This description/advice is awesome, and I mostly agree, but I think it presents an overly uniform impression of what love is like. I’ve been in Mature Adult Love multiple times, and the feelings involved have been different every time. I wouldn’t necessarily reject your division into obsession, closeness, and sexual desire, but I think maybe there are different kinds (or components) of closeness, such as affection, understanding, appreciation, loyalty, etc., and any friendship or relationship will have these in differing degrees. For instance, for a lot of people, family love seems to involve a lot of loyalty but not as much understanding.
This classification is (aims to be) “hardware”-oriented; the three groups should be supported by different sets of hormones. (I am not a biologist, I merely copy the info from other sources; mostly the Married Man Sex Life blog. The author is a nurse, so I trust his expertise.) I can imagine that the same “hardware” foundation could be used to implement multiple different “software” emotional flavors in the brain.
Actually, I believe there might be even some cultural variations; if nothing else, the mere belief that some two emotions should go together, or that some emotion should be felt in some situation, would create a cultural difference.
This description/advice is awesome, and I mostly agree, but I think it presents an overly uniform impression of what love is like. I’ve been in Mature Adult Love multiple times, and the feelings involved have been different every time. I wouldn’t necessarily reject your division into obsession, closeness, and sexual desire, but I think maybe there are different kinds (or components) of closeness, such as affection, understanding, appreciation, loyalty, etc., and any friendship or relationship will have these in differing degrees. For instance, for a lot of people, family love seems to involve a lot of loyalty but not as much understanding.
Yes, I agree completely.
This classification is (aims to be) “hardware”-oriented; the three groups should be supported by different sets of hormones. (I am not a biologist, I merely copy the info from other sources; mostly the Married Man Sex Life blog. The author is a nurse, so I trust his expertise.) I can imagine that the same “hardware” foundation could be used to implement multiple different “software” emotional flavors in the brain.
Actually, I believe there might be even some cultural variations; if nothing else, the mere belief that some two emotions should go together, or that some emotion should be felt in some situation, would create a cultural difference.