This is something I've been feeling for a long time and in today's social climate it shouldn't be as hard to say as it is. I'm a disamorist. That means I don't believe in love in the same way that an atheist doesn't believe in a god. For a long time my feeling has been that there are so many different emotions that we call "love" that the term has virtually no meaning. I don't know quite when I started thinking that, but it must have been around the time I stopped believing in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny because I've felt it in the back of my mind for as long as I can remember. Couple that feeling with examining the relationships that I have had over the years and realizing that I've never felt any of those dozens of emotions we call "love," even for those most resembling romantic relationships and the possible conclusions are clear: Either I am uniquely cut off entirely from a huge chunk of the human experience or that chunk is just a delusion that all people indulge in for the sake of maintaining pair bonds capable of raising offspring and even though I can't break free from that delusion, at least I've begun to see it for the fiction that it is. The latter option makes more sense to me both emotionally and intellectually. So yeah. I know it's not one of the traditional "coming out" topics, but it's nonetheless something I've struggled with for a few years now and I wanted to admit it somewhere publicly now that I've come to understand it myself. I hope it doesn't come off as offensive to anyone. Oh and hey, this site doesn't seem to lag horribly for me anymore so maybe I'll become a regular here again.
So, wait. Are you saying you don't believe in love in a romantic sense of the word? Because that's actually reasonably common. Most people call it Aromantic. Or are you saying you don't believe in love at all ever in any sense? (Either way, I'm super supportive of you, but I am confusion)
What I'm talking about is more of a belief than a romantic orientation. In that sense I would describe myself as "heteroromantic," but I don't buy into it as anything more than a repeated pattern of behavior that kept early humans from going extinct. It's a feeling that I'm not able to escape from, yet still recognize as not real. To go back to the atheist example, I suppose it's more like someone who believes it makes more sense for there to be no god but can't bring themself to fully stop believing it. I also think that the list of emotions that are referred to as "love" is too broad for the term to have any meaning in the general sense. There's romantic love, familial love, platonic love, love that soldiers feel for their comrades on the battlefield, patriotic love, likely many others that I haven't heard of, and all of these can be subdivided even further. All of those emotions are real in some sense (though some less than others), but it seems to me that a single word to refer to all of them can't possibly be meaningful, especially because they're all so different from one another.
Maybe I'm not getting an accurate view of your stance from your arguments, but you sound incredibly arrogant. You seem to be saying that love is a mass-shared delusion, and your only reasoning is because you can't appreciate it or flat out can't feel it at all. This is completely lacking in empathy for other people who do feel love and it's a very closed-minded view. Really, think about what you're positing for a second in the context of the billions of other people on this planet, almost all of whom have experienced some form of love. You are sort of right in that love almost certainly evolved as a means of encouraging long-term pair bonding through an offspring's adolescence if not longer. So just because we have a scientific basis of it, that makes it a delusion? If anything that makes it even more tangible and real. We didn't start saying that illness wasn't real just because we were able to identify bacteria and viruses as causes of infectious disease. Moreover, it is quite easy for most people to differentiate between romantic and platonic love. Love is an involuntary response to another person's virtue; you come to love a romantic partner, a close friend, or a family member because you recognize their virtues that are compatible with yours. Where romantic and platonic love differ is the context and the presence or absence of a desire to procreate. The other things you described (like "patriotic love") aren't really love, they're just fanaticism or strong enthusiasm. Do correct me where I'm wrong; this is what I got from the way you framed your arguments.
I figured out quite early on that "love" was a pretty blurry concept. Good luck giving a clear cut definition to that one. Kinda like the words "ghost" or "god". Not that it makes them entirely useless. I've always had a had time slapping a label on my emotions. I can recognize anger quite easily alright, but subtler emotions utterly confuse me. Not that it bothers me that much. I've been dating someone for three weeks now. Am I in love? No idea. All I know is that I wept tears of joy just thinking about it last week. I just want our relationship to last as long as it can and I'll do anything and everything in my power for that to happen. I'm fine leaving it at that. This is the first time in my entire life I've ever felt anything like this mind you, and I'm 38 years old.
You're right that "delusion" was probably too strong of a word. I apologize for that. Meme (in the classical sense) might be a better word for what I'm describing in that I see it more as a pattern of repeated behavior than something hard coded in the human mind. Early humans could have just as easily bonded in harem-like units, but for some reason pair bond behavior was easier so that's what was imitated most often and now social conditioning in almost every culture instills in us the desire to continue imitating that behavior so strongly that we feel like it's an intrinsic part of being human. So love is only real in the sense that money is real. Things get very messy when a barter or gift based economy is applied to more than a dozen or so people, so now we have paper rectangles (note: better countries than mine also have plastic rectangles) and round pieces of metal that we trade as shorthand for things with actual value. In the same way, love is a shorthand of sorts for, "If this person stops being a part of my life, my chances of survival and/or quality of life will be severely reduced. I should continue to watch out for this person in order to ensure that their survival continues to benefit my own." I'm not so arrogant as to say that just because something is a social construct that means it isn't real. I'm just saying that love being real as anything other than a social construct doesn't make sense to me anymore. Close examination of all my past and current relationships has confirmed, at least for me, that no love exists that society has not conditioned me to feel. I don't think it's possible for me to rise above that conditioning, but maybe I can at least stop letting it bother me and with that I might be able to actually stop hating a lot of things about my life that I really shouldn't hate so much.
The money analogy is interesting, because it can really support either of our arguments if you're going by a resource-backed currency or a debt-backed currency like what we have now. But financial commentary aside, yes, pair-bond behavior is preferable for humankind as a whole, but the reason is more well understood than just "some reason". In nature, sexual reproductive strategies can be broadly classified as r- or K-selective. (Bear with me, it won't get any more jargon-y than this.) r-selective reproduction involves quantity over quality: use your energy for making as many offspring as possible. K-selective reproduction involves quality over quantity: use your energy to raise a small number of offspring the best you can. For a species like rabbits, K-selective reproduction makes no sense. Rabbits rely much more on base instinct than learned behavior, so it would be a waste of time to invest in long-term parenting. For a species like human beings, K-selective reproduction is ideal. We have a lot of potential beyond our base instincts. Therefore it makes a lot of sense to invest as much energy as possible into our offspring, so that they can reach their full potential. Since humans work best in K-selective environments, we need a parenting style suited for K-selective reproduction. Pair bonding is far superior to harem style pumping and dumping, because it allows parents to focus as a team on their handful of offspring. Two-person romantic love evolved to accommodate this reproductive strategy. Knowing all of that evolutionary background, love is no more a "social construct" than sexual preference is. In contrast, love and other elements of human attraction played integral roles in shaping society as we know it. So again, yes, I agree with you that love is in fact a means to an end, but it is more deep-seated in human nature than you seem to give it credit for. I am genuinely sorry to hear that you've had relationships that affected you so negatively. But love is both deep-seated in human nature and imperfect. Let's work with the definition of love I proposed before. You can be drawn to someone's virtue initially, and it could wind up not working out for a variety of reasons. How do we avoid this outcome? Well, I would argue that self-mastery is the key to optimizing relationships. This is because ultimately, self-knowledge and self-improvement make you more virtuous. The more virtuous you are, the easier it is to notice virtue in another person. (Because if you're living virtue, you know what virtue looks like.) If you accept my arguments so far, then this is the best way to find a compatible, quality mate. But it is limited by human nature. I scarcely believe that perfect virtue is possible, so neither is bulletproof love. Human relationships can approach perfection, but they can never quite reach it. But an imperfect idea can still be worthwhile. Forgive me if I'm off-base here, but I'm going to share my thoughts on where it is you're coming from. I think there is a bit of confirmation bias on your part -- I'm saying this as someone who struggles with a lot of confirmation bias of my own. I think it would be healthy for you to think back to those past relationships. I totally understand why it's tempting to tell yourself that love must be futile, or at best a self-imposed trick. But think openly and honestly about how you interacted with those individuals. Your mutual honesty, your emotional availability to each other. Wrestle with the idea that those relationships may have been fundamentally flawed. You might just surprise yourself.
Not saying that you act, think, or do anything in any specific way. Going to preface with that so nobody gets their toes stepped on as that is not my intention. With that said, have you potentially considered that you are taking this stance in an attempt to mitigate risk? An incredibly easy way to avoid heartache, stress, self doubt, etc is to just stop playing the game (so to speak) all together. Meaning you can't lose if you don't play. Now I'm not saying bonds between two people is a game -- I am making an analogy. I don't mean to like disrespect your choices or anything, but when I see threads like these I honestly can't really believe that a choice like this was made while you are being level headed. There's a reason people tell you not to make big decisions while emotional, because loads of times you can end up doing something you wouldn't want to do. Now if the "love" thing really isn't for you and you end up following that (not with just your words, but your actions as words without the support of action is rather meaningless) then cool. I must confess however that I do not believe you really understand what it is you are saying, or rather I do not believe you understand everything that goes into making a choice like this and actually sticking to it. If I were to bet on this I would honestly expect this to be a phase, and there isn't anything wrong with that.
Which is pretty much what I've done. My "phase" lasted 15 whopping years. Turns out you actually can lose if you don' t play. You end up dead inside. But then I realized there was a common denominator in all of my romantic failures. It' s called Patman. It took me quite some time and a lot of introspection, but I finally got rid of my insecurities. I asked myself what kind of person I'd want as a partner, refused to settle for less, started looking around and ... voila. Dare dreaming peeps, it' s worth it.
I was going to reply to this thread but I guess I forgot. On Friday in my philosophy class we were talking about the regular “is the world an illusion or is it real / are we in a video game” of stuff, and these are all important questions, but what I brought up was even if the world isn’t real, or we’re in a simulation, we still exist in some capacity because for us to be inside an illusion there has to be an “us”. No matter what the answer is we have to live “here” anyway, even if “here” is just made out of code or whatever So with the love thing I think it’s the same thing - whether it’s “real” or an illusion, whether it really exists or it doesn’t, people still feel something whether that something is real or fake. It’s sort of like the example of our world being inside a computer - it doesn’t matter if that’s true or not because at the end of the day we gotta deal with it (sometimes even without our permission cause like, feelings tend not to ask first before they make you feel). So in the end whatever it is or isn’t, if we continue to “go on” with relationships and what not, in a sense we’re gonna have to deal with it either way, just like dealing with a real or fake world There’s also something else philosophy related I can think of here. The idea is for example, if you marry you will regret it, if you do not marry you will regret it. It doesn’t matter what you decide to do in a sense because you will end up regretting a portion of it anyway, so to love or not to love there is always regret
