How do we know when we’ve fallen in love? (2016)

I mean, wouldn't you feel weird if somebody had these very strong feelings for you that you just could not reciprocate? Would that make you want to keep the relationship going, or would it make you feel a queasy mixture of guilty, flattered, and uncomfortable?

A great read about that is “a complete idiot’s guide to chemistry of love”, which gave some solid peer-reviewed confirmations to some of the trends I thought I was spotting.

Quite much agree with the rest, not a lot to add :) - life is most beautiful in its diversity.

I don’t know the answer but monogamous relationship is suitable when children enter the picture. It’s a whole different ball game now.

Digressing a bit, I am fond of beckoning the monogamous nature of our bird friends. It is very expensive for them to gather resources to raise their young(aka perpetuate their species) and monogamous bonded pairs have a better chance of a surviving brood. Perhaps in times of restricted resources or hard to access survivability resources, monogamy is the best answer.

Consider apes and big cats, they have completely different social structures. They conserve energy when the alpha leads the pack for food. The alpha also gets the pick of his ‘harem’, as it were..And they are not monogamous. So there’s that.

I think that while we like to believe that we have access to free choice as human beings, we are not that far removed from our mammalian cousins. Having said that, we are also finding ourselves in a situation where resources are becoming scarce(exponentially increasing population) and mating choices are restricted due to individual’s place on the economic and social hierarchy.

I am compelled to pick serial monogamy over poly or true monogamy. Our biology compels us to obey the brain chemicals. To disregard that is an enormous act of will against nature. Unless we deal with the pesky problem of religion, values and morals along with our resource constrained hierarchical world, hypocritical forced monogamy is here to stay.

In a lot of ways religious morality induced monogamy has paved the way for pair bonding and successful child survivorship statistics....so from the gene POV, monogamy must be winning in some way.

I didn't really say anything different, I was replying to an OP who said that he is participating in a love which is both unconditional and lustful, and I said that it can't be both. You can't simultaneously lust for someone and love them unconditionally, the lust colors the fact that you give a damn about them in a first place. Even after the lust disappears, you still have the shared memories, experience and identity that bind the relationship and form the basis of the love. These are all that condition the love.

> But now that you've provided extra constraints and context (where sexual attraction is a pre-requisite, and that you are speaking from your individual experience) I think the confusion is cleared up.

These "extra constraints and context" you point to are explicit and implicit if you read the post I was replying to, I did not provide any new modifiers to this discussion. Nor am I speaking from individual experience.

> Exactly, as is saying unconditional love is not possible in the presence of lust - it would require a means of knowing the emotional feelings (something notoriously difficult to measure) of all people who have been in love throughout history.

Why do you need to know their emotional feelings? Is it not enough to know that lust causes attraction?

How are you defining unconditional love anyway? My definition: love which is not based on conditions. How can the presence of lust NOT condition any resulting love? You can't reject basic cause and effect.

I'm not immediately sure how to make the hierarchy more visible with this data. The source data has no single entrypoint except arbitrarily chosen, and can be (or seem, practically) infinite in all directions, with arbitrary relationships at any point -- maybe something like a very large wiki with a different internal structure (more at http//:onemodel.org ). A structure could maybe be chosen for presentation purposes though. But the "article" you refer to was made as an exception and is not the way information in my ~"knowledge base" is typically structured. Each page I see as not a document but as an entity with properties and also a set of references to whatever else relates. More about my outline comments elsewhere in this discussion, where I can export chunks of it as individual outline documents, to some # of levels from any point, but conceptually it does not lend itself to paragraphs or documents, as much as ideas and relations. I'm not explaining it as well as I'd like -- again, there is more at that web site about the intentions of my software that this comes from. It's like a big mind map (with future plans to hang more data and code, on all the nodes.)

Or maybe each page could be seen as a paragraph, broken into bullets which each can link to details on that thing, if someone is interested. Or it is a set of topic sentences, with contents underneath each sentence or link being the full paragraph, for the interested -- like where I wrote in this discussion about enabling skimming.

I don't want to stifle discussion, if you have questions or more suggestions that can in some way account for the above, or improve on it... Thanks.