Love

Love. Baffling, no? Divine love of God - simple and pure, so easy to understand once He helps you grasp the concept and truth. But when it comes to humanly love, be it between a mother and her child, a father and his son, a guy and a girl, between sisters, brothers, it does get messy sometimes one point or the other in everyone’s lives. When you’re a kid, you have dreams that someday you’ll fall in love and have a magical relationship, or like me you might have had a totally different dream (which need not be revealed). But then ok, so I admit the whole love thing wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, what with all the butterflies and goose bumps not to mention those feelings of small-doses-of-adrenaline-shot-into-you-making-your-head-spin-and-prevent-you-from-trying-to-stop-grinning. We all know what happens after, it’s so clear it automatically spells itself out, H-U-R-T. 

Fortunately, or not for some, I’m not planning to talk about relationships and the related topics of what you should do or not do, what makes him/her smile. Blog-posts on the subjects of dating, emotions, relationships rules, flirting, are already ubiquitous in the blogging world as it is. 

Rather, what intrigues me is exactly how love affects us human beings (with superior brains and opposable thumbs, to be exact). It has been proved in previous researches that it involves all the physiognomies, behavioural influences and general nuances of substance abuse, i.e., love addiction. Love passion, though it offers much pleasure and oestrogen-infused goggle eyes, proves a constant neighbour to much pain every so often (Gibson, 2010). Curiously enough, love passion is not being acknowledged as a clinical disorder in modern medical sciences (Reynaud, et al., 2010). Be that as it may, it can’t be denied that human beings fall in love over and over again only to get hurt again and again. The question would be ‘why’ we continue to do so, i.e., fall in love in spite of the looming risk of hurt. I have three theories here; two borrowed. 

The borrowed: The first theory is that we fall in love to fill the gap in our personality, i.e., we may be attracted to others who seem exceptionally strong in an area where we are weak. This resonates with the much used phrase, ‘Opposites attract.’ As it is, human beings do not have only one weakness and even if we overcome one of those weaknesses, many others remain which would let us to be attracted to people who exude the contrary. The second theory is related to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow, 1943). Despite the presence of criticisms of Maslow’s Hierarchy, the Needs – physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation – causes motivation and trigger the brain’s reward system when that motivation is achieved. Case in point, the need to find love and feel fulfilled by that other person’s presence in one’s life. 

My theory: While watching the movie A Dangerous Method by David Cronenberg, one quote by Sabina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightley) caught my attention, ‘Only the clash of destructive forces can create something new.’ Now I know that opposites can attract, but according to me ‘destructive forces’ here refer to more than just opposite personalities. Two people can have same personalities and tastes, have so much in common, both very positive person or vice versa and still be destructive forces. In other words, to be two destructive forces, the need to be different or opposite or contradictory is not a prerequisite. Referring to the need to ‘clash’, as humans, we are easily bored; it may or may not have been academically proved but I know it. The need to feel something new, i.e., new love (since we’re on the subject of love), is fed by clashes between two people (with destructive forces each). Although love may have already been experienced, the need to create something new escalates again and again, giving rise to a cycle of clashes between destructive forces. Now of course I’m not referring to clashes between two new people all the time, the clashes could be between the same two people but with different destructive forces which could have been pre-possessed or newly minted!

Love passion followed by hurt and then love passion again is a vicious cycle which most of the time is unavoidable, but then the hurt is also ‘something new’ that contributes to making us feel alive, no?

References:

Gibson, J., 2010. Addicted to Love. [Online] 

Available at: http://brainblogger.com/2010/08/22/addicted-to-love/

[Accessed 24 September 2012].

Maslow, A., 1943. A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, Volume 50, pp. 370-396.

Reynaud, M., Karila, L., Blecha, L. & Benyamina, A., 2010. Is love passion an addictive disorder?. The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 36(5), pp. 261-7.