love

Love is the act of liking something to an excessive and overwhelming degree, to the point where it deviates from the normal path and becomes visibly apparent, such that a third party observing would notice this excessive fondness. It is often mistakenly used to describe liking something excessively, which is incorrect. In nature, a mother’s love for her child is often interpreted as excessive affection, but the nature of this love is definitely different from true love, which is derived from the letters ‘A’, ‘Sh’, and ‘Q’.

The True Meaning of Love

The emotional and psychological connection between two human beings who possess reason, logic, reasoning, and understanding to establish sexual relations; which, as a result of sexual relations, leads to the survival of the generation. Love is a primary stimulus for choosing a spouse and mate among humans. Just as a person has a strong desire to drink water when stuck in a desert and very thirsty, love creates the same desire in a person to have sexual intercourse in order to continue the generation. Certainly, a thirsty person drinking water in the desert will experience a different pleasure than a person who drinks water normally. Having sex after the phenomenon of love will bring multiple pleasures to a person. True and healthy love occurs only once in a person’s life and is rarely repeated.

Theories of Love

In family psychology, there are two theories for examining love:

• Existential Theory
• Evolutionary Psychology Theory

Existential Theory

Founded by American psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, existential theorists believe that humans are solitary creatures. They are born alone, live alone, and die alone. However, to ease the hardships of this path, they need a relationship to escape solitude.

Evolutionary Psychology Theory

This theory considers love to be an essential need. According to this theory, love is a stimulus that drives humans to pass on their genes for survival in nature, meaning that humans pursue relationships for survival through love. This theory examines the role that hormones play in the body. Hormones make humans need sex, which is why sexual intercourse is both physically and psychologically necessary for humans, and if it is not followed up, the person will have problems. (The great Plato says: The God of love lives in a state of need.)

Love creates motivation, need, and restlessness in humans, so that humans are stimulated and engage in sexual intercourse for the survival of their species. Love is a material, physical, scientific, testable, and accessible phenomenon. It is demonstrable that love is a physical and scientific phenomenon. The popular saying that love makes a person blind and deaf is also testable and provable. There is a part of the human brain that is the part of need, desire and desire, which is called the VTA. This part of the brain creates motivation, focus and desire in humans. The hormone dopamine, known as the hormone of pleasure and love, is produced in this part and distributed to other parts of the brain.

The Analogy of Love

By using drugs such as cocaine, you overactivate this part of the brain and experience a feeling of pleasure due to the increased levels of the hormone dopamine (the pleasure hormone). When an MRI is taken of the brain of a person who is in love, it is evident that the VTA part of their brain is much more active than other parts. Both a person in love and a person who has taken drugs will have more active VTA parts of their brain when scanned with an MRI due to the high release of dopamine. Love is also considered a type of addiction. That is, when you examine the MRI of a person in love, it is like the MRI of an addict, except that in love, the addiction is with the mind and the mind, but in a person who is addicted to drugs, the addiction is physical and with the use of drugs. At this stage, a kind of obsession occurs for people. In the way that dopamine stimulates the brain to reach the lover (just like when it stimulates the brain to take drugs) and when the lover does not reach the lover, the need becomes greater and greater. (Exactly the same mechanism occurs when the addict does not reach the drug). Love can take control of decision-making power, willpower, thinking power, and other brain functions and direct them.

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Helen Fisher’s Perspective on Mate Selection

According to Helen Fisher, three mental frameworks for mate selection exist in humans:

• Sexual Arousal System
• Romantic Love Feeling
• Attachment Feeling to a Partner

Sexual drive system: This system drives a person towards the opposite sex and choosing a partner. However, this system does not make a person committed; rather, if this factor is considered alone, the person will seek variety. The feeling of dream love: It is the same romantic love that, in addition to being sexually stimulating, drives a person forward with greater motivation, makes them committed to one person, and prevents them from seeking variety. A sense of dependence on one’s partner: In addition to sexual stimulation and the feeling of romantic love that comes with commitment, this feeling helps to create a lasting relationship and creates long-term stability in the relationship.

Interest-Based Love

Loves that are based on intent are based on desires that, if these desires are not fulfilled, will lead to some kind of illness, so they are also called intentional loves that lead to illness. How to recognize this type of love: This love is desire-centered, focused on a series of inner desires, and those desires must be in the form of a transaction. That is, I fall in love and give love, and I want to be loved in return… I spend money and I want services in return. This love is base and low-level; one loves to be loved in return. In contrast to this love, hatred arises. When someone loves and does not receive a response, and after not receiving a response, they feel hatred, know that the type of love they have is a love of intention. This is not true love, but the love that the masses are looking for. In this love, we have two people who are both empty of something. One is empty of affection and the other is empty of attention. These two people enter into a matter that they mistakenly call love with an empty vessel and interact with each other, and because they do not reach a conclusion together, they gradually hurt and harm each other.

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Degrees of True Love

True love has several stages:

Self-Oriented Love

Love Directed Towards Oneself A person must first know themselves and, with the same intensity they can love and be in love with others, love themselves, appreciate themselves, and enjoy their own company. A person who loves themselves enjoys being alone. In such love, you long for yourself, you yearn for conversations with yourself, and for moments of solitude with yourself. When your inner self is filled with love for yourself, you can love others as well. Love Directed Towards Others: When you are filled with self-love, your love will overflow into others. Such a person is full from within and can love everyone equally, free from judgment, and interact with all humans without harboring any grudges. You will enjoy the presence of such a person and find peace in their company. This person loves others so much that their “vessel” overflows, just like their inner self, and they can expend their love and affection on existence itself.

Love Directed at Existence

A person reaching this stage delights in being alive, enjoys living in this world, and expresses love and interest in everything they observe, whether that thing is an ant or a human. Passing this stage of love leads to the next stage, which is absolute perfection.

Love Directed at God

In this stage, humans typically experience a unique kind of mystical ecstasy (note that this isn’t pathological, and very few achieve this stage, like the great poets Khayyam and Hafez). This type of love is love toward the creator of all beauty, the creator of this existence. A person reaching this stage, regardless of any religion or faith, loves the creator and will possess numerous virtues.