Love seems like a high priority | Hacker News Reader

Love seems like a high priority

forum.effectivealtruism.org

172 pointsapsec112142 comments

Initially, people do not fall in love. Rather, they fall in lust. This is typically short term. Love emerges when there is deep, long term compatibility and commitment. Humor helps as well. This is an anecdotal observation from someone who has been "in love" for over four decades...

What happens if you never fall in lust with a partner but then fall in love just because of compatibility reasons? Is it really still as satisfying?

It depends on the people in question and how open minded they are. If either one wants good sexual compatibility but the partner isn’t able to provide it, that’s a recipe for disaster. If you both don’t have much of a sex drive then it’s probably fine.

I don't know. But as you age, the lust factor tends to diminish. The relationship tends to depend on more than the mere carnal. Like being friends and enjoying each others company for instance. Partners in life, as it were...

As long as there is some sort of intimacy (including non-sexual and non-physical), I'd say it can be. Lust is just really convenient socially and biologically for getting an intimate relationship started.

Personal anecdote here but over the long term (decades) you'll regret not being passionate with each other if passion is important for you.

I overlooked that aspect for the longest time based on how compatible we were on all other fronts. Unfortunately that turned out to be an expensive and hurtful drawn out lingering issue that exploded down the line.

As Jordan Peterson says, the best, best case scenario is being with a partner you're compatible with and being physically attracted to. Never let go of that person.

You don’t have to have intercourse with everything you love.

Love is a big term for a wide variety of feelings. It’s an never ending endeavour to explore it.

Sexual attraction is different than lust. The first is good as such because it leads to procreation; the second is a vice, an excess of sexual appetite that darkens the mind and, like all vice, corrupts you from the inside. So ultimately, it is best not to "fall in lust". Lust will lead to misery in a relationship precisely because it is the condition where sexual pleasure is sought for its own sake; the other is reduced to an object of sexual exploitation. Because lust is sexual appetite that is no longer proportioned to reason, someone "in lust" will grow tired of his or her partner and will look for the next, often increasingly more risque thrill. Quite a miserable way to live.

Romance as such is also different from lust. It is sexual in nature, but with a greater emphasis on the affective than on just sexual attraction on its own. Romance is what people often mean when they say "fall in love". Typically, romance only lasts a couple years, hopefully having gotten the couple far enough to procreate. Of course, it is possible to cultivate romance, but the main point here is that relationships are supposed to mature, and clinging to the pleasure of passing emotions experienced early in the relationship and using that as a standard against which the relationship is constantly measured is a sign of immaturity.

Love is something we often seem incapable of understanding. Love is not an emotion as such, even if lovers experience emotions. Ultimately love is a desiring and a willing of the good. Love can be broadly divided into two basic varieties, namely, the erotic and the agathonic. The erotic (which should not be understoodd as sexual only) is a desire of the good for one's sake. Whenever we desire something for our own good, we are speaking of erotic love. Agathonic love is desiring the good of the other for their sake. A relationship requires both.

I don't get it. You guys seem to have sex in your mind all the time. What about brotherly love? What about motherly love? What about fatherly love? What about love of one's country? What about love of humanity? What about Love Supreme expressed by John Coltrane https://youtu.be/ll3CMgiUPuU

I think this really depends on the person. There are lot of people who have deep and satisfying relationships with limited intimacy. For other people it's very difficult.

Check out the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/.

You'll see a lot of people on both sides of the equation. People who aren't really attracted to their mate but happy in the relationship, and mostly people who are deeply unhappy because their mate doesn't have romantic/sexual feelings for them.

Having had a fair share of both, I'd say yes, if not moreso. My partner and I never had the hot passionate need to be together. We became friends, we got closer, things made sense, we talked about the nature of relationships, we got closer... and we keep falling deeper in love. Sometimes I wish we had more intense sexual passion, but I've had that with lovers in the past, relationships where the loss of initial passion was notable, where depth in the relationship gradually overtook that loss. So, I guess I processed that loss, to the point where I don't see it as necessary. And, gained the perspective, that depth truly is the goal; passion only blinds us to what's not working and risks souring into passionate discontent.

See also Diotima’s ladder: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima's_Ladder_of_Love

I'm not sure that's true.

I have little to no sex drive (am "asexual" as the kids say), but I've had intense crushes/obsessive feelings about individuals with no associated desire to have sex with the targets thereof.

I imagine that for people with normal sex drives, both components play a role in initial relationship formation; ie, there's an emotional component in addition to "lust" as conventionally defined.

You could quibble that these (relatively short lived) intense emotions are "lust", as opposed to the "love" of a longer relationship, but that seems to be playing a semantic game that doesn't really concord with how we generally use those words.

Infatuation?

There are edge cases to anything in biology. I would say you are an edge case. Love and sex are fundamental to humanity and our continued existence. You being a 0.001% outlier, who will likely not produce any offspring who would have a chance to inherit your asexual-ness, does not refute the parent comment whatsoever.

Love and sex are two different things. There's a reason we have two separate words, not just one.

And, people can love their parents, children, and siblings. Does not mean they want to have sex with them.

What little research that has been done on asexuality puts us at closer to 1%.

I'm certainly an outlier, but it seems intuitively likely that I'm experiencing a subset of what other people experience, rather than a disjoint. Ie, other people feel the socio-emotional component as well as the lust component, with me lacking the latter.

However, it might be difficult for most people to orthogonalize these two components, since for them they occur simultaneously. That's the relevance of my asexuality to my comment: I suspect it allows me to experience the socio-emotional component without also experiencing the lust component, and thereby more easily see them as different.

If it's true that there's both a lust and socio-emotional component, it still seems inaccurate (or at least, idiosyncratic) to refer to the combination of the two as "lust".

I appreciate this perspective. I also appreciate that you responded to a comment that could have been construed as dismissive or personally attacking without a hint of defensiveness or enmity. HN often surprises me.

Data point: I'm definitely not asexual, but I do experience romantic feelings and sexual feelings separately: I feel one, the other, or both towards various people. (A situation that satisfies one drive is likely to inflame the other, but initially they are often distinct.)

Just because people have questioned the word "love" and stuff: when I say "romantic feelings" above, I mean this type of thing: "I find myself idly thinking about her, and that this tends to make me blush; when near her, or imagining it, I'm hyper-focused on her presence (primarily her face), such that if she moves slightly closer, it's as if I feel it on my cheek; my desires are to look at her, smile at her, tell her about my feelings, and touch her affectionately." Upon touching her (or imagining doing so), I would tend to notice her body and, as I say, that is likely to inflame sexual desire; but often not before then.

I've asked around. I've met some guys who said they were similarly separate drives, and others who said they always coincided. I think girls tended to say they were separate as well. I don't have too many or too certain data points, though.

Please don't devalue and dehumanize your opponent and their contribution by calling them an edge case and a 0.001% outlier. Instead, speak for yourself. If for you 'falling in love' is a highly lust driven experience, that's fine. It may be much more 'emotional attachment' driven for others.

Tangentially - being an edge case doesn’t inherently dehumanise someone, edge cases do exist and we need to be able to discuss them without feeling we have to deny that to protect people.

Being an edge case is one of the most human things you can be. Our differences are what make us interesting!

I've read an anecdote somewhere that some phrenology doctor tried to find the most average man in a camp, by measuring everyone and then finding who is closest to all averages of measurements. Turned out that no one had all their measurements near average, everyone was off in one category or another. So, most of us are edge cases.

Sounds like early design on jet fighter seats. Found it!!! https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

Nobody is doing this. A person who struggles with ADHD, who has a diagnosed personality disorder such as schizophrenia, or who identifies as asexual is an outlier neurotypically speaking. Pointing this out is not dehumanizing.

The problem with the thrust of the argument the asexual person is making is they are equating their feelings of obsession as "half" of what makes love work. It's a false equivalence.

To me, the parent comment reads as "you're a freak who will not reproduce so your opinion doesn't matter".

Instead of engaging with the multitude of experiences of love and falling in love, the author discards the experiences by calling the person an outsider with nothing to contribute. That's quite unhelpful for the discussion.

That's a very ungenerous interpretation. But why take offense without knowing if the comment's recipient took offense?

I do not take offense on behalf of somebody else. Instead I find that the comment we are talking about goes against the guidelines of HN, and can't in good faith find a well meaning interpretation.

Guidelines are here to maintain a level-headed discourse, and I grew to expect a high level of empathy as well as thoughtful discussion here. One of the basic things needed for that is not devaluing other people's experiences, but instead sharing your own. Especially in such a highly subjective topic as love and falling in love. But also in general, I think that we would all benefit from accepting that others have different experiences, listen to them when they are shared with us, and share our own experiences expecting the same level of respect.

maybe anytime people use this argument they should provide an alternative.

so alternatively, how do you point out statistical insignificance, without calling someone a freak? That obviously not what literally happens here, but since you can read it like that, what would be the phrasing that YOU won't read as hostile?

Every one experience is anecdotal, and as such statistically insignificant. We get into trouble not when people tell their own statistically insignificant stories, but when someone tries to speak for others.

Generalizations, especially by someone who has no overview (e.g. doing some kind of a study on the topic) are not interesting. They are as if the photoreceptor cells in your eyes would talk to each other, while you look at the sky. "I see blue" most would say. "I see black", some would say. Then, some cell seeing blue could make the generalization that all are seeing blue except for some outliers. And you would remain blind to the fact that birds (appearing black) are flying in the sky. We need data points and personal experiences, not generalizations, to get a sharper picture.

Anecdotally, I teach first year students at a design university. They use generalizations all the time in language and in thinking about highly personal experiences (e.g. when asked to describe how they felt using one object compared to using another some would say "one feels" instead of "I feel"), thus pushing their realities onto others. It is as if generalizations are taught in schools as being more valuable, more valid, and personal experiences as anecdotal and invalid. Of course, the ability to deduct, to generalize is important for the process of reasoning. But it gets in the way when talking about what we actually feel and perceive.

You wrote 3 paragraphs and did not respond to my question. Did you think what you said is some mind blowing insight that no one have thought of or smt?

No need to be snarky and dismissive. I am sure, if you re-read the reply you will be able to understand how it relates to your question.

> Every one experience is anecdotal, and as such statistically insignificant

No, there are anecdotes from people with a majority background, that are useful to more people. If you really thought about this statement instead of forcing a talking point, it should have been obvious. The fact that we value minority's experience does not mean that there is not an inherent priority in most discussions to bring values to more people.

It's really hard to talk to you, since you imply I am forcing some talking point. I don't even know what talking point you mean. I am not from the US, never been to the US, but I can only assume it has something to do with your politics? I also don't appreciate language like "If you really thought about this statement" implying I don't think. That is not necessary. It is really out of place to talk so lovelessly in a thread about love. You can assume good faith on most of HN. No one is attacking you and you don't have to attack anyone. I hope some day you will be able to accept that.

My point was and still is, that anecdotes from people with majority background (as you put it) are not more or less useful to more or less people. When we talk about feeling we don't even know what 'majority' would be as it is really hard to get the real data; to talk about feelings honestly and faithfully. So it makes sense to let people talk first, to gather the actual experiences of real people, without assuming they have majority or minority point of view, and without assuming one of those is more or less valuable. After all, if an experience doesn't resonate with you, you can just let it be and move on.

If you go back to the comment that sparked this discussion, the issue is not that people were not allowed to "talk first".

Someone assessed that a particular anecdote was not reprentative of the majority. They could be wrong there, but instead of challenging that assessment, or "move on", some people jumped on the conclusion that the intention was hostile.

I think I understand you better now. However, there is no 'challenging that assessment', since the assessment itself is useless (adds nothing to the conversation), and could be rephrased as "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man". But instead of being as inoffensive as this quote from The Big Lebowski, the comments reads as, at best, rude, and at worst, abusive. Since the tactic of making the experience of others appear invalid is the cornerstone of abuse. And we should do better than being abusive to each other.

The thread moved on and I'll end the conversation at this point.

> the assessment itself is useless (adds nothing to the conversation)

doesn't this contradict with "let everyone speak"? In a discussion, there are talking points, and then there are comments that contextualize them, such as pointing out whether something *sounds* like outlier. It can help provide heuristics when parsing large chunks of input.

Again that comment reads completely fine to me, and the person did not say they were offended.

>Please don't devalue and dehumanize your opponent and their contribution by calling them an edge case and a 0.001% outlier.

Why devalue or dehumanize?

I tend to view "being outlier" as something positive

Even when someone argues that your opinion is less valid since you are an outlier? Like (for my eyes and ears) the parent comment does?

I believe s/he wanted just to remind or make him/her aware, not devalue him/her.

I know plenty of people who are demi-sexual, in which the love comes first and the sex perhaps later. And for that matter ace folks do have children too.

That's called limerence, not love.

That's the word some psychologist coined. It's pretty absurd to me to take such a common part of the human experience and use a neologism for it, when it's something that has been experienced for thousands of years the world over, and has received common words - love at first sight, infatuation, lust, depending on exact details.

Ok, call it infatuation if you want, but it's still not commonly called love. But limerence sounds like it is like infatuation on steroids.

Psychologists have simply got better at classifying emotions, what you've decided to dismissingly call 'coined'.

The original response being disputed was that people initially fall in lust rather than love. Infatuation and lust seem like different things to me

>Psychologists have simply got better at classifying emotions

This being Hacker News, I am really not supposed to lay into the statement with all the derision and vitriol that it legitimately deserves. I'll restrain myself.

One critique of psychology is practitioners use fancy sounding words- ideally with latin rootes- to make unscientific claims seem scientific.

I believe I read that critique from a psychologist.

That's just obsession and has nothing to do with your status as asexual or not. Everyone is prone to obsessive feelings but they're not companions of love.

I think you're actually the one that's pushing a semantics game here as in societies which are broadly liberal (let's say most Western cultures for sake of argument), sex is the hook that gets you to love. You generally don't start with love and then lust later.

I don't think my experience is at all uncommon among women.

It's extremely common for me that I will love someone first for who he is and only develop lustful feelings later.

Perhaps men routinely begin with lust. Perhaps women do too. But starting with love and lusting later is also common.

Lust may be the wrong word here. Infatuation is more like the term I tend to associate with people's initial attraction and substance of their relationship with someone else. The simple reason has more to do with the fact people simply CANNOT truly know each other, their values, and the result of their behaviors and choices, until enough time passes.

It is also worth mentioning that people's lives arc on their own, in that they change. Preferences change. Values might even shift for some people over time (e.g. a religious person becoming totally secular or even atheistic later in life). And those changes also do not typically emerge in a couple of months of dating and flirting with one another.

It's.... just human nature.

Same here, been with my wife for more than half my life now, we build on our love all the time.

It's funny, I've had infatuation before for a couple acquaintances and celebrities and it's amazing how on a timer it is. Six months, like clockwork, that strong feeling is gone if you don't feed it.

This, been married for 6 years already, but didn't start loving my wife until around year 3, lots of lust before that. We talk a lot about it, we talk a lot about everything, our love keeps growing and lust doesn't play such an important role anymore.

I have never understood how some people can fall in love with just a few sexual encounters, have had my share of women falling in "love" with me... It was quite a scary thing, now I understand I need a long time to develop any feelings. But for the majority of my life, it made me wonder if there was something wrong with me.

*edit for formatting

>Initially, people do not fall in love. Rather, they fall in lust. This is typically short term. Love emerges when there is deep, long term compatibility and commitment. Humor helps as well. This is an anecdotal observation from someone who has been "in love" for over four decades...

Maybe there are different kind of ways to love. If you've just met someone, you can have in the first months some kind of attraction that is different than the sexual attraction you might be feeling. We can call that love.

This doesn't match my lived experience, I've fallen in love with a person I've never had any lust for (and actively found unattractive when we first met). After falling in love the sex was just fine even though I wasn't physically attracted to them.

Yeah, for a highly upvoted comment OP is unbelievably presumptive and universalizing about human nature. The sort of dating culture in which such an account is even natural didn't even exist prior to 50 years ago or so. When I lived in small town America about a decade ago, very few people used dating apps. Hookup culture existed but was not really the norm; most people had a pre-existing friendship before they began dating.

Moreover, my understanding is that many women describe their experience as something closer to what you talk about. They usually do end up feeling physically attracted to their partners, but this is something that happens after they develop romantic feelings for them. I'd have to say my personal experience mirrors this in part, though not completely.

Also worth pointing out the effects religion may have on this. In some Christian sects, for example, adherents are expected to not feel (or at least repress) lust towards their partners until marriage. Assuming that some of them are even partially successful, they will likely have several years of a romantic relationship before lust is allowed to act freely.

you seem to really like freud...

Yikes getting some PTSD reading this

Now I’m a very curious chap who when an interest rises, I likes to explore that interest. One day in the past I was lucky enough to meet a lady who was very Interesting. Talented in so many mediums. Now if I had not known her I would have innocently, as I have done with many other of my hero’s found out as much as possible about her and her talents, but didn't because It felt creepy.

            I could never forget her, which for me with no visual memory is not normal, out of sight out of mind. I did not know her well, I did not know much about her works, I cant reminisce due to lack of visual memory and not much to reminisce about. My denied curiosity would be a powerful reason why my mind would find itself thinking of her, but It was more her goodness and kindness, her frequency that captivated me. A number of years later I wrote a letter or two and she responded.

         Now from narcissist’s wood Nymph, Echo, to other invaluable writings throughout the human struggle, love at first sight exists for some people, be that a biological or a spiritual matter ( IMO its got to be a symbiotic relationship).

         We eventually met up at her house, I screwed up and turned up a bit pissed, I wasn't drinking much at the time and underestimated my capacity, nervousness and thirst. She politely put up with it for a bit then asked me to leave. There it should have ended, about a year later I looked up her Facebook, I seen photos of her that bewitched me, the powerful feelings from just seeing her photo blew to pieces! I was not in a normal frame of mind, I sent letters and such but came off looking like a weirdo due to my temporary insanity, she responded it was obsessive and there the tale ends.

         It wasn't just curiosity, lust infatuation mixed, it was all consuming, she said in our previous letters I must be infatuated, and I in return wrote her a short story to try and approach the subject which she liked. I'm upset I’ve annoyed the lady by turning up pissed and sending unwanted messages, but not in any other way I just hope she is OK and happy. Whatever it was I was lucky it didn't develop before the trouble, I don't know what it was, but it created a cascading reaction throughout my entire being that I had no control over, it was my master, by a long margin.

It would be great if there was more research on on “love” and it wasn’t left to silly Hollywood stories to define it. I’m happy that therapy is normalized and that people (both single and couples) get professional help. But it would be great if therapy was common, and silly notions of finding the “perfect person” didn’t have so much power over so many people.

The Hollywood portrait of love has done a lot of damage to young people the world over. Believing things like "love at first sight" or that it's healthy to "do anything to get the person you want", "never give up", for example. Or that there's always the "one" person who you're destined to find, and if you don't it's somehow a failure of yours.

Incredibly frustrating beliefs that I suffered myself in my youth. Just hope young people today can see love for what it is: chemicals in the brain, mostly instinctive. Most of what makes it work is unconscious, too... your smell (not your freaking perfume, but your natural smell) may disgust, or arouse a potential partner, for example... same with things you have zero control over, like the shape of your chin or ears, the length of your legs, how symmetrical your face is, the way you walk and talk (you can change that, maybe, but not easy)... It's cruel, but no, if the other person doesn't "like" you, don't waste your time and health trying to make them fall for you - they just won't. Just like you can't control who you yourself "like", it just happens (and it's unfortunate that almost everyone seems to "like" the same few attractive people around... if you're not one of them, understand that as soon as possible to avoid being hurt! And try to be happy with other non-perfect people you can find that also understand that).

That, and the parent, spot on comments. Hollywood is a disease for romance.

I do wonder for example, how general is something like "dating"? Did people everywhere always used to go to dates? Was that the mainstream "approved" way to fall in love always? Everywhere? What else is out there? Are most westerners missing out because of the Hollywood stuff? And not only in real life, but also in the arts?

hollywood didn’t invent those narratives, only portrayed what people already romanticized (otherwise, what, are they pushing a love-at-first-site agenda?)

I think it’s more of a narrative to idealize and pursue perfection in everything in an addictive fashion: the perfect life, the perfect partner, the perfect house, the perfect image and so on.

hollywood 'dramatized' them .. they exaggerated them into something else that can cause people to fantasize and aspire, as a technique for influencing/controlling people's behavior

it's the high sugar/fat low nutrition junk food equivalent for people's mind instead of their tastbuds - people ate food before, but fast food made junk food prevalent - hollywood made junk romance prevalent

Things like body weight matter a lot more than tiny things. A girl can go from being rejected by the same guy to having him follow her every whim just by stoping being fat (real story a friend told me about her first crush).

> What I have in mind, ideally, is a relatively quick and cheap activity, using behavioral, psychological and/or pharmaceutical techniques, that two people who have already matched for general compatibility (e.g. with a kind of dating service) can take in order to induce a mutual limerence-like state that can naturally turn into a stable long-run relationship.

It's both sad and amusing to read discussions related to love that are so logical, cold and mechanical.

Limerence is not love and if you want to use pharmaceutical techniques to form a "stable long-run relationship", why not just lock "pre-matched" men and women in a room with a bed and put them on a perpetual Soma-drip?

I'm pretty terrified of the idea of any relationship built on pharmaceuticals. It seems dangerous and unsustainable in the long run.

Logic can work on anything. In fact, it exists to serve emotions. I don't have a logical reason to keep living, I just want to do it so I do. But the logical reason to stay married to my partner is that it makes me happy to do so.

The only reason people are sour about perpetual Soma drips is that they wouldn't work well long-term. Most drugs would be really good if they had no negative short-term and long-terms effects.

> But the logical reason to stay married to my partner is that it makes me happy to do so.

Ostensibly, you actually love your partner and are not in a stable long-run relationship that was initiated by a mutual limerence-like state induced using behavioral, psychological and/or pharmaceutical techniques.

> Logic can work on anything. In fact, it exists to serve emotions.

That's a frightening idea (a riff of the classic Humean quip). Luckily, it is false. Emotions have their place. Properly developed and proportioned to reason, they can motivate us to do what is good and they can be pleasant. They are a good per se and a deficiency of them is defective as is an excess, but in mature adults, they are subject to reason. You wouldn't cheer at the funeral of your dead spouse, right? But if reason is subject to emotion, then there's no way to really object to the idea.

> I don't have a logical reason to keep living, I just want to do it so I do.

I disagree. The reason we wish to live is because to live is good. To exist is good. Being is better than non-being. We are by nature bound to want to exist. Even suicide is not really a wish for non-being, but escape from a predicament.

> You wouldn't cheer at the funeral of your dead spouse, right?

If someone truly hated their spouse I don't really see what the problem is. Although if someone was that happy that their spouse died I doubt they'd bother with a formal funeral.

There are some deeply unhappy marriages out there.

> To exist is good. Being is better than non-being.

That isn't a logical conclusion though, that is a premise. Logic cannot provide premises. Premises enter logic from the outside, and logic decides if the premises are consistent with each other and whether they have implications.

Logic and emotions aren't opposites. Emotions are a fact of life. Logic can help you manage them. If you feel like you would be happier if you met someone and loved them, you should probably do something to meet more people instead of just waiting for it to happen. That's using logic to manage your emotions.

Effective altruists writing about almost anything is highly amusing.

I suggest as a followup essay: Art seems like a high priority. Research suggests you can make yourself like a painting by taking a special drug cocktail while staring at it for six hours.

Effective altruist after trying various drugs: "ensuring a steady supply of cocaine for everyone seems like a high priority..."

Why go through all of that effort when you can just describe what you like and let the computer's imagination bang away at it until it creates something that moves you?

'crowds worshipping a ufo that has crash landed in the desert' - https://imgur.com/a/acdbLVu

(courtesy colab notebook by http://twitter.com/rivershavewings )

I guess pleasure/endorphins seem like a high priority.

I'll take that. Considering I have woman friends who say "you're such an amazing guy, so handsome" while they're single and not interested in me romantically, and I can't seem to be interested in women who show interest in me for a set of reasons only partially identified, I'm pretty much ready to go Brave New World on things.

> Considering I have woman friends who say

I see your problem. If you want to date a woman don't try to get to be her friend over the course of time, just be upfront about it ("I think you and I would be great together. How about we talk about it over coffee?").

Taking time to get to the point signals an extreme lack of confidence to women, and confidence is the #1 thing that gets a woman attracted to a man.

If you don't want to be friend-zoned, then don't try being friends. Be honest about your romantic intentions and you will be surprised how far that gets you.

Beating around the bush indicates to everyone (including other women, your family and friends, her family and friends, etc) that she can do better.

You should figure out what's horribly wrong with you. Or maybe they want to fuck you and are just waiting for an invitation to a date? Observing female friends talking with each other all the attractive guy friends are regularly evaluated as love interests and even given priority when planning social events.

What strikes me about „Love“ is that we lack the vocabulary and the framework to speak about it.

There is not just „Love“ there are a bazillion feelings that fall under this term, and we cannot speak about it.

What we seem to lack is an education.

The Greeks, for example, and later the Scholastics, already had a much more sophisticated way to speak of love than we seem to. As I wrote elsewhere, love can be erotic and agathonic. Within each we can make finer distinctions, and we can speak of various varieties of love depending on the object (love of father vs. love of son; love of wife vs. love of mother). Love is not an emotion, even if emotions accompany various kinds of love. Ultimately, love is a desiring of the good for oneself or for another. We desire the good because it perfects us or because it perfects another.

Our cultural understanding of love is often very infantile, and that's on the milder end of the spectrum. The very idea that you would leave your spouse because you've "fallen out of love" is preposterously childish.

I think I know what you mean, but your assertion seems wrong to me. At times "love" is all what mankind seems to be able to talk about: it's the topic of most songs, but also of literature, cinema, poetry, art in general. I'd risk to say it's the number one topic of art, and we have multiple ways of depicting it and talking about it!

It's, of course, also one topic of science.

I think it is English language problem because we only have one word to cover emotional bonds. I would wager other languages with more terms have it easier. Greek several different word describing types of love; Agape (love of a parent for their child), Eros (erotic love), Philia (love of siblings and close friends), Storge (familial love), Philautia (self love), Xenia (love of guest).

Those Greek words don’t seem to add much over obvious context 99% of the time.

All the below words are older than steam. Newer ones include limerence. We do not lack the vocabulary. People have been thinking about this for an exceedingly long time.

> Greek words for love and what they mean Eros: Sexual passion. ... Philia: Deep friendship. ... Ludus: Playful love. ... Agape: Love for everyone. ... Pragma: Long-standing love. ... Philautia: Love of the self. ... Storge: Familial love. ... Mania: Obsessive love.

https://parade.com/1274015/charli-moore/greek-words-for-love...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love

What about love of Lisp? What label would you attach to that?

Parenthesis ?

Parentisophilia.

That would be Mania! :))

Technically:

    ((: Mania! :))

These are not words used in common parlance though. They are no help in discussing love with people you'd like to discuss it with.

As with many words to be honest. The only thing to do is to study the concepts and create a shared understanding with friends/family.

We do often distinguish between familial love or brotherly love and romantic love, though.

I agree they should be separate terms, and I believe they actually are in many other languages.

I think this is common for one's internal (not shared) reality. Eskimos have many words for snow as a matter of practicality. Likewise, ideas that do not need to be shared often, or as a matter of survival, end up with much fewer pieces of language dedicated to them, excepting the musings of the bored and comfortable.

Just one post from a long line of debunking posts: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497

I thought that Douglas Lenat's remarks (at Lex Fridman's podcast) about this were really insightful[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMKoSRbGVs&t=5691s

No reason is actually given why love is supposed to be important?

Many societies seem to work very well without it? Parents choose marriage partners for their kids, and things seem to work out? Not sure what percentage of such marriages also end up with love?

The takeaway is to focus on solving the issue of Aging, and not waste time in this Love nonsense.

SENS Foundation is doing good work there.

SENS Foundation, or at least Aubrey de Grey, has gotten some sexual harrassment allegations recently.

Hope it doesn't stop them from their core mission.

It's sad how popular or important people get targeted.

My partner and I actually tried the questionnaire and eye contact technique when we started dating.

There are a lot of confounding factors - We were already good friends, and I already had a crush on them. But it probably didn't make anything worse. It's funny to see it pop up on HN.

> We were already good friends, and I already had a crush on them.

them?

It's being used in the singular sense.

I get it, but I thought it's merited in cases where the gender of the person referred to cannot be determined - usually because the reference points to an abstract class of people of any gender ("a manager") and not to a particular person of known gender ("John Smith"). In OP's case, the gender of their significant other is known, so why use "they" instead of "he" or "she"?

To respect their gender identity.

OP's partner may be non-binary or otherwise use they/them pronouns.

It seems appropriate to use whenever their gender is irrelevant.

In this case, it creates extra confusion and extra mental overhead, because of double meaning of "they".

It was very clear to me.

do you also find the indeterminate number of "you" confusing?

Not OP, but thy question evokes an odd pining for idiomatic use of the second person singular in general English.

I understood what they meant perfectly well. Are you perhaps not a native English speaker?

Because they want to.

Everyone's assuming modern notions of 'identification', what happened to good old anonymity? Perhaps 'ReactiveJelly' just doesn't want to reveal (or rather probabilistically point at) their own gender, or that of their 'SO'. It's not like they said 'wife' or 'husband' and then 'them'.

Link to the study (PDF)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616729723400...

The 36 Questions -

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-o...

Honestly, love seems to be a byproduct of good economics. Less work gives people more time to love.

I'm working on this. Though when I initially talked to some vc-adjacent types and accelerator mentors, they over-indexed on current dating apps. It's my belief that if one does indeed crack interpersonal chemistry, that'd be a major disruption...

Dating apps are working on this, albeit higher up the funnel (which is arguably more important), and so a lot of resources are being invested in this area.

Dating apps have gotten worse as there has been consolidation and attempts are being (successfully) made to extract more money out of customers.

My last experience with Tinder over 3 years ago was that it's a carefully controlled dopamine drip. You get a lot of matches at first on the free tier then it slowly decreases until it convinces you to pay then you get a lot of matches again to justify the price and then it decreases again to keep you hooked.

Tinder is crap, but others are better. I've had quite a few high-quality dates from Hinge recently.

Can confirm. Hinge is great.

That's interesting because they're both owned by Match Group.

It makes sense for Match Group to specialise their offerings based on the types of people they think might want to date - e.g. quick flings vs more serious relationships.

Hinge has been my best one too. I hate the $20 price tag per month though. Basically extortion.

Tinder is a joke now tbh.

Bumble is like tinder but saves the guys time.

OkCupid is bloated and nobodies on it.

Okcupid used to be the only good option, but it got increasingly worse since match.com bought it. They recently did another overhaul and now it's so bad that it feels like they're deliberately trying to kill their userbase. Which might actually be true - it's probably better for match.com from a business perspective to kill off some of their less popular offerings and force the users to migrate to Tinder. The network effects and hence the potential monopoly are nothing to scoff at.

Dating apps are in a weird place because they invariably use a subscription model, which means they're incentivized to provide a long-term drip of temporary and mediocre matches rather than finding each user a single good long-term partner. Incentives could be better aligned through a "reverse subscription" model, in which a user pays nothing until the app finds them someone they'd like to date, whereupon they must then "subscribe" as long as that relationship continues.

I have to disagree on that model. That may work for dudes who aren't confident and can barely make a decent profile. But for guys who can, it would be extremely annoying that I have to pay to attempt to date someone I'm not really that interested in. Vice versa for the women as well. Now you're giving them another reason to not consider you because they have to pay money too.

The solution exists. It's natural selection. Unfortunately a lot of guys (especially in the midwest where I'm in) just do not understand how to game the system. I've been on enumerable dates. I am by all means a loser who peaked in high school then bounced back 9 years later and never even had a real relationship. So how was I successful?

Pictures. With friends, in public, signaling social intelligence, and showing hobbies that interest women. Most guys take just cringy pictures that scream "Not only am I a loser, but I'm so depressed I'm embarrassed to do things in front of other people." That is why no girls want to date them. Even the very low status ones.

Also, being confident and just being capable of holding a conversation is basically required.

You don't understand the problem the parent commenter is talking about. This isn't about who is or isn't successful, it's about incentive structures, and the degree to which dating service providers have an interest in having more or less people find love. Currently, people finding partners and being happy means that dating service providers lose money, which means that they will deliberately show you partners that are less interesting to you, to make sure you keep feeling unhappy and come back to the app for another try.

Your experience actually corroborates this, as most people do not want to do a lot of serial dating, and your advice is all about serial dating.

That's the game. An incentive structure will not fix that.

> I've been on enumerable dates.

That gave me a chuckle and reminded me of my friend's complaint that they were "continuously going on dates"

I know it sounds douchey but it's how to play the game. I just stopped. I lost complete interest in it at this point. My hobbies are more interesting.

The joke is that “innumerable” means “so many I can’t count them”, while “enumerable” means the opposite of that.

> Most guys take just cringy pictures that scream "Not only am I a loser, but I'm so depressed I'm embarrassed to do things in front of other people.

From swiping through dating apps with women, it seems like men in my city at least are trying pretty hard. Most have dating profiles with high-quality pictures of themselves doing interesting things with their friends. I don’t see a lot of the profiles you’re talking about.

I live in the midwest filled with lonely losers.

What? That creates a financial disincentive for long-term dating. Better is to pay a one time bounty when a good match is made

> What? That creates a financial disincentive for long-term dating. Better is to pay a one time bounty when a good match is made

There are larger financial disincentives[1] for long-term dating, and yet people do it regardless.

The idea is actually quite good - if the relationship is not worth $1/m then it probably isn't a good relationship anyway.

[1] I'm assuming you meant a $1/m subscription.

How did you come up with $1 as the market clearing price? At what monthly price point would you decide to dissolve your marriage?

I don't think perpetual subscription pricing is a match-making model folks are interested in--as evidenced by the models that exist today in the market.

I think that the reason bounty-based isn't widespread is that it's too easy to defraud--similar to a subscription house-cleaning service losing customers who go "off-platform".

> How did you come up with $1 as the market clearing price?

I made it up. It could be $5, or more.

> At what monthly price point would you decide to dissolve your marriage?

That's a difficult question, and it varies over the years. For example I paid several dozens of thousands to get out of my first marriage, while I am willing to sacrifice a lot to keep my current wife.

I think the fact that this model is almost purely voluntary from an enforcement PoV means that the couple will pay what they feel is fair: bad relationship and they'd feel no obligation to pay, while a good relationship might make them feel happy to pay for a while after staying together.

I think the current generation of tinder style apps are probably worse for this than previous generations of dating sites.

It's such a shame, how much devastation was done to okcupid over the last few years.

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