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That is kind of a dumb quote. I don't know who said it, so maybe it's lost in translation if it wasn't in English. If you are making excuses to love someone it is time to take a serious look at that relationship. But everyone from parents to lovers have a million reasons to love the people they love. The "reasons" to love someone are just the ways in which they are awesome. If you know why you love someone you should tell them. They'll be proud and happy, you'll lose nothing and the love will still be there.
Might really be lost in translation then. Zizek is smart, and I will always want him there to inhale my enemies, but this seems weirdly reductive for him. Defining exactly what love is is a very different thign than having reasons to love someone.
Capitalism redesigns love to be incomprehensible because its incomprehensibleness allows Capital to thrive. Stuff I've been researching shows that traditional human communities are diametrically oppossed to the accumulation of capital wealth and the destruction of indigenous cultures was always predicated by war and the dismantling of traditional family structures.
Real love is actually quite easy to comprehend once it's defined. If you filter my post history by Posts and not Comments you'll see some of my plagiarism on this topic.
I might do another one soonish with specific examples.
If you define love as having to be incomprehensible that makes some sense. But I don't know how much sense that makes in the first place. Love being incomprehensible does not mean that anything comprehensible isn't love.
“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
This makes no sense
Unconditional love is a concept that we accept and readily just throw around.
I think it's much better to think of it as actions and habits and processes, rather than an essentialistic switch that is either flipped on or off.
I would say that most people don't really put that much credence in it if they think about it enough. Almost everything in this world is conditional.
The idea that love has to be unconditional is really toxic.
It's an absurd idea. Love my family to death but if I found out one of them was killing people for fun I'd turn them in without question, and distance myself from them immediately.
Idk definitely love my bf everytime I look at him it feels like my heart will explode and my bones will break :hyperflush:
He's helped me through so much that he could probably cannibalize someone in broad daylight. And when the police ask me why he would do such a thing I would probably just be like' he probably had his reasons'
I dunno, this makes sense to me. Like I love my cat and I tell her that it's because she is the cutest and softest and most wonderful cat in the world. But the truth is that if she wasn't soft and cute and nice anymore I would love her just as much. Even the people in this world that have hurt me the most deeply, the people I've cut off, there's still a little part of me that loves them. Love is irrational.
I guess you could be a sociopath, but it doesn't really sound like it to me. You could just be overthinking this due to being a bit out of touch with your deeper feelings. I was like that for years when I was seriously depressed - my emotions were numbed, and I thought something was wrong with me for not feeling things the way others seemed to. All my relationships were held internally at arms-length, but I didn't understand why. Like a glass wall between me and the world.
I don't know. When I cut people off it's very absolute for me as well. I don't have any doubts about letting them back into my life and no urges at all to stay in touch. It's just that in the quiet lonesome moments, when I have the courage to hold it, when there's no one else to be accountable to, I still feel the sadness. And sadness is just another face of love.
“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
Lol wut
Zizek is a weird dude maybe don't take advice from an actual raccoon :zizek-joy:
As with many so-called "great men", he's at best a genius, not a prophet.
No he does not. He was wrong about some things, such as where the revolution would come from. He was a genius, but not perfect in his predictions.
Oh dammit, my long ass draft got deleted. I'm grumpy. I might do another effortpost on this.
I've been really searching for definitions of 'love' recently because I too wonder if I have ever 'loved' someone. All of the things you hear in media and conversation like 'when you're in love you'll know'; 'love is a decision that you have to make every day'; 'to love is to let yourself be truly known'; 'something that motivates you to be a better person' etc. etc. are all so vague and unhelpful but I guess they do work for some people in some situations.
I've liked the definition that belle hooks uses in All About Love the best so far, "[Love is] the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth", but despite flashes of confidence when I evaluate my feelings by this definition I still have no idea what I 'truly' feel for my gf. :shrug-outta-hecks:
Your quote is probably another to add to the list. Just something simple to make someone evaluate whether they love someone as a whole, or for the 'reasons' of 'superficial' things like money, looks, sex, etc. Which honestly are all valid reasons to love someone, but maybe not reasons enough to stay in a bad relationship.
The Bell Hooks quote is kinda like a nice, succinct version of the last three paraphrases you listed, I think, and I agree is probably the best of anything I've heard. 'when you're in love you'll know' is more like the Disney princess love idea which, as far as i know, doesn't exist outside of infatuations (which are ephemeral).
:meow-hug:
Solidarity comrade, I know the feeling. I fell in love exactly once in my life about a decade ago and it was unrequited. Ever since then I feel like the part of me that's capable of romantic love has just shriveled up and died.
Real Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club hours, who's up?
thats exactly how I feel. After that experience I'm thought to myself, lets not worry about romantic things for a while. Then a decade passed
Nothing in this world occurs without reason. If love, as a prerequisite, has no reason, then it cannot exist in this world. Therefore, you've imagined something cool and are bummed you don't have it. I got over not having a dragon, you can get over this. I love my family and friends, I would kill for all of them and die for many. I love communism, because it gives me hope and shows how we should be. I love the way the sky looks when the sun is setting in June, and it's a beautiful sky blue right around it but electric blue everywhere else. I love Latin, the way every word is formed so beautifully and how they relate within a sentence. Surely you can find some love like that in your life, not this one you've gotten stuck on.
That concept is not what love is. If it was no one could ever feel it, everything has an origin.
Okay, I figured out how to simplify this without block-quoting certain books that obviously influenced this. I think Zizek is both right because of his influences from Lacan and wrong due to the background influences of capitalism that he doesn't interrogate as much as he thinks he does.
Love in "my" definition consists of three components:
- Accepting beings as such. That is, using empathy to see why they are the way they are without trying to put them in a pre-defined box. Love should drive us to see others as they truly are, and stave off apathy. Also, an aside, this is by no means saying you have to empathize with a toxic person or justify doing so, but one should consider that might be an unhealthy kind of love to tolerate a one-sided situation.
- Recognition of minds beyond one's own. This is sort of an extension of 1. When you are accepting of a person's reasons for being as they are, it opens you up to seeing them as a thinking being with their own reasons for doing things, which can help immensely with respecting their needs and autonomy.
- Attentiveness to potential change. Living things aren't static. They can come upon hardships, weakness, failures, learning, and growth. Love pays attention to these changes, and attempts to ease, aid, teach, or nurture them. My fav example that a lot of people here can identify with is transitioning. Do you still love someone if you cannot support their transition? I would say no. Similarly, I would say it's not love if you're apathetic to someone's struggle with addiction or food insecurity, etc.
As an aside: romance/limerance can be a shortcut to these, but imo isn't love in itself. It's very VERY easy to objectify partners and fwbs and so many relationships self-destruct due to possessiveness. To achieve love with a romantic partner, it's imperative to recognize their humanity.
Tbh, I think your feelings are normal because capitalism sucks the humanity out of everything, not because you're a 'sociopath.' But with a little work these things are easy to set goals for.
Like I said in my other comment, the 'ineffibility' of love is capitalist obfuscation so they can sell you dating apps and nucular families and junk. It's more simple than it looks. But my preferred authors also tie a community aspect into it which I post a lot about.
I think loving humanity for struggling for existence is pretty natural. Gilman-Opalsky talks about that in his analysis of the work of Weil and Levinas, and follows it up with a chapter about Plato's Symposium in which he proposes the ancient Greek "soulmate" concept could be expanded to apply to entire communities. That is: rather than expecting an individual to complete your 'soul' as in the traditional metaphor, it is the entire community which you help complete and which simultaneously completes you.
As for loving individuals, this sort of generalized love of humanity can be split up into sort of 'slices' of 'attention' (since attention is the limiting resource here). And you can synthesize that love with romance or limerance or cathexis if it feels right for that relationship.
I don't know if I'll ever feel a positive emotion ever again. I definitely won't ever any love ones in my life. The world is without mercy for losers like me who can do nothing but feel depressed every second. It feels like I have tried everything, but the way everything is set up, someone will always come screaming that you didn't try everything hard enough and that failure is that you didn't want it hard enough, it's impossible to fail without it being 100% your fault.
I'm sure someone will tell me who wrong I am and I deserve to be depressed.
