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Brillyant comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
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I share your feeling that breakups, and all things related, suck. And I like your idea of coming up with best practices for avoiding as much heartache as possible. But I'm unsure about the practicality here.
It is my experience that love involves high-level risk necessarily, and by it's nature.
I just saw a Terence Malick flim this past weekend (To the Wonder) and a quote from the movie comes to mind "The one who loves less is the one who is stronger".
My general thought is that this is opposed to everything of which LW is in favor. That is, love is not a rational move, since it (by a definion I'd accept) requires self-sacrifice for the good of another.
(Note: Not that LWers are selfish, per se. Only that love which chooses another person winning big while you open yourself up to lose hard is antithetical to most of the sentiment I see here.)
Dedicating resources to one thing that you want means that you can't dedicate them to another thing that you want. Wanting to make someone happy isn't different from any of the other things that you want.
Love makes/recognizes another person's good part of your good, so, depending on the magnitude, it isn't self-sacrifice to give up some other parts of your good to increase that of your loved one's.
If love were as simple as this, that would be great.
As Ritalin said:
"Love" requires that you risk the "devastating pain", I think. You may hold back, or engage principles that mitigate the heartache you feel when a relationship ends—to an extent this is fine, as recklessness is not good—but the risk or devastating pain is inherent in "love", as I'd define it.
Of course, if you find a relationship where both parties are always happy and healthy and pinging each other's fuzzy/utilon meters, then good for you. Life, in my experience, is a bit more dynamic and challenging than that.
I like the idea of coming up with disciplines to protect those who you love from heartache whould things not work out, but love is risky. It just is.
Love makes the other's welfare a win state. It is the ultimate incentive to cooperate.
Would you be willing to elaborate?
What's to elaborate? That your partner's smile seems to be directly connected to endorphins in your bloodstream? That knowing that your smile has the same effect on them makes it twice as potent? That your baby's first laugh or step makes all the sleepless nights to fade away? That your dog happily wagging its tail when you come home cheers you up after a hard day? "The ultimate incentive to cooperate" seems like an apt decision-theoretic description of what evolution wrought.
It's actually considerably more than just incentive to cooperate. Valuing the welfare/happiness of another above your own leads to many things other than game-theoretic cooperation.
I'd like to hear more of what you have to say about that.
Love (and consequences) is a very wide topic :-) Do you have anything particular in mind?