What is love?

patchperson · 2012-05-04T09:40:35+00:00

[permanently deleted]

aleifur · 2012-05-04T12:44:37+00:00

I empathize man. We have all been there. But let me give you my take on it.

With my psyce 101 super-powers I can see that you are afraid of rejection (well who isn't at some point). Just remember that it is OK for the girl know that you are into her.

My advise to you is twofold:

start learning and employing the PUA stuff. If you do this with the attitude of learning this insulates you from faliure to an extent (don't get me wrong, this will be fucking hard the first few times). As you start doing it more you will start to realize that women are just as insecure as you and that it is OK for her to know that you are into her. This will give you a better understanding of fully 50% of the population and in time make you more confident. And it will grant you an oppertunity to interact with a bunch of women to help you find a girl that is relationship material.
see a psychiatrist/psychologist (the one that doesn't pump you full of pills) and start to deal with your PTSD. This will dramaticly increase your quality of life and save you a whole lot of grief down the road. If you have an aversion to seeing a shrink you can think of it like this: your PTSD is a festering wound on your leg. You need help from the doc to heal it, because untill you do it will prevent you from running (I know, I know, a little after-school special but you get the idea).

Hope this helps.

beardfacekilla · 2012-05-04T14:36:43+00:00

Start seeing a therapist weekly and work through the PTSD as opposed to just existing with it. You're going to need to do a lot of crying. Submit yourself to the process, don't resist. Don't get on pills. Do every bit of research you can into your condition so that you can better understand and process your own emotions. The brick wall you've built up to protect yourself is keeping others out and you're kind of you're own prisoner. With proper treatment this stuff gets better.

savoirfunk · 2012-05-04T15:19:22+00:00

Love is a big tent word that covers a lot of different things. I'll give you a definition, so at least you have something to work with: love is choosing to become one physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually (destiny/origin/place in existence/big questions kind of stuff)--to the end that her good becomes your good, and your desire becomes for the best of things to occur in her life, so that she would respond in the best way, becoming the best person she can be.

That's a mouthful. Work through it, and see if it helps. As you know if you have a little life experience, the only thing that will help you out of what I offer you is what you can make your own.

A big part of what love is, is trusting others with who you really are. That kind of vulnerability is going to be difficult, so I'd want you to take baby steps at first.

The following helped me in my thinking about what love is:

References: The Five Love Languages. According to this guy, they are touch, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and quality time. I think that this list is not exhaustive, but this way of thinking about how to love is very helpful to me--the idea that communication is not what I say so much as what you hear.

Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. Necessary to a thoughtful examination of this idea if you are an English speaker.

Paul of Tarsus' take on love. Note that this is agape (selfless, Christian) love, not eros (desire)--Lewis makes a big distinction.

You've been hurt a lot. I agree with the guys who suggest you see a therapist and spend some time working on the horror inflicted on you and which you inflicted.

Even if things get worse for a while, they will get better.

ThrowawayPUA · 2012-05-04T15:21:58+00:00

There are many great tips on how to trick the girl in to liking you and in to pay attention to you.

No there aren't. None. Not a single one. You cannot trick someone into liking you. You have some gross misunderstandings about what the seduction community does.

You obviously have some attitude problems and you need to deal with that. But let me give you one piece of advice about relationships that will put you on the right path.

One of the reasons we want relationships is so we can discover what we are like in a relationship to someone else. We don't really know what we want, but we can find out by dating a variety of women and seeing what qualities they bring out in us.

swamy_g · 2012-05-04T18:36:39+00:00

There are different camps and view points that attempt to describe what love is. It is a very tricky subject. The scientific camp attempts to objectively describe this very subjective and personal feeling using hormones. The basic premise is that love is a feeling when certain hormones get secreted in our brain. Primarily oxytocin and other endorphins. This was seen as a necessary step towards pair-bonding that is essential for the survival of an offspring. There is truth to that. But no one knew why we were seeking love. Helen Fisher, a phd anthropologist, came up with a different meaning of love. In her very insightful talk she defines love as a need. Before that love was seen as a feeling. Yes we all feel love, but she makes a point that we feel the need to love and be loved, just like we feel the need to eat and have sex. Just as there is a sex drive in a person, there is also a love drive. That can be pretty insightful. What this means is that we need to be loved as a human and that it is perfectly normal to seek this thing called love. Sure we build stories around it and put it on a pedestal but Fisher defines it as just a basic need. Based on her theory, you can have 100 F-Closes a month but still feel empty inside because though you are satisfying your sex drive you are doing anything about your love drive. Hence so many of the so called PUAs who are just bent on getting rampant sex just end up getting disillusioned because they are only catering to their sex drive. And the smart ones find a good pool of women to give and share love while enjoying great sex. And some people just end up with a stable relationship with one special person. This is a very pragmatic answer.

But then there's the mystical/pyschonautical side of love. That defines it as the primordial life sustaining force of the Universe. Love is defined as the all pervading force that moves everything in the universe. Just like gravity where everything in the universe is attracted to every other thing, so is everything in love with everything else. We as post modern 21st century humans, with our limited level of consciousness, cannot feel this religious/spiritual feeling because we are caught up with need always seek money/fame/women and our day to day chores and rituals and we forget to seek things that are going to deeply satisfy us. I personally subscribe to this view. Not that the scientific camp is incorrect but it does not satisfy me fully. There's a very good by Rumi which goes like

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

So what this means is that Love will come to you. You do not have to seek it. You merely have to work on yourself. To put it bluntly on a mundane level, one has to work on their inner/outer game. One has to work on their confidence, they way they dress/talk, finding their purpose in life, eye contact, flirting skills etc and then love will come seeking them. When you've made yourself a very purpose driven attractive man, you will attract the sort of women you are looking for and Love flows between you two. I'm pretty sure when Rumi talks about love, he is talking about the spiritual love for all things in the universe but it can also be adapted to romantic love.

So there you have it, my take on a very complicated subject. I leave with a link to one of my favorite chapters from a book of boundless wisdom -- The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran.

On Love

UnapologeticalyAlive · 2012-05-08T20:15:23+00:00

These two videos helped me understand what love really is. (or more accurately, what it isn't)

Swami Satchidananda -Real Love

Eckhart Tolle - One-sided love relationship

bitustacon · 2012-05-04T14:01:43+00:00

What is love? ...............nonexistent

Title	What is love?
Author	PSY-OPS-01
Upvotes	3
Comments	14
Date	May 4, 2012 9:12 AM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/seduction
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/t6m2v/what_is_love/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/seduction/what-is-love.1332212 https://theredarchive.com/post/1332212

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