First and foremost and actually totally unrelated to love, my dad needs to fucking stop sending me emails asking me to add him on Facebook. The reason I'm so desperately looking for a job or internship over the school year and summer is because I can't wait to be financially independent and not have to depend on his ass to help with tuition. I've gotten to a point where I've wondered if it's possible to get a restraining order on a family member. A quick Google search said yes, it is.
Now then, love. (Because that paragraph wasn't.)
In my Love class, we read an article about types of love. In a nutshell, the article classified six different types of love:
- Storgic love: founded on rapport, interdependency, and mutual need fulfillment. Good friends who have grown in intimacy, appreciate even mundane activities with each other, does not have a "falling in love" phase but rather realizes it after some time. Temporary separations are manageable due to mutual trust. Very similar to siblings.
- Agapic love: Centered around selfless devotion to the partner. Will put him or herself through various pains for the good of the object of his or her affection. There is no "falling in love" in the sense that their happiness is derived from a love object accepting the affection or love they're always willing to give.
- Manic love: Characterized by obsession with love object, sometimes beyond rationality. Jealousy and manipulation can be common, and separation is difficult. Usually very anxious/reflective about what can/did go wrong in a relationship. Can be associated with low self-esteem.
- Pragmatic love: Love based on investment of self. They assist the loved one in fulfilling each other's potentials, but is very business-like in the motivations. For instance, a pragmatic lover might think about compatability, future family size, financial security, and education all in context of how the relationship will affect it. Sex is not unwelcome, but might be done, for instance, to relieve sexual tension and sleep better rather than for physical pleasure.
- Ludic love: Love is like a sport, and the compatibility of partners is centered around how well the partners satisfy his or her wants. Love is like a challenge, and self-fulfillment is had when he or she is successful; partners are like conquests. Love affairs are considered natural.
- Erotic love: Extremely romantic, usually monogamous, incredibly explosive and escalates quickly. Usually very idealistic, risks that might harm the relationship are not afforded. Certainty in reciprocation is absolute, and partners rarely spend time apart. Physical intimacy happens early, and displays of passion are varied and frequent. Usually more common in people who have had a secure and happy childhood, especially those with happily married parents.
While S- pointed out that the article clearly gave preference to storgic love, I nevertheless felt that it was reasonably fair towards the other types of love, and I still prefer storgic love to the others. What I want out of a romantic relationship is not financial security, or the thrill of "conquering" a romantic partner by winning their heart. I want to establish a deep, meaningful connection.
The first assignment in my Love class was to define "love," or explain why it couldn't be defined. While it was extremely open-ended and more or less ended up being a lot of students just sharing their thoughts on what love is, there were two ideas that particularly stood out to me.
First, one student defined love as a region on the high end of a continuum of how much you care for someone. On one end is total indifference, and then maybe 70% of the way up you've reached the part of the spectrum that contains your friends, and then maybe the top 5% are things or people you love. That makes sense to me; it doesn't strictly define what love is, but provides an operationalization of love such that you can sort of quantify love, or compare two things against each other and determine which you love more or less.
Second, one student suggested that you cannot be in love without leaving yourself vulnerable. To be in love is to fully put your emotional well-being into the hands of your love object, and trusting that they will not only do no harm, but might actually improve your emotional state.
In the context of those two ideas, I can elaborate on what I mean by a "deep, meaningful connection." I want this connection to be made between me, in my most honest and thus most vulnerable state, and my partner's most honest and thus most vulnerable state. When you meet someone, you don't just tell them anything; only after becoming close and building trust do you start to divulge more personal details about your life. That explains why I struggle with falling for people I don't know well, and believe I need to be close friends with someone before I can begin to consider them a possible romantic partner. What good is an emotional connection between the person you are when your walls are still up you're still on guard with anyone else? You need to have made the step to reveal everything about you first.
So if this is so straightforward, what is up with society that has obscured this clarity?
I had a pretty heated conversation with S- today wherein she told me that, as far as romantic endeavors are concerned, I'm essentially a middle school student because (spoiler alert) I've never been kissed on the lips. At first, I was pretty offended. Who was she to evaluate on my behalf how meaningful my past relationships are? Who was she to tell me that, because I didn't slobber all over my past girlfriends, my relationships were meaningless? I'm convinced I've grown more as a person and learned more on how to partake in the miracle that is human-to-human interaction, including romance, from my relationships in middle school than many adults have.
But then I realized the underlying meaning that S-'s contempt carried: our society measures relationship success by physical intimacy, more specifically making out and sexual activity.
The ultimate end result of romantic relationships (in the western, American culture that I'm familiar with anyway) is to find "the one," the person you're meant to be with for the rest of your life and live happily ever after with, basically. As discussed earlier, that person is the partner with whom you have that ridiculously strong emotional connection to. In that process of building that emotional connection, it is common that you will do something physical, like making out or having sex. That does not mean that physical intimacy causes emotional intimacy/you to find "the one". There is a correlation, not causation.
Physical intimacy in cases where emotional intimacy is also present can simply be one of many ways to communicate passion. It is no different than giving flowers, or serenading, or making breakfast in bed, or holding hands, or cuddling on a couch watching a movie, yet it is blown so wildly out of proportion by popular culture.
And what is with "Facebook official" and being able/the right to use to phrase "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" to describe your romantic partner? While certainly some people see being in a relationship as a thing of pride and a thing to gloat about, I know plenty of couples in relationships that are not, say, Facebook official. In those cases, the purest way to think about it is that officiation is also a way to communicate passion. Homosexual couples have been living together for decades, yet the fact that they can get a marriage license with their names on it now is such a strong, symbolic milestone in their relationship (just like with any other marriage, I might add). It strengthens that emotional connection that we all, in theory, seek to make.
The obfuscation of relationship success by society, then, is because a relationship, perhaps back in the mid-20th century, would only reach a stage of physical intimacy after the emotional connection is established, and thus physical intimacy was associated with relationship success. However, in today's society where those in my parents' and grandparents' generation look and shake their head at my generation's liberal, gratuitous relinquishment of lip (and other) virginity, that is no longer the case. Relationships that are founded on physical intimacy, with or without emotional intimacy, are a thing in today's culture. (Especially because Hollywood says so.)
It seems to boil down to whether physical versus emotional intimacy comes first. I certainly prefer establishing an emotional intimacy first; physical intimacy is something that comes after the emotional connection is made. Unfortunately, emotional intimacy is less obvious or visible, and I think this might be why measures of physical intimacy (e.g. kissing, sex) are more often viewed as benchmarks for evaluating the development of a relationship. It might also explain cultural phenomenons like the friend zone and being led on, when the two involved parties see different levels of emotional intimacy.
Holy shit this was a long post.
