The obsessive part of love only lasts for three or six months, so it's not important in the long term. Think about it as an extra motivation to pay the initial costs of establishing the relationship. It would be evolutionarily maladaptive to become forever obsessed with your significant other, unable to focus on tasks of daily survival.
This is the part of love that most people get wrong: basicly anyone who gets their important life lessons from Hollywood movies. Hollywood describes the obsessive part as the "true love". People following this definition get into the predictable cycle of forming a new relationship, enjoying it intensely for a few months, noticing their obsession disappearing, interpreting it as an evidence that this actually wasn't the "true love", breaking apart and starting a new relationship... which again follows the same schedule; and some people can do this for decades. -- If this is what you noticed and want to avoid, you have a good point, but you are taking it too far.
(Some people express it cynically by saying that the main difference between eternal love and casual fling is that the casual fling lasts longer.)
I don't think about love as...
It is a real thing. You can find more detailed explanation on Married Man Sex Life blog, but essentially there are three things people can mean when talking about "love", and each of them is driven by a different set of chemicals.
a) obsession
b) closeness
c) sexual desire
The obsessive love is A + C, or sometimes just A. The mature love is B + C, with a smaller intensity of A returning shortly once in a while, usually when you break your stereotype in a good way, e.g. go together on an exotic vacation, or go dancing.
You probably already have the experience of B without C. It's what you feel towards good friends (the ones you feel safe with), family members, or perhaps your pet. And what you will later feel towards your children. The feeling increases if you touch someone in a non-sexual way (e.g. hug, or dance with), or if you look deeply in their eyes (assuming you already feel safe with them).
Now imagine this, in a high intensity (but only when you think about the given person, usually when you are with them, not obsessively all the time), with the sexual undertone. (The sexual undertone doesn't have to be there all the time; however its long-term absence is a frequent fai...
This description/advice is awesome, and I mostly agree, but I think it presents an overly uniform impression of what love is like. I've been in Mature Adult Love multiple times, and the feelings involved have been different every time. I wouldn't necessarily reject your division into obsession, closeness, and sexual desire, but I think maybe there are different kinds (or components) of closeness, such as affection, understanding, appreciation, loyalty, etc., and any friendship or relationship will have these in differing degrees. For instance, for a lot of people, family love seems to involve a lot of loyalty but not as much understanding.
I have a very reductionist viewpoint, on everything
As a reductionist you utterly failed to even define the phenomenon you describe. There are huge variations in what people mean by love, even if you only include the so called "romantic love". You probably have some vague model in mind, but without writing it down, giving a few examples and counterexamples to sharpen it up, you can hardly figure out whether the question you asked, "Is love a good idea?" is even meaningful.
145+ IQ (13/1000ths): 93 million
I'm guessing that's from a base of 100? If so, you're off by almost a standard deviation there: the mean world IQ is very far from Western normed 100s. IIRC, the population weighted estimate from the Lynn national IQ estimates puts the global mean at maybe 90. That's going to affect the tails like 145+ a lot.
Several things:
Title is vague. You say "love", looks like you mostly mean early-stage romantic love, which is a small subset of love.
So then, the idea of love bothers me, because you sort of throw rational thinking out the window, stop asking why something actually matters, and just decide that this significant other intrinsically matters to you.
So, most non-rational people do this about everything, not just (or especially) about love, and I don't think rational people particularly do this with love.
This article actually explores the brain chemicals involved in love, and suggests that the chemicals are similar to those that appear in OCD.
Chemicals don't "appear in OCD." As the article states, OCD is sometimes associated with low serotonin levels, as are many other mental disorders and things that aren't mental disorders. The only behavioral pattern the article notes that they say resembles OCD is "attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one's loved one" which is something that happens in almost all intense human relationships, including mother-infant ones, and also is not actually closely associated with OCD.
Also as the article st...
Throwing rational thinking out the window is not at all necessary when it comes to love. Nor is thinking that your significant other is intrinsically valuable. Irrationality in relationships is a common trope, but actually rational thinking and relationships go together quite well.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that "love" is something that doesn't help people get happy. If you're trying to optimize for personal happiness and love (in whatever form) enhances your ability to be happy and/or directly causes you happiness, love is a perfectly rational thing to do.
You say:
So then, the idea of love bothers me, because you sort of throw rational thinking out the window, stop asking why something actually matters, and just decide that this significant other intrinsically matters to you.
But that doesn't have to...
What do you guys think?
My take is that coming to love X is a process whereby I extend my sense of myself to include X.
So when you say:
The answer to the question of, "why does this matter?" is always, "because it makes me happy". So then, the idea of love bothers me, because you sort of throw rational thinking out the window, stop asking why something actually matters, and just decide that this significant other intrinsically matters to you.
...you basically lose me. You're talking as though "me" refers to some kind of u...
the idea of love bothers me, because you sort of throw rational thinking out the window, stop asking why something actually matters, and just decide that this significant other intrinsically matters to you.
Not at all. It's not that rational thinking goes out of the window, only your system of values changes.
You can stay perfectly rational, it's just that now "making that other person happy" is a huge value for you. A terminal value.
And you can ask yourself "why it matters" -- the answer is that you have a new terminal value and termi...
Out of "Understanding Humans for Vulcans 101":
Humans have things that are called emotions. The word love refers to one of them. From the positive emotions that humans can feel it's a quite strong one.
Feeling positive emotions has been shown to provide a bunch of health effects.
Human who are deprived of positive emotions also tend to do a lot of very irrational stuff to feel well. Especially when they are intelligent they are usually good at rationalizing their behavior. Once basic emotional needs are fulfilled it's usually easier for humans to make decisions that are actually rational in other area's.
Regarding your first point, which do you suppose is more likely: that love is a bad idea, or that having a very reductionist viewpoint is a bad idea?
Regarding the second, a lot of things are like "the brain chemicals involved in love." (The article only discusses low serotonin levels.) This doesn't provide a basis for thinking love is a bad thing.
Regarding permanence, "is lifelong commitment to a single person a good idea" is a different question from "is love a good idea?" Since you've asked, though, I think I disagree with t...
...Love is used not only as a constituent in moods and affairs, but also as the raw material from which relationships produce hour-later exasperations, regrettably fashioned restrictions, riddles laced with affections known only to the loving couple, and looks that linger too long. Love is also an often-used ingredient in some transparent verbal and nonverbal transactions where, eventually, it can sometimes be converted to a variety of true devotions, some of which yield tough, insoluble, and infusible unions. In its basic form, love supplies approximately t
If your gut reaction is that romantic relationships aren't for you, being aromantic is a thing. It's uncommon, but it seemed worth saying.
...Finally, there's the issue of permanence. Not all love is intended to be permanent, but a lot of the time it is. How can you commit to something so permanently? The impression I get from seeing friends' and acquaintances' relationships is that the average length of time they last is comparable to how long a person stays at a job (but with a greater standard deviation). Even when you're trying to build a relationship th
I don't think this is a bad question to be asking, although I might have done it in a more neutral way, such as: "OP, what are your personal experiences with love?" This would still allow you to make your rhetorical point, just a bit later in the conversation.
I know we don't say this anymore, but your metaethics is vulnerable to several criticisms which appear in the metaethics sequence (and elsewhere, no doubt).
Congratulations, you have violated Betteridge's law.
When I think about it, I come to the conclusion that I'm always trying to optimize my happiness.
Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
-J.S. Mill
Well, I mean, you're free to optimize what you want. But I doubt you'd want to be turned into a pig in exchange for slightly more happiness. Humans are pretty complicated as a rule, and happiness is only one of many things we like. Valuing the well-being of other people is totally okay.
I forget where this quote is from: if humans were all alike, love would be the arbitrary elevation of one person over a billion equals. But each person is truly special; we in our limitedness merely only appreciate the specialness of those we know well.
Obsessions are BAD for empathy. "“basic” ToM abilities of OCD patients are generally preserved, but they show significant reduction in their “advanced” ToM abilities, which seem to be related to their reduced memory capacities. The possible reasons for the relation between memory and ToM impairments, as well as the clinical significance of ToM deficits in OCD are discussed."" I think empathy is a good idea - it's probably the foundations of my intuitive conception of moral reasoning.
It comes down to a definition of "love".
I, for one, think of love as a conscious choice to invest in the well-being and flourishing of another person. It is preferable that the person reciprocate, but not necessarily a requisite of my ongoing commitment. In this way, love is sacrificial, and I don't see how LW could make a case for it.
Of course, you could be in a romantic relationship where both parties benefit, creating a situation where the sum is greater than the parts in regard to fuzzies, utilons, etc. That's academic. To the extent you can ...
When I think about it, I come to the conclusion that I'm always trying to optimize my happiness.
Optimizing it keeping what constant? I mean, in the prisoner's dilemma what optimizes your score for a given strategy of your opponent is to defect, but if you and your opponent both do that you get a worse score than if you both cooperated.
Romance can be similar. See the xkcd comic “Drama”. (See also “Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth” by Nick Szabo.)
You say you're trying to optimize your happiness... Why not consider taking the leap into classical Utilitarianism and optimize happiness generally?
I actually recently made a Utilitarian argument for romantic love, on the Felicifia forums for Valentine's Day. You may find that an interesting little argument to consider, though I admit it isn't the most intellectually rigorous argument I've ever come up with.
As for the issue of the permanence of love, here's a copy of something I wrote, about just that, almost four years ago:
The Essential Tragedy of Love
F...
Your genes want you to reproduce successfully, they don't want to optimize for happiness. As such it may be necessary to make an extraordinary effort to acquire a decent mate, a task that goes against many of our other instincts. Such an effort is harder to do if you realize that the person in question is in fact fairly average and not The Most Perfect Person Ever. Note that some of the reasons you choose to fall in love are important yet hidden from your conscious mind, such as the importance of choosing a mate with a dissimilar major histocompatibility c...
Side note/joke/context - I hope you didn't get your username from the ending to Annie Hall. When I watched it, I was about as frustrated and angry as I have ever been.
It's saying that there's a guy with a psychotic brother who thinks he's a chicken, and he doesn't want to turn his brother in because "he needs the eggs". So eggs are something that is clearly not real, and yet, the guy needs them. Then Woody Allen says that love is like that - it's crazy and irrational, but we go through with it because "we need the eggs". The way I see it, he's saying that we need the irrational to make us happy.
I think Paul Graham once said that the things that make us truly angry are things that we think might be true (you wouldn't get infuriated if I said that it's going to rain bananas tomorrow). I think that the reason I was so angry was because despite my tremendous commitment to truth, I suspected that truth might lead to net unhappiness. I also suspected that happiness might matter more than truth, and thus, being irrational... might... be... rational.
At the time, there was a girl I liked, which doesn't happen too often for me. I was sort of contemplating asking her out, which I have never seriously contemplated before. I decided not to because I knew that my liking of her was a product of some primitive brain structures, rather than actual compatibility, and that a relationship that isn't based off of real compatibility wouldn't be good (I know that you're probably thinking that this conclusion of mine was probably wrong and based on naive and impulsive thinking. I can assure you that it wasn't. I could tell what it would be like to be actually compatible with someone, and I wasn't actually compatible with her.). Anyway, I was finally becoming comfortable with the conclusion that I should forget about her, and when I watched this movie, it made me second guess.
"I like you a lot. You make me happy. But there's probably at least tens of thousands of people in the world that can provide me with what you're providing me. So you're replaceable, and if we broke up, I'd get over it after a few days/weeks and find someone else.
Yes, there are transaction costs (getting over it + finding someone new). But the point remains that people are replaceable, not just in the theoretical sense, but in a very practical sense. At some point in their lives, mostly everyone goes through a rather serious relationship, ends it, and starts a new rather serious relationship. So then, I don't think that it makes sense to pretend that they're "the one".
Best case scenario, your SO is an admirable person who you're compatible with and who brings happiness to your life. I think that this is fine, but that it strays from the absolute and romantic idea that people seem to have about love. I can't imagine any guy saying to his wife, "I love you. You're great. But you know, there are probably a good handful of people I've met in my life who I could have grown to love the way that I love you if I really got to know them. And there's probably many more people in this world who I could have grown to love the way I love you if I got to know them well enough. In fact, there are probably people in the world that I would be more compatible with than I am with you. You're great, but you're not the only one in this universe that is capable of providing me with what you provide me. That doesn't mean that I want to break up with you. I'm content with what you provide me, and I think that you're pretty good. The point is just that you probably aren't the best, and that you probably aren't the only one. Absolutes are rarely true."
The way society defines it, I don't imagine someone who thinks these things as in love. I don't see any relationships where people are open and honest about these facts. Some people in relationships might know these things. Sometimes both people in the relationship will. But it never seems acceptable (let alone comfortable) for them to be open about it.
So then, it seems to me that love involves thinking and acting like these ridiculous absolutes are true (or at the very least, pretending to think/act this way). Maybe I'm wrong though. Hopefully I'm wrong!! Are people really as committed to these absolute ideas as they seem? Are there relationships where both parties are comfortable admitting to each other that there are probably other people who they're compatible with, and that there are probably other people who they're more compatible with, but that they're deciding to satisfice with their love life? (A reducto ad absurdum argument seems most concise - thinking that there isn't anyone else who you would be more compatible with if you got to know them would mean that you found the 1 person in however many billion, which seems unlikely.)
You're signaling that you have ambitions in life which are more praiseworthy, or laudable, or of a higher caliber, than just pursuing purely selfish ends.
I don't know what my terminal value should be, but I suspect that it's my own happiness. Fortunately, my happiness is tied closely with doing good things. I see opportunity to do hugely great things. So I plan on doing them. If I'm right that I should be pursuing happiness... it'll accomplish that goal. And if I'm wrong and I should be acting as altruistically as possible, I'm doing that as well. That doesn't address knowledge and death though - I could be sacrificing those by pursuing altruistic causes. So I'll have to think this through some more, but I suspect that the right approach is to live a happy life, and divide my time between altruism and science.
It seems like you're also trying to explain that to us as readers as well.
Sort of, but not really. I think out loud a lot and don't have much of a filter.
I'm suspecting you're asking "how do I balance a commitment to such a lifestyle, while still appearing and being normal enough to do (many of) the typical things typical humans do to be happy?"
It's a concern, but not a major one. I don't care about altruism enough to sacrifice my happiness for it (well, I'd make some sacrifices, but I wouldn't live an altogether unhappy life).
The real objection is that love seems to dictate that your SO has to be the most important thing in the world to you. I can't imagine a husband saying to his wife, "I love you, and you bring me a lot of happiness, but I care more about my job than you. And I care more about science and technology than I do about you. But other than those couple of things, I think that I care more about you than anything else." So this is another aspect of love that seems nonsensical to me.
With that said, I do think that there should be some reasonable floor. Like you probably shouldn't care about more than a handful of things than you do about your SO.
Ideally, I would prefer that the practical conclusions resulting from discussions on Less Wrong could generalize to, and be implemented within, as many of its readers' lives as possible. So, I don't mean for this response to be critical of your personality, and I hope me raising these points hasn't offended you. I believe it would be better if you were to clarify what your true concern here is though,, and summon the gumption to address it to us more directly. This is because we could have a clearer discussion, that benefits, and interests, more of us.
I have the same goals. No offense taken. I apologize for any lack of clarity in my comments.
My main point is this: there seems to be this thing called love that society has invented. It requires a bunch of "absolutist" ways of thinking and acting. I think that these absolutist ways of thinking and acting are irrational, and thus I don't think that it makes sense to think and act in these ways. However, it seems that if you don't think and act in these ways, you aren't "relationship material". So then, in order to be "relationship material", you have to think and act in these ways. Which means that in order to be relationship material, you have to think and act irrationally. Relationship material ~ love. So then, in order to love, it seems that you have to think and act irrationally.
...I can't imagine any guy saying to his wife, "I love you. You're great. But you know, there are probably a good handful of people I've met in my life who I could have grown to love the way that I love you if I really got to know them. And there's probably many more people in this world who I could have grown to love the way I love you if I got to know them well enough. In fact, there are probably people in the world that I would be more compatible with than I am with you. You're great, but you're not the only one in this universe that is capable of pr
I've searched around on LW for this question, and haven't seen it brought up. Which surprises me, because I think it's an important question.
I'm honestly not sure what I think. One one hand, love clearly leads to an element of happiness when done properly. This seems to be inescapable, probably because it's encoded in our DNA or something. But on the other hand, there's two things that really make me question whether or not love is a good idea.
1) I have a very reductionist viewpoint, on everything. So I always ask myself, "What am I really trying to optimize here, and what is the best way to optimize it?". When I think about it, I come to the conclusion that I'm always trying to optimize my happiness. The answer to the question of, "why does this matter?" is always, "because it makes me happy". So then, the idea of love bothers me, because you sort of throw rational thinking out the window, stop asking why something actually matters, and just decide that this significant other intrinsically matters to you. I question whether this type of thinking is optimal, and personally, whether or not I'm even capable of it.
2) It seems so obsessive, and I question whether or not it makes sense to obsess so much over one thing. This article actually explores the brain chemicals involved in love, and suggests that the chemicals are similar to those that appear in OCD.
Finally, there's the issue of permanence. Not all love is intended to be permanent, but a lot of the time it is. How can you commit to something so permanently? This makes me think of the mind projection fallacy. Perhaps people commit it with love. They think that the object of their desire is intrinsically desirable, when in fact it is the properties of this object that make it desirable. These properties are far from permanent (I'd go as far as to say that they're volatile, at least if you take the long view). So how does it make sense to commit to something so permanently?
So my take is that there is probably a form of love that is rational to take. Something along the lines of enjoying each others company, and caring for one another and stuff, but not being blindly committed to one another, and being honest about the fact that you wouldn't do anything for one another, and will in fact probably grow apart at some point.
What do you guys think?