I think love is the most deeply powerful, emotional and mentally life affirming thing in the world. Or at least that's how it makes me feel. I could write a thousand pages on one lover, regarding every experience I've ever had while in was in love with her, and it sill wouldn't come close to the emotion itself. This is how good it feels. To someone who has felt this, they may or may not relate to this feeling. This is my own internal feeling of how I think romantic love feels and consequently, how it ought to feel.
I'm about to get all Subjective romantic theories of love on your ass. Maybe when I finally finish up my degree, I'll call it something more academic Anyhow, my hypothesis is this:
I think our first love hardwires us as individuals, more so than most of us we'd be willing to admit. This effects our degrees of free will.
It helps to form our emotional concept of love and consequently, requires us to make comparisons to this feeling as a kind of emotional baseline of what love is, the next time we think we feel it. Subconsciously, the first person (you fell in love with) traits and personality get correlated with the emotion that we assign as "romantic love and attraction", and this is the actual reason we continues to act in (either wise, but mostly stupid) ways because the first emotional correlation of love (which isn't necessarily the healthiest one) continues to fuck with our understanding of love far into adulthood.
How's that for an abstract? I always wanted to search the word "fuck" in the peer-reviewed journal databases.
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure this has been studied at some point, but I'm not here to do original research I've been similarly guilty of re-inventing the hover-car. Seriously, when I was around 6, I hadn't yet watched the Jetson's or Star Wars, and I drew a hover car, complete with drawings and little diagrams showing how the rubber skirt kept the air from blowing out. Anyhow, my dad promptly told me "They already have those" and in my mind, I remember thinking "son of a bitch" and that scene where Ralphy from A Christmas Story gets his decoder ring from Little Orphan Annie, only to find out the secret message is an advertisement for Ovaltine. If you younger people haven't seen this, go Youtube.
Anyhow, I think our concepts of love develop depending largely on what type of personality traits you had before you experienced love for the first time.
If you're someone who falls in love often (or thinks you do...not sure if there's a difference), you may have some kind of biological predisposition for your internal feeling/association with love, combined with the personality traits of the person you first associated love with, and you act in ways where you think you can repeat this feeling by seeking out partners with similar behaviors.
Duh, right? You knew that. You ain't no dummy.
But then there are those of us who rarely feel it, for whatever reason For whatever reason, be it biology or rearing, it takes a certain something more to turn us on. Fewer people seem to be built this way. I'm going to go out on a limb and say a whopping two people I've been in love with is on the low side at the age of 33.
Yet, I'm pretty sure I've never really thought about this fact about myself because I've never thought outside of my own head. Now that I am, it's pretty clear that probably is going to skew my perception of love, and it needs to change if someone like me wants to be in something like a relationship.. I have to be willing myself not to act in ways in which I'm merely "filling the emotional hole" temporarily. Or at least find someone who's willing to have their hole filled many many times. *ba da tiss*
It all comes down to the degrees of free will you actually want, versus the degrees you were born or programmed with.
I'm using scientific language, but I think this has all been covered in poetry. Give me some fucking Dylan Thomas or D.H. Lawrence, and their descriptions of love will make you cream your pants, dripping with sultry hot lovers on cold winter nights, or the excesses and destruction love can wrought on the hearts of those who love too much.
I think I want part of what everyone else wants. Someone who understands and cares about them, but also wants the passion of being wanted (and wanting them) on a gut emotional/physical level. I want that to work and not be dysfunctional.
That's a hard match for me. She's out there somewhere. At least I like to think so. Here's some Nick Cave. He explains it better than I can.
https://youtu.be/rKlaV-9Vzsk
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