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Stoic Fatalist Romance
This is just some musings, and I make no promises of coherency. However I have been reading/hearing about various issues friends of mine have had with their love lives, good and bad, and I have been thinking about what I think of love. I promise that statement is not as redundant as it seems.
First off, I should say that I believe in love. I believe in love as a powerful emotional comitment between two people. I believe in different kinds of love - familial, romantic, and platonic. Maybe even other kinds that I am either forgetting or I haven't been exposed to.
Secondly, though I believe that Love is a bond between two people, I don't think it is exclusive. It is possible to love more than one person, both in succession or even at the same time. I don't believe love is limited, but it is different betwen different sets of people. A loves B and C, but not the same way. It isn't necessarily a measure of quantity or quality - our socicety wants to quantify and qualify everything, to explain and limit things. I don't know if it is *possible* to do so with love, but I'm certainly not convinced it is helpful. Love, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, so why try to limit it?
I don't believe love is static. Life is fluid. People change, and emotions also change. Our socitety allows for a lot more dynamism thanpeople have been allowed in the past, and I think this fluidity explains, in part the high divorce rates and the tendancy for serial monogamy, etc. Some people love the same people for all their lives, and others don't. I think in the past people learned to live together when they were not necessarily in love anymore, because they had to. As a tangent, I also believe that you can have a happy and fulfilled life with someone that you don't love.
That said.... As some of you know, I consider myself a stoic in the old sense - I don't believe that emotions should ever be the controlling factor in thoughts, decisions, actions, etc. This is especially true of the important powerful emotios such as love. This doesn't mean that I don't think people should do things for love, but all decisions are a matter of choice, and you always have to be willing to accept the consequences of your decisions.
I don't think that love is something we necessarily choose to have or not to have, or be in, or what have you. You can't make someone love you, and you can't make yourself love someone else. But we *do* decide what to do when we love someone.
Because I think that love is good, and that we can't control it but can (and should) control ourselves, I don't believe in mourning lost love. I am not necessarily an optimist in all things - I don't always expect the best, though I do always hope for it - but I alsways do try and seek the positive side of things. Any good experience that ended was still a good experience, and I think that they should be treasured. It is better to have loved and lost, as they say. And I really believe that.
I guess that is all for now...
First off, I should say that I believe in love. I believe in love as a powerful emotional comitment between two people. I believe in different kinds of love - familial, romantic, and platonic. Maybe even other kinds that I am either forgetting or I haven't been exposed to.
Secondly, though I believe that Love is a bond between two people, I don't think it is exclusive. It is possible to love more than one person, both in succession or even at the same time. I don't believe love is limited, but it is different betwen different sets of people. A loves B and C, but not the same way. It isn't necessarily a measure of quantity or quality - our socicety wants to quantify and qualify everything, to explain and limit things. I don't know if it is *possible* to do so with love, but I'm certainly not convinced it is helpful. Love, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, so why try to limit it?
I don't believe love is static. Life is fluid. People change, and emotions also change. Our socitety allows for a lot more dynamism thanpeople have been allowed in the past, and I think this fluidity explains, in part the high divorce rates and the tendancy for serial monogamy, etc. Some people love the same people for all their lives, and others don't. I think in the past people learned to live together when they were not necessarily in love anymore, because they had to. As a tangent, I also believe that you can have a happy and fulfilled life with someone that you don't love.
That said.... As some of you know, I consider myself a stoic in the old sense - I don't believe that emotions should ever be the controlling factor in thoughts, decisions, actions, etc. This is especially true of the important powerful emotios such as love. This doesn't mean that I don't think people should do things for love, but all decisions are a matter of choice, and you always have to be willing to accept the consequences of your decisions.
I don't think that love is something we necessarily choose to have or not to have, or be in, or what have you. You can't make someone love you, and you can't make yourself love someone else. But we *do* decide what to do when we love someone.
Because I think that love is good, and that we can't control it but can (and should) control ourselves, I don't believe in mourning lost love. I am not necessarily an optimist in all things - I don't always expect the best, though I do always hope for it - but I alsways do try and seek the positive side of things. Any good experience that ended was still a good experience, and I think that they should be treasured. It is better to have loved and lost, as they say. And I really believe that.
I guess that is all for now...
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I'm not sure you really get a choice in that. Mourning is the process by which we learn to deal with a loss and restructure our lives, thoughts and routines to account for it.
If you meant that we shouldn't brood or analyse the loss in microscopic detail, then I'd agree.
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On the other hand, I don't think that not everyone who thinks or says they are in love necessarily is ;)
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It is also quite possible to love something which is not another person.
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I do agree that you can love things as well as people, though. You can certainly love animals, especially, and also things. I was just thinking more about people when I wrote this.
Like I said, these are just musings - nothing absolute :) I was mostly trying to say that though I think you can love more than one person (or thing) at once, your love for/bond with any particualr object of affection is always a unique relationship. Argh. I'm lacking the means to express myself properly on this issue apparently :o
And Chocolate!
Mmmm... Godiva, the orgasm-tastic chocolate.
Re: And Chocolate!
Re: And Chocolate!
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I recently had a discussion in which I said I was not a jealous person. This is true. It was suggested that this is the wrong thing to be, since jealousy implies passion, I guess, and often a partner wants to be jealousied over, at least from time to time, I guess to know that they're valued.
I've thought about what I said, and it's still true, but it doesn't mean I don't get feelings of jealousy. Sure I do. But they don't get very far, within me. I think it's best that I don't claim rights of control or suffocation over a person I care about, just as I don't want them to do to me. Life is short, and limitations deny us experiences that we only get the chance to take once. I don't want to limit the people I care about just as I don't want them to limit me. If we are to be limited, we have to make that choice ourselves. I think that's actually more what love is about, is letting the person you care about be free. If they still care about you, if they still choose you, then you know they love you.
With that in mind, as I said, I get feelings of jealousy just like any other human being. I know that my jealous feelings arise partially because, on some level, I want to possess or control the person I care about. The other reason for my jealousy is that it reflects my own insecurities, threats to my self-esteem. I am a pretty fragile person, emotionally.
I said these feelings don't get very far in me, and what I meant was that I don't act on them. I have pretty strong emotional checks in me, and one benefit of that is that I can dismiss feelings like jealousy, which I intrinsically understand to be destructive, quite easily. This comes back to the stoic philosophy. I can recognize a source of emotion and then deal with it rationally.
I can't do that as well with every emotion, some not at all, but for some reason I am simply not a jealous person.
This leads to some minor frictions. (1) People like to be jealoused over, and I don't do that. That's not a huge problem, since I think most people can recognize that my relationships tend to avoid all the negativity that also comes along with a person who exhibits strong jealousies.
(2) Just because I'm not jealous, doesn't mean the person I care about isn't. This is a much bigger ball of wax. It could theoretically result in all sorts of inequities in a relationship. I haven't really worked this out yet. I need to give it more thought.
So, yeah, this was all just off the top of my head, but your post got me thinking. :)
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I don't understand people who try to make others jealous to get attention. I do't understand why the person they are tryng to make jealous in that situation wouldn't get mad at *them* for the attempted emotional manipulation. Bah, people are dumb :p
I'm not 100% sure that all possessiveness is jealous though. Sometimes it is just plain selfishness. I don't want you to spend tiem with that person because I want you to spend time with *me*.
And oh, that just opened a whole can of semantics in my head about the relationship between words/language and feelings -_-
I need a nap!
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I think this is what I meant, at least partially, when I described the sources of jealousy I may feel. I guess I will take back what I said about wanting to possess or control someone and re-qualify that as wanting, even irrationally, to protect a scarce resource (if I can use economic terms in this context). I know a lot of people are different from me, but it does not bother me what the person I care about does with someone else. I just would like that person to still be available to me as much as I like. It becomes pretty obvious, then, that a desire to possess or control is synonymous with a threat to self-esteem; they all have the same root motiviation, which is to maintain (or increase) the level of relationship with a person.
It's just that expressions of jealousy are a really bad way to go about it, and are unfair.
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This is how I think about things, but of course, it has been a long time since I have actually been in love :/
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