't really come close to the powerful emotions that we can generate naturally when we are in love - I can only compare it to an MDMA trip that lasts for months...
That love has carried us through the difficult moments of having a child and careers in our modern, artificial society and we would have been separated many times had it not been for those memories.
Being from a "warm and romantic" background myself, I can confirm that falling in love is very much intoxicating. It alters one's frame of mind and leads to decisions one simply would not make for any other reason. Some of them are quite momentous and have lasting impact indeed.
I can't really complain--they both love me--I grew up in a safe middle class environment, one of them always read with me at night when I was young, I never worried about being hungry, got toys on x-mas, etc. They certainly never abused me.
But to this day I struggle with relationships. I have a hard time connecting with people, even in a non-romantic context.
Man, I realize I don't know anyone who's going to read this, but it feels real good to confess it to someone.
EDIT: To be honest, I feel like such an asshole. There are people that have had it way worse than me, and here I am feeling sorry for myself.
In reality, a lot more parents stayed together for the kids than you realise. Decades of marriage aren't easy to sustain for anyone, no matter what their personalities or notional compatibility. Many more people struggled and struggle with depression, alcoholism or substance abuse than meets the eye. There's a veneer of comme il faut civilisation over it all, but it's very thin.
Actually-existing reality is messy. The world is messy. Don't forget that you only see the curated--in some cases scrupulously curated--presentation layer of almost everyone else's life.
It's almost like going to a Quixtar-Amway IBO motivational conference/Sieg Heil cult rally, or any trade show consisting primarily of account reps, crazed MBA apes and sales bullshitters; it'll seem like everyone's a successful millionaire except you, because that's the whole point of the venture. Nobody would pay expensive registration fees to attend a grim, morose and sober appraisal of the ups and downs of the casino that is their life. In reality, 89% of them are broke.
I don't really know what the next step to take is.
> But to this day I struggle with relationships. I have a hard time connecting with people, even in a non-romantic context.
I was in a similar situation, and you can get over it with time and practice.
I have a friend who's stayed married for > 10 years for the kids. His wife hates him, is passive aggressive to him and is always putting him down. It's rubbed off on the kids and he's struggling to teach them the way mommy treats daddy is not the way they should treat people.
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Let me add, I also have a close friend who has great parents who've been madly in love their whole life and yet he massively struggles with relationships.
I grew up in a 'parental couple' too. Lots of my friends have parents who had troubled relationships to say the least. It does impact you. It also makes me wonder which couple ever had a long tender and motivating feeling staying together. I find culture makes people run in circle for something few understand but it's too late you settled.
That thought often cheers me up. My problems are, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant and transitory. Better buck up and better days will come.
Couldn't someone say you're addicted to work? To entrepreneurship? Solving problems? Or for many here, hacking?
(Not being pedantic, I just like set theory symbols and never get to use them)
Even if one doesn't agree that the factual content of this research is boring, rather than salacious, I think the conclusions drawn here are vastly premature given our current understanding of the brain. Imagine that somebody with a tool to "see" electrical currents (an oscilloscope? CAT scan? I don't know) was looking at my computer, first as I unleash a massive DDOS attack on some unsuspecting evildoers, and then as I put my latest philosophical writings on my ftp server for all my rabid fans. In both cases they'd see my NIC go crazy, working itself to death to blast out packets to either badly configured DNS servers or badly confused human beings (as it happens, these human being strongly resemble cocaine addicts when it comes to reading highly digressive rants composed by yours truly). So, is hosting an essay on an FTP server "the same" as initiating a DDOS? Yes, I suppose either one could fry my network adapter, but that's pretty contingent. So, how exactly are they different, and what does this have to do with cocaine?
Restricting ourselves to what's happening inside the computer, the differences reside atop a massive tower of abstraction. And what's more, these differences put down shallow roots. Even with an understanding of the von neumann architechure generally or my intel chip in particular, most physical ("neurological") measurements one could make would look pretty damn similar. One would have to understand the dynamic relationship between the cpu state register, my RAM chips, and my Hard Drive to even begin to grok what's "really" going on. I think neuroscience is in a state analogous to that of a man measuring currents in a modern computer. Even if it turns out that in certain neurological ways love and cocaine are completely identical, it may turn out that the similarities are completely overshadowed by subtler states in a different subsystem. We don't understand brain architecture, so who knows.
And really, the crux of the difference between the DDOS and rabid fans downloading my latest essay in beautiful LaTeX formatting has to do with the way the activity is situated in the relationship between me and the social world in which I exist. And the same is true of the difference between love and cocaine addiction. Courtship is a foundational human activity, one that profoundly shapes our cultural practices and understanding of ourselves. Of course it changes us! What the hell is meant by "Normal Altered State?" What is an "unaltered" human state? Being a human is inherently a state of profound embeddedness in a culture which originates in others. And another human being, who is also a rich and complex cultural creature, has immeasurably more to offer than the cruel, contentless, solipsistic chokehold of a drug addiction.
Take it from somebody who has both.
I love the idea that many things in life can be modeled as addictions. Abstractly, an addiction takes the pattern of long periods of misery (plateau) interrupted by brief moments of ecstasy - what's special about an addiction is that it feels like the moments of ecstasy are worth it. This pattern is similar to that involved in learning a new skill, or going through a personality change.
"Love is like oxygen...You get too much you get too high... Not enough and you're gonna die"
Short (single) version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlM6OBRc8w
By Sweet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet
(You may know them better for The Ballroom Blitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_jdiU47bFA ).
I'm not a Christian, but the best description of love (that I know of) is found in the Bible...
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+1...
To look at it in information-theoretic terms, you need a higher-bandwidth channel to communicate about "core" experiences like love. Labels condense information by encoding culture and definition into them. So it's tempting to reach for them. But if the person you're communicating with doesn't share the same culture and definition, then you wind up mis-communicating until you can work out the source of the disconnect.
Labels are great for talking about computer software systems. Not so much for love.
For me, and to use your terms, I can't feel romantic love for someone without also having desire for them. I can care deeply for them, want the best for them whether it's with or without me, but in order for me to have a loving relationship with someone, desire has to be a constant undercurrent. I cannot spend copious amounts of time with a person otherwise, I start to retreat back into myself. Desire is that thing that draws me out and allows others in, it's absolutely essential.
So, while your love / desire divide may work well enough for your purposes, it won't necessarily for other people. You can try to adapt the framework to accommodate them, but do this too many times and you're left with a mess.
It's best to just share your own experiences with as plain of language as you can and let other people come up with their own abstractions.
That's what I meant by saying that desire can be the gateway to love. Desire helps you commit, love can grow from that point on.
Without the strong feelings that often characterize the first period in a relationship, I or the other would probably have bailed out before even figuring out if some of these issues can be resolved.
Of course, the downside is that I've found myself spending a lot of time and energy in the infatuation phase only to discover that there were fundamental incompatibilities and wondering how I could have felt so strongly about this other person in the first place. But I guess that's unavoidable.
Cocain destroys your mind - love heals it.
What would this mean in practice? Court-ordered rehab?