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TopChuck -> RE: Control of emotions, and how long has it taken for love to develop? (2/21/2010 11:13:30 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Andalusite
I don't just want the word, or just the actions, I want him to feel the emotion of love. It's less about him not using the word, and more about him saying he's not sure how he feels about me. In my last relationship, the only other time it has been an issue, my previous Dominant said outright that he *didn't* love me.
Topchuck's response:
Okay. All we need is a clear definition of just what that emotion is.
Andalusite's response:
TopChuck, I'm a little confused. Do you not know what romantic love is, or are you trying to encourage me to express to you (and hopefully to him as well) more specifically what I want and need from him? I don't expect him to feel *precisely* the same way as I do toward him, but I don't want it to be completely unreciprocated either. I have that "heart-bursting" or "heart-swelling" feeling that ranja described above. I care about him and am happy when he is, and feel terrible when he's upset or sick or hurt. I want to be with him as much/often as I can, and miss him and think about him when he isn't there. Caring and respect are important aspects of love, but I feel them toward people I'm not sexually or romantically involved with at all. I guess you could say that they're "necessary but not sufficient." I can't crawl into his head or his heart, and know exactly how he feels about me. I pretty much have to take his word for it, that he isn't sure yet how he feels about me. Insisting that what he feels has to be love because he cares about me seems like projecting my emotions onto him, rather than giving him room to figure out how he actually feels.
No.
I asked, because I know you can't define the emotion, "love".
First, it's the noun. It's an inert state and nobody knows what it is. We've located reactions in the human brain that may be love, but exactly what the noun means isn't yet known. Most emotions defy exact description, when you think about it. We can talk about reactions to the feelings or behaviors that create feelings, but that moves us to actions. We talk about action when we consider whether we are being loved; acts of loving. "In love" is meaningless, because it can't be defined.
Second, the feeling of love could be totally different from the criteria that people use to decide if they are loved.
Human loving is about the verb, loving.
We measure our loving by whether we feel loved in return. It's an exchange of what makes the other person feel loved, for what makes us feel loved. Loving takes place as long as the exchange continues, quid pro quo. And, we yearn to give as well as receive. We want to see signs of both the quid and the quo.
Because males don't think logically and emotionally at the same time, they can avoid actually 'feeling' about someone they are loving. They can avoid thinking about it forever and never feel the emotion of love.
Males can also allow themselves to feel love about their loved one, by momentarily turning off the logical brain and turning on the emotional brain and simply thinking warm thoughts about her. I suspect that's how men actually do develop that emotion about women they are loving.
They can allow themselves to move to their emotional brain and feel that warm emotion of love, when they are in a place of safety. They can do it while she is with them, but they have to stop loving, while they are feeling the emotion of love. That's because they love logically and the emotion is, of course, in the emotional brain. Providing cherishing, understanding, and respect are actions he takes while thinking logically about doing those things. It eventually becomes internalized in his logical brain and is automatic as long as the conditions are normal.
Women, even while functioning logically, are in touch with their emotions. Just as, when they are functioning emotionally, their logical mind can break in at any time. They love and know it while they are doing it.
For males, they may feel love, but have to move back to their logical brains to remember the feeling.
You're right in that you can't force that feeling in another person. You can only let him know why you want loving to be a sharing, togetherness, relationship, where he feels that warm loving glow about you.
So, why do women need him to feel that?
I think it's because women want to feel that each has an emotional investment in the relationship. It's a biological urge for women, because women evolved needing a provider and protector while she was gestating and then until her children no longer needed their parents care and protection. Emotional investment helped convince her of his devotion to the relationship. Men aren't in an immutable situation after impregnating a woman. If he's not devoted to her, he can leave. She has that thing growing within and unless she destroys it, she's tied down for the duration of time needed to bring her children to adulthood.
For him, he had to realize that devotion to one woman and giving up his ability to produce enough babies to populate the entire universe before noon, had advantages for his survival and the survival of his dna in the next generation of humans. Now, I don't say he thought these things through in those terms, while evolving, but it turned out that enough success was achieved that men have survived who behaved that way. Survival wasn't confined to those who had exclusive relationships, though and the ability to shut out the emotional brain by the male has proved to be both boon and bane.
Men needed women who would produce babies if they were to evolve successfully and achieving balance in the relationship, by exchanging love on a fair basis, worked to more successfully achieve that goal.
There has been a dichotomy of thinking since BDSM moved in and swallowed up D/s.
Many don't think an emotional investment is necessary in D/s relationships. They feel there is no connection between loving and D/s. Many speak of BDSM and D/s interchangeably. There is a thread on CM that expresses a majority opinion that D/s is included in the kinks of BDSM, as if D/s is simply another kink, rather than the essence of the feeling that motivates BDSM. But D/s exists throughout the animal world and even though there are kinky dolphins, the amount of bondage, domination, sadism and masochism in the animal world pales by comparison with the fact that D/s is a way of life for the animal kingdom.
Unfortunately, the dichotomy has created imbalance in relationships, because the Dominant side has developed a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.
Others want an emotional commitment, an emotional investment, in their D/s. As unkind as it is to say, if a woman believes in a loving relationship and is involved with a man who doesn't realize the advantages of balancing his D/s relationship, by including the emotion of love in the relationship, that man is not providing the submissive with her half of the power exchange.
Each has a right to their own love elements and the failure to provide the elements has meant the end of relationships throughout the world, since humans developed their nature on the way to populating the world. A Dominant has a right to demand his elements of the exchange. It doesn't seem fair to deny the elements of the exchange to the submissive.
I'm not telling anyone they have to abide by my prescription for having a balanced, fair, loving exchange. There are submissives who are willing to provide the Dominant with all the elements of the power exchange and receive none at all in return. The level of consent is a matter of free will of the submissive and life is full of compromises.
My suggestion is that submissives learn what their elements of the loving exchange are and then enter relationships that provide the full gamut of exchange elements to each.
For myself, I want the exchange with my submissive to be as balanced as possible, because I believe that achieves the deepest level of loving.
And, after all, fair is fair.
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