Love

[leo9]

What is love?

Ah, one of the big ones.

Someone becomes intensely important to you, hir presence and hir involvement in your life make you happy, hir welfare and happiness become at least as important as your own and sometimes more so.

That last part is an essential element. There is another condition, which for want of a better word I'll call possession-need, which is very similar except for the last part. Rapists and stalkers often say that they love the object of their obsession, but are happy to terrorise and abuse hir in order to get possession of hir, and sometimes to kill hir rather than let hir get away. I don't think most people would call that love, but as noted, it shares enough features to be confused with it. I think this is an important point which we'll come back to.

Love also overlaps with but is not the same as sexual attraction. Love for a child or a parent is essentially the same as love for a mate, minus the sexual element: and it is possible to love a non-related fellow adult that you're not in any way sexually attracted to, though it takes some special circumstances.

How does it change a person?

At the very least, it can radically rewrite ones priorities. People can give up their home, their job, their religion or politics. One of the reasons Cupid is shown as a child is the chaos love can cause.

How does it change your preception and your ideas of another person?

Personally, I usually fall for someone as I get to know her, but I can remember in school falling for a girl who'd been around for years, but who suddenly was for no logical reason enormously important to me. (In a different way from the ones who were newly important to me because I'd discovered sex, and they were it. She wasn't particularly sexy, she was just the one whose name had been on the arrow that hit me. The others I wanted to fuck, rape, whatever pervy things I was learning to imagine: her, I just wanted to hold hands with and gaze into her eyes and tell her what a wonderful person she was.) When that happens in adult life I can imagine the mental upheaval it involves.

What about love for other than persons? Pets? Countries? Books?

Pets I like, but have never really loved. If I put myself out to care for them, it's from a sense of responsiblity, not what I'd call love.

Love of country I don't think is the same, though there are parallels. If you're a patriot, you usually grow up that way, it doesn't come as a sudden discovery.

I like my books, but there are very few I wouldn't throw on the fire if I were freezing.

Is all love monogamous?
Can you love only one? (at a time, or in your life)
If you fall in love with someone, must you fall out of love with others?

Speaking as a loving polyamorist, absolutely not. In the early heat of a new love it can feel as if nothing else matters, but that's not the same thing.

Does love and jealousy follow each other, or are they seperate

Can you love without jealousy?
Can you be jealous without love?

Now, this is where I am glad I defined the condition of possession-need as something close to love, but without the concern for the welfare or happiness of the object. Because it seems to me that much of what passes for jealousy is the result of mistaking possession-need for love.

If you love someone, you want their happiness. If someone or something makes them happy, that makes you happy.

If you are possession-needy for someone, and someone or something makes them happy, that upsets you because it's taking their attention away from you.

I wonder if the poly theorists have come up with a better word for this? Because I think I've stumbled onto something important here.

Is crime passionel a sign of love, or of love dead?

What causes crime passionel?

Like stalking, it's a sign of possession-need.

Does society support the idea, and, if so, why?

Historically, society supported it because patriarchial economies depended on the orderly inheritance of property and status, and female infidelity threatened that. (And women needed a husband to survive, and male infidelity threatened that.) Laws on divorce were modelled on property law, and a man who killed an adulterer got the same sympathy from the law as a man who killed a thief.

None of which has anything to do with love, but it provided a societal endorsement of possession-need.

Or did it, and is now changing attitude? If so, is that ok?

I think it's more than OK, it's a sign of enlightenment.

Do you think it is understandable/ok to kill the loved one?

Barring euthanasia, it's a very sick perversion.

Or to kill for love in other situations?

Depends who you're killing.