I'd love to see if these MRI studies hold up if you select participants who are happily married or in long-term relationships of > 3 years length. The author's study selected participants with a maximum relationship length of 7.4 months. I dug up the Bartel's study referenced by it, and it had selected participants by putting out posters & Internet posts looking for people "truly, madly, and deeply in love", and got people with a relationship length of 2.4 +- 1.7 years:
FWIW, I can recall crushing hard on girls up through college, with exactly the same drug-like intoxication that the article describes. But as I got more secure of myself and comfortable in my own skin, the crushes moderated. When I met my wife, there were no massive can't-stop-thinking-about-you highs, no obsessive yearning, few intrusive thoughts. It just felt natural - we enjoyed being together.
This was really disconcerting at first, like maybe it wasn't love after all, but I checked with a number of friends who were happily married for long (sometimes >10 years) periods. Very often, they mentioned the same feeling of not having the trumpets and whistles blow, and instead they grew together and found that love developed later on. Indeed, the people who were always "truly, madly, deeply in love" were usually broken up 2 months later.
I've heard a theory circulated round that when we feel that huge deep rush of intoxication, we're actually reading our "completion" into personal characteristics that the other person possesses. We're not so much in love with them as in love with the idea of being with them. And that limerence persists as long as the idea does, but eventually we all have to face the reality that we are not our partners, and we are not going to somehow become more or better than ourselves just by being with them. That huge mind-blinding rush of dopamine when you meet a new person might be an antipattern, because it blinds us from seeing the real them.
This is very enlightening. I am not sure if people are aware but arranged marriages are still prevalent in India (which these days means being asked to meet someone and decide in few months if you would want to get married). Although, it seems a bit awkward and more of being forced into it but there is statistical evidence that it can work out really well.
If people enjoy being together, love develops eventually.
> there is statistical evidence that it can work out really well
May be true, but it really depends on the definition of "works out well". In particular, there's still a very strong taboo against divorce in most of India, so "remains married" isn't a good proxy for "high-quality relationship".
I've met some people from India who spent a grand total of 2-3 hours doing what people in the U.S. would call dating (spending time together; talking to each other) before deciding to marry them.
I think that is really messed up. Marrying someone is one of the most important decisions you can make in your life, especially if you're planning to stick with them until you die.
I think you need to spend at least a hundred hours (preferably, even more) together with a potential mate, before deciding whether you want to spend the rest of your life with them. A hundred hours together could be a 60 or 70 dinner dates, and weekends spent together, which you could do in less than 6 months.
Everyone puts on a show in the first couple of dates, and it takes a little while to get to know who a person better / for who they really are.
Arranged marriages are probably a vestige of ancient society were alliances were designed to solidify clan associations.
If more women enter the workforce hopefully a Women's Rights Movement will take off. Maybe it will induce a sexual revolution and do away with arranged marriages in Indian society.
I was about to link to the recent NYTimes article [1] posted to HN which said Indian women were leaving the workforce ( workforce participation slid from 37% to 27% ), but looking at the linked data now it looks it stayed at 27 % [2]
I think most people commenting here on India and arranged marriages have no clue what they are talking about. While some of it is generally true, but not any more truer than if I make a statement like "Cops in the US are wife beaters" (Translation: Long stressful job with association with violence seems to increase the likely hood of domestic violence compared to general population.)
Arranged marriages may have started off as ways to solidify clan associations.. may be.. in the long lost past and more recently for a very select few. By and large arranged marriages in India now a days is just a matter of convenience. Mostly parents, bride, groom all reaching some sort of a consensus as to whether the marriage is likely to succeed. Why does this matter? Generally because unlike (again generalization) in the western society, this is truly two families coming together. It is easier for every one if there is a bit of compatibility between families too in addition to the bride and groom.
As to the "messed up" factor in this, usually these marriages do not happen overnight. Engagement is followed by many months (to many years) of time "together" (not necessarily in a live in sort of way) after which the wedding happens. In many many cases the engagement gets broken off for one reason or another. There is a certain amount of taboo associated with this, so it is not easily said and done. On the other hand, this is good practice ground for resolving conflict among each other.
Contrast this to ( what appears to me, an Indian) the usual dating ritual in the US.. Mostly starts of with both parties in various degrees of inebriation, followed by some awkward dates where one pretends to be smarter, funnier and what not, followed by a few sexual encounters, after which reality may dawn and the relationship is broken off. Fast forward many years and relationships and at some point the people involved realize that well, no body is perfect, lets make this work, we have some similar interests and lets face it, we are getting old. They decide to make it work and get married.
I do not generally see how this has any chance of working any better. If one could see the magic list of all the people (past present future) one could potentially get married to, with all the qualities listed, sure, one can pick the perfect partner. But till then, it is like predicting the best time to buy a stock. Who knows if something better is in the horizon. But more importantly should one care?
Pretty cynical. It all depends on your cultural framework I guess. I'm sure there are places in India (not upper-class technology workers for instance) where the rules are different. And there are sure different ways in America for dating to work. How about: meet in college, have a few study dates, go out for dinner or a movie, meet her parents on Parents' Day, graduate and continue common interests like folk dance club or book club. Propose among the amazing plants of the Cactus Garden on campus. No inebriation, settling or age-related angst involved.
A bunch of my friends have actually gotten married that way. They met and dated their future spouse in college, and got engaged in their senior year, and married the summer after graduation.
They were all serious Christians though. They also went to lengths to ensure there was absolutely no sexual contact whatsoever before marriage -- e.g. by avoiding being alone in a room with their fianceé; always meeting/dating in public places, etc.
I will admit, American Christians do fall outside the majority cultural norm in this country, and I was writing from that perspective.
Sure. That works too. Like many things in life. Generalizations don't work. The happy scenario you describe above, also happens a lot in India.. With a billion people a lot of things happen. Some good. Some bad.
Maybe a variation of arranged marriages would be the way to go - a prospective partner must be approved by both the person being married and their parents - and there must a minimum amount of time spent together so they know each other.
a sexual revolution and do away with arranged marriages would probably destroy culture and replace with consumerism - everyone focusing on being attractive, rather than being virtuous.
Or, as my dad always advised, "Son---if you decide to get married. Made sure to have separate residences to retreat to."
As a kid, I knew what he was getting at, but even then, I knew I would never have those funds.
(My parents fights were legendary. My mom was at fault early on. later it was my father's fault? It was a verbal battle, the minute he walked into the door.)
> I've met some people from India who spent a grand total of 2-3 hours doing what people in the West would call "dating" (spending time together; talking to each other) before deciding to marry them.
I am sure this happens widely and in many cases, the woman's consent isn't even taken, post-wedding is when the first conversation takes place. I agree this is unacceptable but in most metros, with less-conservative households, expectation is that they take their time before having a final say.
One of my Indian friends now living in North America recently got married to a girl via an arranged marriage. He claimed that sex wasn't important to him, yet he's a self-proclaimed porn addict. To each his own, but I wonder about how his wife will feel if his addiction continues and he grows cold and distant. Before getting married he had only met her briefly face-to-face on a visit back home.
If you find someone fairly attractive, then the sex is not important so long as both parties are somewhat functional. "Good sex" is learnt, nobody was born with this ability. If both parties are patient and willing to go through it together, they will succeed.
Point taken, you learn together overtime and discover things. I was more referring to this specific case, where porn and its potential to affect desire/frequency may be an issue. Again, to each his own, they can do what works for them.
Judging by the divorce rate in the US where we date for a long time before marrying, it does not appear the length of time you spend with someone before deciding to exchange vows them is not a good predictor of success in marriage.
Actually I would say arrange marriages have a higher chance of success simply because people who know you well decide to give you in marriage to someone else whom they know kind of well.
What does hearts are "really knitted together" even mean ?
I agree about the proxy part, but for rational discourse we need to start somewhere.
Personally, I don't know what that is because I don't think I've had a high quality relationship or maybe I'm not even sure what that means.
I was saying that a 100 hours should be a minimum. Various friends have said they need to date for "at least 'x' number of years", before getting married. To each his own.
The goal is to try to get to know the person to such a degree that you can decide intelligently whether you truly want to spend the rest of your life with them.
I personally think dating for 3 years or more is excessive, and prefer something shorter. But I would, at the very least have an intense dating period of 6 months or more, before deciding on something as important as marriage.
There is just no telling. Keep in mind that your mate will only show you part of their self and hide many other parts. So do you. Many people find out well into their relationships that their partners is XYZ and XYW.
3 months and 3 years and 3 hours are not so different, although they provide some false comfort.
If you really are serious and want to build a long term relationship, the safest step to take is bring a list of questions and a polygraph.
They are very different. There are things you can hide for 3 hours that will easily leak in 3 months, let alone 3 years. It's easy to get through 3 hours on basically bullshit small talk.
I think part of the thing is recognizing patterns of behavior. For example, now that I am 31, I am really getting to know my parents. Things they said when I was 17 all make sense now, because I've seen the patterns again and again in recent years.
Part of is growing up and part of it is more awareness of human nature, and part of it is a lot of reflection. So in a dating relationship, the more time spent with the person, the better. Its also important to learn something about their past relationships. With my ex I wasn't really listening when she said that she was the problem in all her past relationships.
I figured that was all in the past. But in my experience, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. IMO, people only change under extreme circumstances.
In the polyamorous community, we refer to the initial drug-like rush you get in the first 3-12 months of a relationship as "NRE", for "new relationship energy". It is definitely much different from the kind of love you experience when a relationship gets up there in years.
Woah, hey, me too! Yeah, it's awesome to be able to meet other people and be excited by the prospect of new love. My partner and I have been dating for three years and transitioned to poly 2 years ago. It's been great for us both, having the excitement of new relationships while also having the strength of a longer relationship as well.
Another way of looking at that experience is that you developed tolerance to crushes. I suspect that simple olfactory and visual cues drive crushing. But whatever the mechanisms, my experience has been very similar.
Yes it is much like alcohol - the first time you try it can be a bit of a disaster, but unless you are an alcoholic you learn how to imbibe without wrecking your life. The more you drink in moderation the better you handle the effects.
> there were no massive can't-stop-thinking-about-you highs, no obsessive yearning, few intrusive thoughts. It just felt natural - we enjoyed being together
This pretty much describes how I've felt while dating girls I've liked. I've never really had or experienced the "drug-like intoxication" obsession-love, and I'm glad I'm left out of it.
I'm intrigued by your theory of why that it might due to a desire for "completion". I don't know if you're right, but it definitely is an interesting theory.
The girl I've been with for the past seven months I've never really felt intense feelings for. But I really enjoy her company, and it's been much easier to keep the relationship going than previous ones, which always felt like I had to make serious effort to keep it going beyond a month or two.
It used to really bother me that I didn't feel intense feelings of love and worried that maybe sometime I'd have to end things, but things keep going really well, and as we've shared more experiences together and mutually support each other, I've been having those thoughts less and less.
And above all love is self inflicted, and has very little to do with the other person. It's selfish in many ways, but I do not have the ability to expand on this.
Infatuation is the word that I think should be used in place of love in this context. Most people want love, but seeking to get it immediately (instant gratification), dooms one to stay in the infatuation phase for lack of sober relating with the other person. If this is correct, then a high divorce rate would be the product of a high rate of instant gratification seeking.
Or perhaps addiction is like romantic love. (Also noticed the first comment for that article also mentions this).
Evolution probably had good reason to select an addiction center in the brain because, well ... those that didn't have and didn't fight for their loved ones, didn't start wars because of it, didn't care as much, somehow haven't made it this far. So that machinery seems to serve a purpose.
Evolution never has a reason - it just is what tends to happen :)
Having said this it is a really interesting question what could be the evolutionary force driving romantic love. My pet hypothesis is that it holds couples together long enough for their children to be too old to abandon.
> Few academics and laymen regard romantic love as an addiction
I think dozens on pop songs say otherwise.
Jazz: "Like someone in love" "you go to my head"
Pop: Kelly Clarkson's "Addicted", Kanye's "Addiction", Kesha "You're love is my drug" (and those are just the "K" artists!)...
But cocaine can be far more intense. Once you burn out those dopamine channels, they don't come back. You lose, more or less permanently, the ability to love, or even care very deeply.
Thanks for this article. Made me block random facebook posts from the girl I spent 7 years being addicted to. I don't want to get any unexpected cues that could trigger pathways forged by this addiction.
But for sure, one should be careful with drugs that down-regulate receptors, especially those that do so long-term or permanently. As cocaine does. Receptor down-regulation is the mechanism for biological addiction. Cocaine is less addictive than nicotine, ethanol or opiates. You need considerable high-dose exposure to do serious damage. But once it's done, you're screwed.
Maybe. But it's probably not knowable. The time course is long and unpredictable, and psychological mechanisms would be hard to distinguish from simple neurophysiology.
Is this a certainty? Depending on how we define the dawn of "love," it seems at least vaguely plausible that it occurred after the first human consumption of coca. Of course if we're specifically talking about isolated cocaine then you're correct for sure.
Coca is a "new world" plant, growing only in the Andes mountains. As best we can tell, there've only been homo sapiens sapiens on that continent for a few tens of thousands of years, at the outside. The hormonal basis for the phenomenon we call "love" is without doubt older than that.
I was in a crazy addicted love relationship once in my life in 2007 and it scared us both because of it's irrational power and what the article terms "intrusive thinking." We met on StumbleUpon and were attracted by our shared sensibilities at first, later much more than that after we met. About that time, when it was getting crazy, we both read the story of game designer Theresa Duncan[1] and artist Jeremy Blake[2], two lovers who committed suicide within a week of one another. She and I broke it off after that. It seemed like the smart thing to do. I would have scoffed at this article if I had not had a very real experience of what the article is describing.
We didn't. I met a girl overseas and within 24 hours we moved in together. Obsessive, all encompassing, "can't take my eyes off you" love.
I moved continents to be with her; 8 years together, married for 4.
Then suddenly, early last year, it all fell apart as quickly as it started. Finalizing divorce next month.
It was crazy, but I feel blessed to have experienced it. We're still good friends, but the thrill is gone, well and truly. I was actually relieved when she said she was having an affair. Good, I thought, better you than me; now let's end this.
> “Last Thursday, a guy I went to college with, Mark Rife, committed suicide. As I understand the story, three years ago his wife Sarah died due to complications from a fall off a 75 foot waterfall. She fell; he dove in after her. Against all odds, they thought she had recovered. Life had returned to some degree of normal; but then six months later, she died in her sleep. Mark was devastated.
> In a video he left behind, Mark describes leaving Sarah’s funeral, driving who knows where and simply wanting to die — but he remembered the time they watched the film Juliet and Her Romeo, a film he loved, and he remembered Sarah’s question: “Do you think Romeo would have still killed himself if he’d waited 1,000 days?”
> So, Mark went on a 1,000 day odyssey, with funds from Sarah’s life insurance policy, to give him time to see if his choice would still be the same. Would he still want to kill himself? Mark traveled, explored, met knew people. He says he “followed every impulse.” Mark had been a pastor in Hawaii, and he left his life behind.”
I still feel rage when I think about what tumblr did:
> Mark kept a detailed blog of his 1000 day adventure, which we may never see because Tumblr took it down immediately after his suicide. I do not know whether or not this was at his family’s request, but it is distressing because he clearly wanted us to see his work. He painstakingly blogged, created content, made videos. In his suicide video he says that the website explains, “a bit more of my process, how I came to this conclusion.” To keep the blog censured is not the way to honor his death. God forbid we face the reality of a man’s decision to die when we could all just be re-blogging that picture of a squirrel in a ballgown instead.
It actually seems obsessed, not natural, to do all that blogging and documenting. It means his mind was constantly going about his plan even though he was meeting new people and such. I don't know, seems contrived if you don't realistically try to let go and live a normal life, and then see if 1000 days later that strong love did survive. If he kept nurturing the love by dedicating his days to documenting, what's the point he's proving?
Perusing it, perhaps it's confirmation bias but I can't help getting the sense that he's already the suicidal type... Fatalism and what I'll call "inflexibility/overcommitment to a cause" pervades it (hint: not a survival trait), and the looming 1000 day deadline ensures he will never get a chance to actually move on.
At the time it happened, there wasn't any news of Scientology involvement. It was told as a straight obsessive-love gone bad. More complicated details emerged later.
True, mad love is a beautiful experience, maybe the most powerful and satisfying thing that can happen to you.
I have been lucky to have experienced it once and now, 8 years later we still have it in us.
Of course it doesn't manifest in endless nights of looking into each other's eyes, but we still cherish that period as a gift from God himself.
Yes it does resemble an addiction, although maybe it's worth reversing the terms - addiction is actually like "true" love.
Everything in our lives just clicked - we'd just moved to the beautiful city of Barcelona, it was spring time and flowers were in bloom, we had money, more than we could spend and we traveled around and experienced each other through Europe - Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Brussels, Stockholm, Athens, Vienna, ...
Every week in a different city, weather was always great, the food and wine were fantastic - but all that beauty around us was pale in comparison to the look in her eyes.
That look - when this beautiful girl looks at you like you are everything for her and you feel like she's everything for you - like you are the perfect drugs for each other - that is a powerful and fulfilling experience.
That's what it feels like to be blessed.
Our daughter is the result of that love and we often joke that our love was actually the effect of her coming into this world.
Drugs don't really come close to the powerful emotions that we can generate naturally when we are in love - I can only compare it to an MDMA trip that lasts for months...
That love has carried us through the difficult moments of having a child and careers in our modern, artificial society and we would have been separated many times had it not been for those memories.
I love your story. I hate that can't tell if I should wait for that or "settle" for the feeling others describe of "just well comfortable". I keep waiting for, searching for, your style of relationship but all I find, generally, is the "this is comfortable" style which while pleasant is also mostly "take it or leave it" kind of feeling for me. For lack of a better way it's nice while together but it's mostly "out sight out of mind".
I think it varies by cultural extraction and emotional background. My life experience suggests that people from "warm" and "romantic" cultures are more likely to experience the highs of falling in love than people from more measured, rationalistic and phlegmatic cultures.
Being from a "warm and romantic" background myself, I can confirm that falling in love is very much intoxicating. It alters one's frame of mind and leads to decisions one simply would not make for any other reason. Some of them are quite momentous and have lasting impact indeed.
I grew up in the care of parents that decided to stay together for the children.
I can't really complain--they both love me--I grew up in a safe middle class environment, one of them always read with me at night when I was young, I never worried about being hungry, got toys on x-mas, etc. They certainly never abused me.
But to this day I struggle with relationships. I have a hard time connecting with people, even in a non-romantic context.
Man, I realize I don't know anyone who's going to read this, but it feels real good to confess it to someone.
EDIT: To be honest, I feel like such an asshole. There are people that have had it way worse than me, and here I am feeling sorry for myself.
Don't feel like an asshole. Life is complicated and turbulent - everyone's. It's easy to forget that when watching TV or browsing Facebook, which beam only idealised portraits and high notes into our minds--the conscious and unconscious parts. It's easy to think everyone has their shit together and you're the only fuckup, but you couldn't be more wrong.
In reality, a lot more parents stayed together for the kids than you realise. Decades of marriage aren't easy to sustain for anyone, no matter what their personalities or notional compatibility. Many more people struggled and struggle with depression, alcoholism or substance abuse than meets the eye. There's a veneer of comme il faut civilisation over it all, but it's very thin.
Actually-existing reality is messy. The world is messy. Don't forget that you only see the curated--in some cases scrupulously curated--presentation layer of almost everyone else's life.
It's almost like going to a Quixtar-Amway IBO motivational conference/Sieg Heil cult rally, or any trade show consisting primarily of account reps, crazed MBA apes and sales bullshitters; it'll seem like everyone's a successful millionaire except you, because that's the whole point of the venture. Nobody would pay expensive registration fees to attend a grim, morose and sober appraisal of the ups and downs of the casino that is their life. In reality, 89% of them are broke.
Nah man don't compare yourself to others or minimize your experience. I grew up in a similar situation. It sucks. Your role models are all messed up. Your normal is not really normal as they say. But now you know a reason why relationships may be difficult for you and now you can actively work on them. You can choose to be different and who you want to be with. It takes a lot of work but it's worth it. It's good that you recognize it for what it was. A lot of people don't get there. Some of us repeat the same patterns.
> But to this day I struggle with relationships. I have a hard time connecting with people, even in a non-romantic context.
Practice with your coworkers. Practice with everyone. Make a joke to the cashier at the checkout counter. Practice just opening up to people, and seeing what is beautiful in them.
I was in a similar situation, and you can get over it with time and practice.
I'm in the same boat! You're not alone. My parents are great and still together and took great care of me but have never really been into each other the way that I guess married people are "supposed to." It's made relationships very vexing.
This describes me as well. I'm 34 and haven't been in a serious relationship yet. (There are a few other reasons for that fact, but I do think the parent thing has something to do with it.)
This is why I think MORE parents should divorce. Of course there's no guarantee you wouldn't still have relationship problems. Maybe your parents new relationships would have had a similar influence or maybe your relationship issues aren't really related.
I have a friend who's stayed married for > 10 years for the kids. His wife hates him, is passive aggressive to him and is always putting him down. It's rubbed off on the kids and he's struggling to teach them the way mommy treats daddy is not the way they should treat people.
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Let me add, I also have a close friend who has great parents who've been madly in love their whole life and yet he massively struggles with relationships.
You mean that the lack of demonstration or overall feeling of love between a couple in your youth impedes you to connect this way ?
I grew up in a 'parental couple' too. Lots of my friends have parents who had troubled relationships to say the least. It does impact you. It also makes me wonder which couple ever had a long tender and motivating feeling staying together. I find culture makes people run in circle for something few understand but it's too late you settled.
>To be honest, I feel like such an asshole. There are people that have had it way worse than me, and here I am feeling sorry for myself.
That thought often cheers me up. My problems are, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant and transitory. Better buck up and better days will come.
It's also a good way to trivialise or dismiss one's very legitimate problems instead of confronting them. That's not to say that you're doing that, just that one should be mindful of the peril.
To expound a little, one should worry about the plank in one's own eye before one worries about the splinter in another's. To me, this means that one's first responsibility is to take care of oneself. If you can't take care of yourself, then you will not have learned what it takes to take care of anyone.
Probably the better superset is intellectual stimulation. Hacking, strategy games, crossword puzzles...all fall under that moniker, and are they so addicting too! It's just of great luck that unlike cocaine or love, hacking can lead to returns in other utilities like in money and a career.
Real love is actually pretty good for you altogether, body and mind, emotionally and psychologically. But that's not what most people think of as "love".
This particular trope of equating romantic love and substance addiction is annoying and fundamentally confused. It doesn't take neurology to understand that any activity from which we derive pleasure could, given the right circumstances or wrong attitudes, lead to a self-destructive spiral. And if one is aware that dopamine and other neurotransmitters are how pleasure is "implemented" in the brain, research which correlates a pleasurable experience with adaptive dopamine responses is pretty yawn-inducing.
Even if one doesn't agree that the factual content of this research is boring, rather than salacious, I think the conclusions drawn here are vastly premature given our current understanding of the brain. Imagine that somebody with a tool to "see" electrical currents (an oscilloscope? CAT scan? I don't know) was looking at my computer, first as I unleash a massive DDOS attack on some unsuspecting evildoers, and then as I put my latest philosophical writings on my ftp server for all my rabid fans. In both cases they'd see my NIC go crazy, working itself to death to blast out packets to either badly configured DNS servers or badly confused human beings (as it happens, these human being strongly resemble cocaine addicts when it comes to reading highly digressive rants composed by yours truly). So, is hosting an essay on an FTP server "the same" as initiating a DDOS? Yes, I suppose either one could fry my network adapter, but that's pretty contingent. So, how exactly are they different, and what does this have to do with cocaine?
Restricting ourselves to what's happening inside the computer, the differences reside atop a massive tower of abstraction. And what's more, these differences put down shallow roots. Even with an understanding of the von neumann architechure generally or my intel chip in particular, most physical ("neurological") measurements one could make would look pretty damn similar. One would have to understand the dynamic relationship between the cpu state register, my RAM chips, and my Hard Drive to even begin to grok what's "really" going on. I think neuroscience is in a state analogous to that of a man measuring currents in a modern computer. Even if it turns out that in certain neurological ways love and cocaine are completely identical, it may turn out that the similarities are completely overshadowed by subtler states in a different subsystem. We don't understand brain architecture, so who knows.
And really, the crux of the difference between the DDOS and rabid fans downloading my latest essay in beautiful LaTeX formatting has to do with the way the activity is situated in the relationship between me and the social world in which I exist. And the same is true of the difference between love and cocaine addiction. Courtship is a foundational human activity, one that profoundly shapes our cultural practices and understanding of ourselves. Of course it changes us! What the hell is meant by "Normal Altered State?" What is an "unaltered" human state? Being a human is inherently a state of profound embeddedness in a culture which originates in others. And another human being, who is also a rich and complex cultural creature, has immeasurably more to offer than the cruel, contentless, solipsistic chokehold of a drug addiction.
This is one of the reasons to read Infinite Jest - it explores the concept of addiction with incredible depth and interest.
I love the idea that many things in life can be modeled as addictions. Abstractly, an addiction takes the pattern of long periods of misery (plateau) interrupted by brief moments of ecstasy - what's special about an addiction is that it feels like the moments of ecstasy are worth it. This pattern is similar to that involved in learning a new skill, or going through a personality change.
This is a good example of why love is so misunderstood. What is being described in the article is closer to desire than love. The two are not the same, though desire can be the gateway towards love. Loving relationships aren't defined by codependency, though desire and love can exist together.
I'm not a Christian, but the best description of love (that I know of) is found in the Bible...
I wouldn't be so quick to label and put experiences into boxes. Your experience and your culture and your understanding of love can be so different than another person's that labels mostly just get in the way.
To look at it in information-theoretic terms, you need a higher-bandwidth channel to communicate about "core" experiences like love. Labels condense information by encoding culture and definition into them. So it's tempting to reach for them. But if the person you're communicating with doesn't share the same culture and definition, then you wind up mis-communicating until you can work out the source of the disconnect.
Labels are great for talking about computer software systems. Not so much for love.
For me, and to use your terms, I can't feel romantic love for someone without also having desire for them. I can care deeply for them, want the best for them whether it's with or without me, but in order for me to have a loving relationship with someone, desire has to be a constant undercurrent. I cannot spend copious amounts of time with a person otherwise, I start to retreat back into myself. Desire is that thing that draws me out and allows others in, it's absolutely essential.
So, while your love / desire divide may work well enough for your purposes, it won't necessarily for other people. You can try to adapt the framework to accommodate them, but do this too many times and you're left with a mess.
It's best to just share your own experiences with as plain of language as you can and let other people come up with their own abstractions.
I see desire/infatuation as catalyst or bootstrapping mechanism for a relationship. In my experience the early stages of a relationship involve a lot of calibration: communication style, likes/dislikes, emotional landmines, lifestyle, etc.
Without the strong feelings that often characterize the first period in a relationship, I or the other would probably have bailed out before even figuring out if some of these issues can be resolved.
Of course, the downside is that I've found myself spending a lot of time and energy in the infatuation phase only to discover that there were fundamental incompatibilities and wondering how I could have felt so strongly about this other person in the first place. But I guess that's unavoidable.
I wonder what chemical reactions occur inside our brains and bodies when we "fall in love." Reminds me of Rick and Morty, which refers to love as purely a symptom of secreting oxytocin.
> Modern data suggest that romantic love should be treated as an addiction, regardless of its lack of official diagnostic classification as an addiction.
What would this mean in practice? Court-ordered rehab?
http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/pdf/NeuralBasisOfLove.pdf
FWIW, I can recall crushing hard on girls up through college, with exactly the same drug-like intoxication that the article describes. But as I got more secure of myself and comfortable in my own skin, the crushes moderated. When I met my wife, there were no massive can't-stop-thinking-about-you highs, no obsessive yearning, few intrusive thoughts. It just felt natural - we enjoyed being together.
This was really disconcerting at first, like maybe it wasn't love after all, but I checked with a number of friends who were happily married for long (sometimes >10 years) periods. Very often, they mentioned the same feeling of not having the trumpets and whistles blow, and instead they grew together and found that love developed later on. Indeed, the people who were always "truly, madly, deeply in love" were usually broken up 2 months later.
I've heard a theory circulated round that when we feel that huge deep rush of intoxication, we're actually reading our "completion" into personal characteristics that the other person possesses. We're not so much in love with them as in love with the idea of being with them. And that limerence persists as long as the idea does, but eventually we all have to face the reality that we are not our partners, and we are not going to somehow become more or better than ourselves just by being with them. That huge mind-blinding rush of dopamine when you meet a new person might be an antipattern, because it blinds us from seeing the real them.