Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014

Gondolinian

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I am naive and inexperienced in the ways of love, but it seems implausible that romantic love is often (usually?) bidirectional. Of all the people of the right sex that one is close too, why do people usually fall in love with someone who is likewise in love with them?

Ok. Reading the replies to this, I feel like my model of how dating works is fairly divergent from the norm.

Do people date (some people: I know that people date for all sorts of reasons) in the hopes of falling in love with each other? You pick someone who is reasonably attractive to you, then go through the motions of having a relationship (which may include eating together or having sex together, among other things) until you fall in love?

The behaviors precede the feelings?

That is not at all the model I am working from.

7ChristianKl11y

When it comes to dumb animals it's because falling in love requires a courtship ritual with multiple steps. If any of the partners doesn't follow the steps of the ritual then the other animal doesn't feel the emotions to go to the next step of the ritual. If a male pig emits enough androsterone, a female pig goes directly into mating position. When it comes to humans on the other hand it's possible to do fall in love quite randomly without it being bidirectional. Humans also don't have an a mating season and do mating quite randomly. At the same time it's not so random that old impulses that make it more likely that love is bidirectional don't exist. Rapport between humans get's facilitated through mimikry where people who like each other copy movement of the other person. Breath syncs. There are also things that happen on a deeper level and that are more difficult to explain. Sunday at the end of the Leipzig Solstice I had a conversation that was on a very deep emotional level. It wasn't love but still deep emotions. The woman I was talked to left the room because by empathizing with me about an issue that's for me painful, because she felt very strong pain in her heart. Given my current understanding of emotional mimikry and emotions I consider bidirectional love at first sight to be quite plausible even if it doesn't happen to most people. It also happens that people have sex before they are fully in love. Feeling pleasure during sex then get's associated with the sex partner and increases the feelings towards that partner.

5MrMind11y

I think you are correct on this one. [...] I have a two-way answer. First: they don't. Unreciprocated love is quite a theme in Western culture, and I suspect in other cultures too, because as a situation is both extremely common and much dramatic. Second: there's also an active selection effect, where we tend to like people that like us and that we are more familiar with. Regarding social circles and romantic interests, it's an exploration / exploitation tradeoff, but the important thing is that there's an exploitation choice in the first place.