love

what does it mean to be "in love" does it refer to the honeymoon period in a relationship? Is it how you show up for someone? does it refer purely to a kind of romantic commitment? or intense love? is love defined by the capacity one has to love?? how does one distinguish between deep love and being "in love" how does one know, is there ever any certainty? or is just foolish to try to understand a linguistically ambiguous concept?

love is highly context-specific but in general it's supporting the life and health of another being. it's an outlook or state of being that necessitates action, i.e. it's something you both feel and do. my two cents.

i do think assisted death can be loving but i hope i never have to be a part of that kind of situation.

I have experienced the fuzzy physiological feeling but I've been not so great at demonstrating through my actions :(

assisted death is quite bleak but I can see if you've been with someone a long time and there is some medical, emotional, or otherwise unbearable condition to live with, and both people are ready and want to lay down to transcend life,love and death for the last time together

haha. Maybe I'm warped,though, (medically) mutually assisted sui honestly sounds like the apex of kissing atop of a crumbling society

couldn't be me. im too poor for that

have you been in love? have you had your heartbroken?

as sort of mentioned i do feel there's like a divide between the two concepts of it being like the feeling and the verb. i don't know if both have to be present to call it love, i don't think so??

what does it mean to be "in love" does it refer to the honeymoon period in a relationship?

generally "in love" is used that way. otoh, just "love", as posed in your thread title, covers multitudes of different feelings, thoughts and ideas, both positive and negative. map otm about it being highly context sensitive.

have you been in love?

yes. deeply and lastingly.

have you had your heart broken?

yes. any really deep and committed love can do this, too.

your many questions can be answered by most ilxors from their own lives and experiences and they will all vary in detail, but not fundamentally.

the fact that you're asking these questions leads me to think you're on the young side and haven't yet assembled a large enough trove of experiences to provide you with your own definitive answers. if that's so, then all I can say is, love courageously. it's the only approach that seems to deliver the goods.

by my own definition, I've probably only been once. I've had a bunch of short-lived relationship, only one that ever got to the point where we felt something deep for each other. lots of people struggle when the 'infatuation phase' ends, but my God, it's a relief for me. I'm not someone who can feel things that intensely about other people. it rips me apart. (I more than likely have OCD or one of its offshoots, so anything that is even a cousin to a feeling of obsession is bad for me).

in fact, even THAT one relationship almost fell apart because the 'honeymoon period' had messed with my wellbeing so much (I also wasn't on antidepressants yet). but in a way that also is what helped us grow stronger - once I mentally decided "I can't do this, I'm going to have to end things", the pressure was off and we both saw each other with clearer eyes, and then wound up staying together for the next six or seven months, something lasting and deeper.

I liken the feeling of being 'in love' to deep feelings of affection and empathy for someone, whose pain and joy you experience together in a well-connected partnership. the latter meant a lot - we both went through a lot that year and it was great having each other.

I no longer feel like I'm capable of experiencing it. I managed to approach things much more calmly and patiently the next few times I dated, much more easily surmising when things weren't working, and not being overwhelmed during the early phases. this unfortunately was a bad overcorrection, as then people would tell me now it seemed like I was detached, not all that present.

I met someone about ten years ago, someone I was comfortable being vulnerable with, which is an achievement for me, and we talked about all of the wonderful things we were going to do together. and then one day, the day after a wonderful date, her demeanor abruptly changed, saying things to me that contradicted how she felt even a day ago, and saying it was my fault things were falling apart. I was just stunned. I of course believed this and internalized it all until I talked to my roommate about a month later and was finally talking about what happened and she said "she told you that? no, dude - she met another guy. seriously...like, right around that time. they were loudly having sex in the room next to me".

it kinda made me sour and since then I've been more guarded, and less able to be vulnerable, and so usually things last 1-2 months. my last girlfriend (who I'm still good friends with, and she's married now) said "are we even still together?" to me one night.

it'll take a lot for me to date again, much less "be in love" with someone. but that's ok. i've made my peace.

as sort of mentioned i do feel there's like a divide between the two concepts of it being like the feeling and the verb. i don't know if both have to be present to call it love, i don't think so??

― Swen, Monday, February 26, 2024 7:06 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think i agree with this. i like the idea of it requiring an action because i've had the experience of people saying "i love you" a lot and seeming to feel and believe it but acting towards me in a way that harms me. but thinking about it more, the action part isn't exactly necessary. i think what's required for love to be real is for the other being to feel it in relationship to you, if you're talking about loving that being.

love can mean so many different things. i'm in way over my head on trying to parse them all out. i think i'm trying to get at my own personal definition of it, by far the most important one to me - what it looks like when i feel loved. at the very least that particular meaning requires two beings to feel it in relationship to each other.

but then again i believe in self-love! are you just conjuring two beings out of yourself if you're loving yourself? i sort of think you are lol but now i feel like i've entered a hall of mirrors.

I've been married for over 30 years and the nature of my love for my wife has changed a lot in that time. When we were first dating (we dated for about 18 months before getting married) it went from a fairly teenage thing — long phone conversations, pining for the other person, sudden fights and short-term breakups, crying — to the almost avalanche-like decision/realization that the other person was it, the ideal partner to spend the rest of one's life (to the degree that one can imagine "the rest of one's life" at 20) with. So we got married, and our lives became one life, working together to pay the bills and achieve greater material comfort while concurrently learning more and more about each other's personality, tastes, habits, ways of thinking, interests, etc., etc., etc. My wife, like me, is constantly reading (and more recently watching documentaries on YouTube and Netflix and wherever else), and she has more formal education than I do, so a huge part of our love for each other is demonstrated by learning something new and sharing it with the other person. These days, as an aging person with a chronic illness who works from home and is thus around my wife pretty much 24 hours a day, I feel a greater tenderness toward her than at any previous point in our lives. Just being in the room with her is comforting and makes me happier. Although I can't say how my life would be different had we never met, because that's obviously impossible to envision, I know that it would be, because she inspires me. Every book I've written is dedicated to her; we're partners in creative projects; we moved across the country a year ago, to a state neither of us had ever even visited...she's the only person I absolutely need in my life. Everyone else is optional.

And that's a fine thing for ya indeed!

My folks hit 50 years married a while back -- indeed, crossed fingers, give it a couple of years and it'll be 60. Aging and time can certainly change things but they make it work in a way that even I on the outside sense it strongly, still.

Love is trust, self-sacrifice, deep abiding care, a river of perpetual happiness that even when broken by inevitable disagreement... you know it's still there to jump back into the next day.

a river of perpetual happiness

Ehhhh

there are people who love each other but are nonetheless deeply unhappy and sometimes they split up

xp - it sometimes is an underground river

Aimless otm. Sorry to state the redundant but ya know, just speaking from personal experience here and understand the ymmv. It's a river that's there, and forces sometimes keep you from enjoying its pleasure but you can always come back to it with the appropriate keys to the door (forgiveness, time-spent, communication etc.)

I like Bill Calahans perspective

True love is not magic
It's certainty
And what comes after certainty?
A world of mystery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DL_Pxgqmno

personally I'm very curious about the lust and love connection, like I know everyone says the love lasts after the lust but then what happens to desire, like as a general thing

i used to think they were way more connected than i do now. like i don't think that one follows from the other anymore, really. desire is chaotic. keeping love and desire going with the same person over time is a rare feat ime.

a river of perpetual happiness

Had to smile at this bc the vows my wife and I took specifically reference "rivers of pain."

best early Pantera album

Hah

They're not mutually exclusive! Often the same river!

but then again i believe in self-love! are you just conjuring two beings out of yourself if you're loving yourself? i sort of think you are lol but now i feel like i've entered a hall of mirrors.

― ꙮ (map), Monday, February 26, 2024 3:25 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

can confirm. it helps to have a genius symbolic consciousness machine.

I got into love because someone made me far happier than I was on my own. And while that happiness has shifted and moulded, that trait has been the defining feature of the love between my wife and I. We make each other better than we'd be on our own and we make each other happier (generally speaking)

Pros of love: someone to hold at night, in perpetuity
Cons of love: sometimes they bark at you that its too hot to be held on this or that particular night

just want to acknowledge that Neanderthal's experience is messed up and must be so disconcerting/disorienting. experiencing that kind of ugly side of people is a pretty demoralizing reality check.

HP that sounds very special. i just don't know, like I'm pretty sure I don't need that in my life right now but then recently I spent the night with an old flame and accidentally told him I loved him because I got caught up in the moment lol. oops!

I will say one thought that is occurring to me is I feel that belief is a big part of what I consider love to be, you know like believing in someone truly an ardently, in their quality of character perhaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC7ijkd8BGU

Right to acknowledge that. Sorry neando, you have been treated poorly when you clearly don't deserve it. People can be cruel.

Haha Swen, good luck sorting that all out! Maybe the heart wants what the brain thinks it could do without. I'll leave it to you to sort out with grace and many a happy ending ideally <3

❤️❤️❤️❤️ i meannnn yes the heart brain (dis)connection is a pretty major mindf***

can't tell you how often, when i was younger, i thought i was in love and then years later i realized, oh, i was in love with an idea of a person and not the reality, or i was in love with the idea of being in love and i put a lot of energy into it, and then i would just be a wreck when whatever situation inspired these feelings didn't work out. i lived in a world of projections, if i could put my hand through whatever i felt i would find no substance there, just a trick of light. so, i had to learn what love is. it was not easy because i am very shy and have trouble getting to know anyone new and rarely talk about myself. but i think i first really felt it, experienced it, shared it with someone almost ten years ago. we were long distance, i took the bus to boston every other weekend and she took the bus to new york on the others. every time we were together it was like a vacation from our actual lives, which doesn't sound like love as i know it now, but at the time it felt like we were building a life together far away from everything that had fucked with us in the past. that sounds like love as a stepping stone to something else, which i guess it was, because we broke up a few months later

my most recent relationship was my longest and deepest. i was sort of blown away by it on a near-constant basis. it just seemed like this deep well of feeling had been carved out of me, and it connected to the same thing in her, and i got to be reminded of it every single day, and it absolutely ruled

unfortunately the communication in both of these relationships collapsed and we stopped having sex and etc. i don't think this is because we stopped loving each other but because ... i was clearly repressing things and was trying to be something i was not. you'd think, can you really know love if you aren't being yourself, and if the other person doesn't have access to whoever that self is (or who, upon finding out who that self is, rejects her)? idk. god it felt like i was close though

i do feel like serial monogamy is a fiction i'm trying very hard to recognize as fictional even tho i don't really like any of the alternatives. i think i agree with map that love and lust sometimes line up but often come from different places and then take very different courses, but who knows, i have yet to have loving sex as a trans woman, i have to assume it'll be completely different

i have literally no idea why i wrote all of that but. wanted to say i love (lol) h.p.'s posts itt

Love your posts (in any thread) too ivy ❤️

This is the hardest question imo: what happens to love when the people in love seriously change? Many a tome written, many a life defined by this question. Its been 4 short years of marriage and there's been changes in both of us, some that have compounded happiness as we shift into the good ideals the other has for us. And some that we have to resign ourselves to, As we ended up with something we didn't know was in the deal when we got together. Sort of beyond these changes there is what Swen talked about: a belief in the goodness and value of each other that is the tool which allows us to navigate these changes. I'm a believer that the core temperament of a person is fairly immutable. Tbh this is where I think the word "soul" still has lots of currency. The anterior parts of a person change, but there's something deeper than tastes, preferences, traits etc. That define a person and where I think love finds its firm footing. I haven't got this all fully thought out...

So far it's been relatively small fry on the changes in one another weve had to make space for. Religion/career/relatively-minor-family-planning stuff. And tbh there's some changes I don't make (and I assume it's the same with her) because pragmatically, I don't see it as benefiting us (and therefore me) even if I think it would benefit me (singular). These are on things I can compromise on, and I understand for some people there are uncompromisable elements that maybe love can't bridge a gap over... but I've shacked up with someone that I feel certainty towards... which leads me to no fear about any such unbridgeable gaps (with the philosophical scepticism one needs to take towards any certainty being held at an appropriate meta distance )

...Famous last words and all lol

Sorry lot of shoddy grammar, spelling, sentence structure there as per usual

“ if that's so, then all I can say is, love courageously. it's the only approach that seems to deliver the goods”
Hi Swen. This is incredibly sweet! Also love the phrase “ deliver the goods”
after my recent breakup, the realization I deeply and unironically love them hit me. The funny thing about the concept is that sometimes a person feels more intensely outside of a relationship.

We were seeing each other for a year and he opened the world up to me in a myriad of ways, from pointing me to, film, poetry, and literature. it was fantastical and delightful. He accepted me with warmth and understanding and encouraged me that if I just looked a little deeper there is a world of stories depicting the world we live in.
Sigh. The relationship deteriorated, as he is a bit avoidant and I have a bit of relationship ocd or some slip of it. We got all tangled up. not being together is so maddening.
Now, taking a quick introspective look over the last several years, I am reminded that everything is temporary, even, and especially love in its varying shapes and forms, I like to think of love as mindfulness and doing; in conjuncture with each other.
Though to me the concept of love is still an anomaly

H.P thank you for dropping that fabulous bop into the thread! and I'll just note that i have really enjoyed reading your line of thinking on this topic

i totally just derped **** more difficult than i look aimless***

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D-ouXcN7FY

i'm sorry this happened to you Fadii, it happened to me years ago and mostly i don't think about it anymore but reading this thread has made me feel like i'm right there and it's still raw

soooo i had emotional blindness when i was a child, and thought of myself as cold and insensitive. i carried a lot of guilt, since i didn't respond to cues with the emotions other people seemed to expect- at least, i wasn't able to parse my reactions. i knew i was deficient but i wouldn't dare tell anyone. i wish i had, someone might have helped. but instead i tried my best to 'fake it'. if someone said "i love you", i had no idea what that meant, i just said "i love you" back like a robot.

i feel a lot but it's always been hard for me to process my emotions. i find them overwhelming and can't communicate what i'm feeling to another person very clearly most of the time.

i've only been in one long term relationship. it lasted just shy of 3 years and indirectly, it resulted from my obsessive infatuation with someone else. i was a wreck and my long term boyfriend had been the primary confidante, until one day he made a move.

it just seemed like this deep well of feeling had been carved out of me, and it connected to the same thing in her, and i got to be reminded of it every single day, and it absolutely ruled

^ that is how i also experienced it. one thing that blew me away was, i'd done nothing to deserve all that. i wasn't required to better myself. he seemed to love me just for existing. that made it so much more special and meaningful but harder to believe in at the same time. a small part of me suspected it was an act of charity. and after 3 years of not really worrying about it, that feeling surfaced and cast everything that had transpired between us in a cold light. it ruined everything very suddenly.

i wish i could just jump back in the river anytime. in a case like this it is notching a boat to seek a sword.

i know it's not the same kind of changes H.P. is talking about, but love has a transformative power. i think of it like Beauty and the Beast, where both of us were the monster and both of us were the beautiful girl who was able to see the prince inside the monster, and draw him out. we made each other real and human. not that anyone has ever mistaken me for an ice cube, but i'm largely oblivious to social norms and cues. so it helped that my ex is very blunt lol. most people would say he is blunt to the point of being mean. and it's has never been reassuring, it has sometimes made him harder to hear. but i found that he's actually very delcate, like a little bird who will take flight if you make any sudden moves. he was someone i needed to protect! and i found a big smile in him, or like a big warm embrace- after a while that was the only thing i could see, i couldn't see the crank at all.

i also found out that i am sweet and kind-hearted, at least i can be. since that's the only thing i ever wanted from myself, i've been able to show myself a little kindness since. i feel like our relationship only failed because it hadn't transformed me fully enough.

so yeah i'm not the best person to answer here because i am a little bit stunted, inexperienced and immature, but i feel like it's really important, for your partner's sake, to be able to love yourself too.

and Neanderthal OTM about the crush phase. The first time it happened to me i couldn't stay on task for years and ended up flunking out of high school.

one thing that blew me away was, i'd done nothing to deserve all that. i wasn't required to better myself. he seemed to love me just for existing.

That is really beautiful. It reminds me a bit of what Phil Lesh wrote in his autobio about meeting his wife:
I’ll never know what she saw in me then—an aging rocker, overweight and overmedicated — but is that not part of the glory of love? Sometimes love can penetrate the countless masks we use and shine its light directly on our souls, for those with eyes to see.

As you intimated in the rest of that post, I guess for some of us it can take practice to accept that sort of grace, or to readily extend it to others. I think it requires a great deal of humility, and also a willingness to somewhat ignore the overanalytical/overintellectualizing parts of our being.

Obviously this thread is for the most part discussing "romantic" love and closely related phenomena, but in terms of love I definitely appreciate the religious or spiritual traditions that insist that love is in fact our true nature -- but that we tend to cover it up with faulty assumptions and ideas regarding ourselves and others. Again I think it requires a great deal of humility to realize that truth, and also necessitates taking an approach to things which can be quite the challenge in a culture or society like ours in which the intellect is so disproportionately privileged.

Love. There's some crossover between this thread and the LGBTQ+ thread, and IDK, I guess I want to talk about it on this thread.

The first relationship I had... it started when I was 33. I had a really, really strong belief that I was unworthy of love. That nobody could possibly love me for who I am. It was something I was taught, over a long period of time. Part of that is my being transfemme. Not all of it.

That belief has taken me a long time to unlearn. The thing my ex and I said to each other a lot... I told her that I loved her more than I cared about myself. IDK, the Tim Buckley "Sweet Surrender" thing, maybe. In retrospect I guess that was kind of a low bar. There was so much good in our relationship, it was so fantastic in so many ways, but that I guess was a central part of it. And then when I transitioned... I _had_ to care about myself more than I cared about anybody else. I still... I mean I was taught that was selfish and bad. Except that the people who are really narcissists, turns out that they hate themselves. People who act like they're better than anyone else, it's a posture. Believing you're better than everyone else and believing you're worse than anyone else are two sides of the same coin, I've found. I often find myself believing both things simultaneously. The thing about that belief is that it makes someone an _exception_. Someone who believes that doesn't deserve what everyone else does.

I've learned the hard way that nothing can substitute for loving myself. It's way harder to do than loving someone else. It's that thing of... some beliefs becomes self-fulfilling prophecies. If I don't think I'm worthy of love, I tend to behave in ways that reinforce that belief. When I treated people who love me badly - which everyone does, sometimes - I would blame myself, say that I was a bad person. All this work I've done over the past couple of years, it's mostly oriented towards changing that belief. Now... what other people believe about me don't define who I am.

Which I need to do because as far as I know my ex-wife hates me. That fucked me up for a while. She was more important to me than I was to myself, and I hurt her, and I left her. Because that's what I needed to do for me. Because after the things she said and did I couldn't stay. Because I saw and see what happens to people who don't leave, when the people they love do and say those things. Because putting someone else above myself wasn't a _choice_ I had anymore. Getting to the point, not just intellectually but _emotionally_, where I realized that she hates me, that she has a right to hate me, and that it _doesn't_ mean I'm a bad person. I'm not to _blame_ for her hating me. That's a choice she made.

That's love. The other ways, the other things people say about love? I don't know. I've felt the... in poly circles they call it "new relationship energy". I want to spend all my time with someone. I find them endlessly fascinating. It's important I think because that's where things build from. Sex with my ex-wife, it did make me feel closer to her emotionally. Even though I hated sex, even though it felt awful. I did it when I could because it helped me feel closer to her.

The thing is, the idea of being someone's all, of being someone's everything, or of someone else being my all, my everything. That's not something I could ever do. My ex and I were compatible in nearly every way but sexually. That was enough, though, enough to make it not work. The endless work is that of boundaries.

Love, between me and my ex... it was like there were three of us in the relationship. There was me. There was her. And then there was _us_, this thing we built slowly, laboriously, over years. The shape of it, the appearance of it... it changed as we changed. Sometimes people change to such an extent that this this thing, a love between two people... it needed something I wasn't able to give. So I did, I guess, in a sense take my love away. Because I still loved her, but I couldn't give her that love, show her that love. It was of no use to her. It was of no use to me. That last time we talked I told her I'd always love her, and she said she didn't know what to do with that. She was right. That wasn't a fair thing for me to say to her.

I do still love her I guess. What does that mean to me? What it means is that what we had was good. It was fucked up in a lot of ways, I hurt her a lot, she hurt me a lot, but it was also good. We had... I guess the glib thing would be to say that we had some good times together, but it was more than that. Twelve years of my life was a long time. Being with her changed me for the better.

I guess I'd say that... something about me, something at my core, needs to _create_. For twelve years I put a great deal of the care I have, a lot of my love and compassion, into this thing. This shared trust. It was important to me. It was good and beautiful, and over the course of a few months it turned... painful. Very painful. I got back everything I put into that relationship and more, and God, did it hurt.

After that, the only thing I was able to think of to do was try and love myself. Hardest fuckin' thing in the world. I'm putting the work into it, though. The more I do that... whatever love looks like for me going forward, I believe I'll be able to build something better with the people who I love and who love me.

hey del
i read your post a few times, it was such a salve to me! thanks.
i think this is an ok place to talk about spiritual love? i assume you are talking about concepts like wahdat al wujud and ego death, but correct me if i'm wrong! i think the sense of Oneness, once you find it, takes real discipline to sustain. it's funny because spiritual and ritual practices are the center of my life, but my practices are devoid of anything approaching mysticism (and probably also discipline, i'm afraid)

what does humility mean to you?
i am usually really grateful to be here on this rock, maybe that's the most important part.

Love. There's some crossover between this thread and the LGBTQ+ thread, and IDK, I guess I want to talk about it on this thread.

my bad! i had no intention of getting into it more when i said "i miss my boyfriend" in that thread

you know, in the years we were together, my ex only said "i love you" 2 or 3 times. i said it constantly, but he didn't have to! he was much better than me at demonstrating it. something to aspire to! i know we'll always care for each other, but i have an estranged friend who probably hates me, and it's like a pall hanging over my life. i feel, as you seem to, that it's prob justified, but also that i did my best and can't punish myself for it. i still have dreams about it all the time tho, i'm not sure it gets easier.

are we sure this new poster isn't some AI variant?

Introduce Yourselves!

WDYLL 2024

that was directed at "Fadii" to be clear

i totally just derped

too much self-awareness for AI

maaaaaybe

could just be a sock I guess

Classic or Dud: replacing half of all ilxor posters with AI variants. Could take the sting, out of the zings

Someone please train an AI on ilx. Honestly would be a laugh to see what was produced

who knows, in ten months or a year Fadii could develop into the next treeship. give them time, they've only just sprouted. but Aja was a well beloved sock, so that's OK, too.

Cant believe no one's figured out I'm just a Ned sock for when I want to be a bit more goofy

Sorry that's slanderous and I already regret posting it

I just have to be phatic for a second and say that it’s gripping reading about everyone’s experiences with love and for everyone having loved and lost my heart goes out to you.

I'm honestly not upset about it, like in the grand scheme of disasters it hardly measures

also I would really say that I love humanity and always have, but the proportion of truly awful people in our nation's gay community is impressive

are we sure this new poster isn't some AI variant?

― I painted my teeth (sleeve)

i can't imagine someone going to the trouble of making an AI to post on ILX but anything's possible ig

and yes i know it wouldn't be that much trouble

you know, in the years we were together, my ex only said "i love you" 2 or 3 times. i said it constantly, but he didn't have to! he was much better than me at demonstrating it. something to aspire to! i know we'll always care for each other, but i have an estranged friend who probably hates me, and it's like a pall hanging over my life. i feel, as you seem to, that it's prob justified, but also that i did my best and can't punish myself for it. i still have dreams about it all the time tho, i'm not sure it gets easier.

― A street taco cart named Des'ree (Deflatormouse)

honestly that just makes me think of love languages, "acts of service" vs. "words of affirmation". people got different ways of showing love

idk if it gets _easier_ but it hurts less and less often. i don't think it's time so much as distance. if i was still around her all the time... well, i'm glad i'm not still around her all the time. i needed to get away.

also I would really say that I love humanity and always have, but the proportion of truly awful people in our nation's gay community is impressive

― Swen

ahhh, for me it's just "hurt people hurt people". the people who've done the most fucked up shit to me aren't bad people. i've done fucked up shit to people i cared about and i'm not a bad person. it fuckin' sucks and it's the reality of things right now.

I've told two women I loved them (my first girlfriend, my wife), both before we had started going out. The stereotype of the distant man who dates someone without feeling (or expressing his feeling) is strange to me. No offence to any men who operate this way.

A lot of people seem to wonder if their pet "really loves" them. I don't know if Tuffy the cat does, but I'm sure he trusts me and relies on me, and it is a sacred bond; almost more so than my marriage, because he is so much more vulnerable (though his needs and desires are much simpler than my wife's). So my love for the animal has a lot to do with compassion towards weakness.

Finally, as someone who was 16 in 1988, it's hard for me to think of this question without considering that a primary authority on the topic of love, Dr. Sam Hagar, noted that it not only "lasts forever" but also it's "just something you feel together".

i tell my two best friends I love them all the time (one male, one female). both feel like siblings to me at this point.

hell I even say it to other friends. life is too short, let people know you love em, and back it up with your actions.

Saying that, I can't do. I would have had a hard time even saying it to my parents as an adult.

heart react

i've become someone who says it a lot! sometimes it just flies out of my mouth! (like to friends, not first dates lol)

I said it far to early to my wife when we were dating! But tbf I didn't say it to any of my previous girlfriends so it reflects certainty rather than lack of self-control!

I think I say it to my pets more than her these days, and I probably say it to her minimum three times a day. To friends though? Basically never. It's a great idea, wish I did it, just can't muscle it up. Too open, too revealing, too vulnerable. Good on you to those who can, I'd love to work towards that, it's an admirable thing to do.

well I definitely think there's a gender/queer thing at play there, like my understanding is that yr a straight man given your descriptions of your relationship, and I do think it's a lot easier for gay men such as myself or women, or other queer people perhaps, to say these things

i used to say it a lot to straight male friends! i think of myself as someone who says it to friends a lot! but now that you mention it, it's been years?? wtf, when did it get weird?

it's so annoying how intimacy becomes so weird growing up!!

I'm good for a 'love you, brother' or 'love you dudes' but not "I LOVE YOU"

I started saying it regularly to my mom and siblings a few years ago, and now we say it to each other whenever we talk. It's like everyone was just waiting for someone to go first.

awwww yea I've noticed that pattern elsewhere

xp 😂😂

lol oh god i hated that, whatever you do don't say "love you dude" or "bro" to a gay friend, it's like saying "love you #nohomo", better to say nothing

One of my closest friends said "I love you like a brother" and I was deeply moved.

that's different (and very sweet)!

obsessed

hey del
i read your post a few times, it was such a salve to me! thanks.

Cool!

i think this is an ok place to talk about spiritual love? i assume you are talking about concepts like wahdat al wujud and ego death, but correct me if i'm wrong!

Yes.

i think the sense of Oneness, once you find it, takes real discipline to sustain. it's funny because spiritual and ritual practices are the center of my life, but my practices are devoid of anything approaching mysticism (and probably also discipline, i'm afraid

Yeah, I'm gonna guess that everyone reading this has had experiences of Oneness, the truth, but yeah accessing it or living it moment-to-moment is I guess difficult for most of us past the initial self-congratulatory phase. It is ultimately about abidance, as the Dude character in The Big Lebowski said.

what does humility mean to you?
i am usually really grateful to be here on this rock, maybe that's the most important part.

That in itself is so good, I think. There is so much complaining and negativity, i.e. 98 percent or so of the internet that is just completely and totally unhelpful. You don't have to be a overly-glib "positivity" person to realize that enormous amounts of psychic/psychological energy are wasted on bumming out about stuff and phenomena in general. (So I say, who starts every day by looking at Twitter/X and reading on the latest grim- and bleak-ness)

To answer your specific question, oh gosh, there is so much I could type, but in the spirit of the question I will ruthlessly edit, if not censor myself. What it means to me in part is realizing that nothing lasts == body, mindstream, etc. Humility is kind of everything. It removes so many encumbrances. Seeing the good and ignoring the "bad" in people. Everyone equal, manifestations of God/the Absolute/the Divine/potential Buddhas, etc., depending on one's specific view. It levels the playing field as it were in a huge way. We could all die at any moment. Nothing lasts. What we are is what matters, though it's fun for a time to think of other things.

Also I think that people sometimes exaggerate the importance of the intellect. The worst sin is to be dumb, the greatest virtue is to be smart. But. These have, I dunno as much to do with wisdom. Our actual being is love, the heart. We try to apply to intellect to things that it, is not only useless at, but that it also actively makes things worse.

Also I think that people sometimes exaggerate the importance of the intellect. The worst sin is to be dumb, the greatest virtue is to be smart. But. These have I dunno as much to do with wisdom. Our actual being is love, the heart. We try to apply to intellect to things that it, is not only useless at, but that it also actively makes things worse.

In terms of romantic relationships, we assume that we know what others may think of us, and are arrogant in that sense, while in reality we hardly know what we think of our own ostensible selves, from moment to moment. But somehow at the same time we presume to "know" what others think of us, moment to moment? So that limited realization, in itself I think is valuable in terms of thinking about humility and love. We don't know! while at the same time assuming a lot of garbage. In some traditions the idea is that there is nothing to achieve per se, but the point is rather to see the falseness of those wrong ideas. The wrong ideas block us from reality, i.e., God, i.e., Love, i.e. the Reality.

I guess it was the Sam Elliot character and not the Dude who talked about the Dude abides but, the reader presumably gets my point...

I keep going back to Robert Ashley “three men have loved her, one a decade on average” (sorry if that’s inaccurate quote)…. Kate so otm on this thread re deserving and not deserving and the self-fulfilling prophecy

I keep going back to Robert Ashley “three men have loved her, one a decade on average” (sorry if that’s inaccurate quote)…. Kate so otm on this thread re deserving and not deserving and the self-fulfilling prophecy

Sometimes it seems as though there are two kinds of people in the world -- those who as young children got the message very clearly that they were loved unconditionally and they could just be without worrying constantly about fucking up and losing that love, which, particularly at that young age feels like you will just about die without it, and otoh those who felt like they had to constantly do some ongoing social equivalent of acrobatic feats in life to maintain that sense of well-being even in some small way. Sadly much of human history is probably shaped by people reacting to and trying to (over-)compensate for those feelings of lack and deprivation. If one is in the latter category, when witnessing ppl in the first it almost seems like you are watching magical beings who glide through so many life circumstances sans friction. Almost like the way the average person might view a psychopath. There are so many psychological burdens that they are not involved in from the getgo.