Are you in love? And other questions about this thing we call romance

[Slothed]

14 hours ago, mori child said:

I have, for a long time now, been interested in dissecting the different aspects of love

Same. That’s why I mostly hang out in the ace relationships section of AVEN. Something about romantic relationships is just endlessly fascinating to me.

 

if you haven’t seen it already, this other census post about love was really interesting too: 

 

[purple_rain]

22 hours ago, mori child said:

I mean, as far as I'm concerned as the author of the thread, by all means, please hijack it! 😁 The numbers you got from ChatGPT are really interesting and surprising. But I'm fairly convinced that everyone, including alloromantic folk, has a slightly different perception of what "falling in love" means, so the numbers could probably vary wildly from one survey to another, depending on what definitions they used. Or maybe I overestimate the diversity of human experience? 

Hey, thanks a lot! I'm relieved now, I really got worried I was derailing the thread. But come to think of it, my curiosity about the statistics might actually tie in with the questions you raised in your poll.

 

Like you, I'm interested in the different aspects of love. And I, too, think that alloromantic people can indeed have different ideas of what "being in love" means. I prefer not to use the term "being in love" for myself because when I look at society at large, people seem to mean sth. quite different when they use it. But chances are that things are a lot more nuanced and individual for allo people than I used to think. And that I'm not the special snowflake I often pretend to be. 😄  

[Ceebs]

Hrmm. Some of the questions are difficult to answer with the poll options provided.

 

1. Are you in love right now? (with a real, living human)

Just got married three months ago after five years together, so I sure hope so. 😂 (Yes, I am.)

 

2. How many times have you been in love before (not counting now)?
NOT counting now? I guess somewhere between zero times and twice, depending on how strictly you're defining 'in love'. Definitely no more than twice though, by the most generous interpretation, or three times total if you're counting my husband. Anything else was a crush, attraction, infatuation, whatever, that didn't advance to the love stage.

 

3. Is a distinction between romantic and nonromantic love meaningful to you conceptually?
Ummm. The actual love part itself isn't particularly different, however a loving relationship that's accompanied by romantic (and for me, sexual) feelings is certainly distinct from something that's solely platonic or familial. That's what 'in love' is to me. I love my husband, and I'm also in love with my husband.

 

4. Can you easily tell whether you are experiencing romantic love versus another kind of love?
In the sense that I know when I'm romantically/sexually attracted to someone I love and therefore 'in love' with them, yes, it's very easy to tell.

 

5. Have you, in your personal experience, ever confused sexual attraction for romantic attraction or vice versa?
No, and they generally go together for me, very closely. Sometimes I've felt attracted to someone in a way that feels more sexual at first than romantic, because romantic feelings would require becoming even closer to them emotionally... but since for me, sexual attraction is pretty much always based on personality traits rather than physical ones, if I have sexual feelings for someone it means I already like who they are as a person to some degree, and if we get a bit closer, the romantic feelings will follow pretty quickly.

 

6. Thinking back on previous partners that you loved and thinking about your one-sided loves, what percentage of those people were you *obsessed* with?
'Obsessed' can have bad connotations at times I think, however if you just mean like... really enthusiastically into someone... all of them? I've also been essentially obsessed with people I wasn't in love with but was definitely strongly attracted to and had a crush on. So, 100% of people I've loved and 100% of serious crushes.  (Also though, are we talking about the limerence/infatuation stage of things when we're talking about 'obsession'? Because that ends, and either becomes a quieter and more settled and deeper love, still combined with attraction of course, or the feelings fade entirely and you're not interested in the person anymore.)

 

7. Do you find the experience of romantic love to be pleasant?
Absolutely.

 

8. If you were to encapsulate all of your experience with romance under one catchy title, what would it be? 
Um. For someone generally good with words, I'm drawing a blank. 😅

[everywhere and nowhere]

What I write probably won't be catchy, I'll try just to sum it up in short. I am able to fall in love, but have never experienced reciprocated romantic love. I also find myself incapable of relationships, in the sense of both genuinely having no idea how do people form relationships - I never got even close - and of feeling that, with my level of introversion, "maintaining" a relationship would be too exhausting for me.

Ultimately, I have given up on relationships without any sense of defeat or unhappiness. I just decided that it's not for me. I prefer concentrating on what I definitely love passionately in a sustained manner: my interests. And even though being in love with a phenomenon should feel like the ultimate one-sided love - because, theoretically, a phenomenon, not being a personal entity or even something with sharp boundaries dividing it from everything else, cannot reciprocate love... for me it doesn't feel one-sided, doesn't feel so devoid of reciprocation as it "should". For me there is always something spiritual about loving the world, the diversity and ever-dissimilation of all its parts, the "surplus of meaning", makes me feel that there is a Purpose, an Intent to this richness. This way... through loving the world I feel that God loves me if I get a chance to love the world so much. This feels much more important than romantic love and this is the path I want to pursue. For me spirituality is a lonely pursuit, it turns out that even love is a lonely pursuit, and even just for this reason "nonpersonal love" suits my nature much more than romantic love as it is traditionally understood.