So recently I’ve been philosophizing about love, sex, and relationships. I’m a man, and I experience lust much more often than love. However, it seems like long-term relationships are better than short-term relationships for a variety of reasons: consistently having sex through short-term relationships as a man requires that you spend a lot of time chasing women, and I’ve read about many mental health benefits that come with being in a loving relationship that I assume don’t come in to play if you’re only having short-term relationships.
I’m a outgoing, masculine, fairly neurotypical guy, and I can get dates with women by putting in time and effort. However, it’s rare for me to feel substantial intimacy or connection with them. So my question for LW is, how can I hack myself to be more loving and get infatuated with women for their personalities and the subtle feminine things they do instead of their overtly sexy aspects? E.g. one idea (rot13′d to avoid contaminating you with my ideas): gnxvat rpfgnfl.
In my experience, the primary factor that generates love is the amount of time I think about positive qualities in a woman. It’s a fairly simple and surprising hack of my brain that could very well work for you too: if I devote enough time (say, a couple of minutes every hour) thinking about what I like in a woman, my brain will automatically start to generate feelings of love. On the converse, when I feel a lot of attraction, if I consciously stop thinking about her, the feelings intensity diminishes drastically. It’s almost like the brain was seeking to maintain internal consistency: if you think a lot about someone you’re attracted to, it must be because you’re in love, and viceversa. The best part is that, since we don’t have access to our internal workings, the feelings generated in this way feels very true (they are true, actually).
My advice then is: before trying more invasive hack of your brain, just devote some time to regularly think about what you like in her. There’s a good chance that soon you’ll start idealizing her.
One of the ways of building intimacy or closeness, which is a key component of companionate love (the type you seem to be going for here, have a look at the research on passionate vs. companionate love if you’re interested) is self-disclosure that is responded to by one’s partner with warmth, understanding and supportiveness.
You can spend a lot of time doing things together without having this self-disclosure: to get it, you need to want to disclose/hear more about the other person, and preferably have dates etc. where you spend some time just talking about whatever, in private, about your pasts or your thoughts—things that might lead to self-disclosure.
So first step, set up these situations. Second step, talk about your past and your thoughts and try to be open—be trusting. Relate random conversations to things you hold close to you. Third step, if your partner opens up to you, make sure to respond supportively and engage with it, and not brush it off or turn the conversation to less close topics.
Which is not to say you should do this all the time, fun dates and silliness and dancing in a club way too loud to talk in are good too. But with any luck, adding a bit more of this in will help you feel that connection and intimacy.
There is a thin line between changing your desires and suppressing them. You may replace a goal X by a goal Y, or you may just convince yourself that you did. -- Think about all the religious homosexual people who try to hack themselves to heterosexuality, believe they have succeeded, and then later realize it didn’t work.
Is there a way to get both X and Y? For example having an open long-term relationship with one partner, and a few short-term relationships when you need them. Or to save time and effort, to have one long-term emotional relationship, and a few long-term contacts where both sides only want sex occasionally.
So recently I’ve been philosophizing about love, sex, and relationships. I’m a man, and I experience lust much more often than love. However, it seems like long-term relationships are better than short-term relationships for a variety of reasons: consistently having sex through short-term relationships as a man requires that you spend a lot of time chasing women, and I’ve read about many mental health benefits that come with being in a loving relationship that I assume don’t come in to play if you’re only having short-term relationships.
I’m a outgoing, masculine, fairly neurotypical guy, and I can get dates with women by putting in time and effort. However, it’s rare for me to feel substantial intimacy or connection with them. So my question for LW is, how can I hack myself to be more loving and get infatuated with women for their personalities and the subtle feminine things they do instead of their overtly sexy aspects? E.g. one idea (rot13′d to avoid contaminating you with my ideas): gnxvat rpfgnfl.
In my experience, the primary factor that generates love is the amount of time I think about positive qualities in a woman.
It’s a fairly simple and surprising hack of my brain that could very well work for you too: if I devote enough time (say, a couple of minutes every hour) thinking about what I like in a woman, my brain will automatically start to generate feelings of love. On the converse, when I feel a lot of attraction, if I consciously stop thinking about her, the feelings intensity diminishes drastically.
It’s almost like the brain was seeking to maintain internal consistency: if you think a lot about someone you’re attracted to, it must be because you’re in love, and viceversa. The best part is that, since we don’t have access to our internal workings, the feelings generated in this way feels very true (they are true, actually).
My advice then is: before trying more invasive hack of your brain, just devote some time to regularly think about what you like in her. There’s a good chance that soon you’ll start idealizing her.
One of the ways of building intimacy or closeness, which is a key component of companionate love (the type you seem to be going for here, have a look at the research on passionate vs. companionate love if you’re interested) is self-disclosure that is responded to by one’s partner with warmth, understanding and supportiveness.
You can spend a lot of time doing things together without having this self-disclosure: to get it, you need to want to disclose/hear more about the other person, and preferably have dates etc. where you spend some time just talking about whatever, in private, about your pasts or your thoughts—things that might lead to self-disclosure.
So first step, set up these situations. Second step, talk about your past and your thoughts and try to be open—be trusting. Relate random conversations to things you hold close to you. Third step, if your partner opens up to you, make sure to respond supportively and engage with it, and not brush it off or turn the conversation to less close topics.
Which is not to say you should do this all the time, fun dates and silliness and dancing in a club way too loud to talk in are good too. But with any luck, adding a bit more of this in will help you feel that connection and intimacy.
There is a thin line between changing your desires and suppressing them. You may replace a goal X by a goal Y, or you may just convince yourself that you did. -- Think about all the religious homosexual people who try to hack themselves to heterosexuality, believe they have succeeded, and then later realize it didn’t work.
Is there a way to get both X and Y? For example having an open long-term relationship with one partner, and a few short-term relationships when you need them. Or to save time and effort, to have one long-term emotional relationship, and a few long-term contacts where both sides only want sex occasionally.