On relation ships and love particularly

I will write about the writer as a character later, for now I must reply on love.

You (Bram) are free to interpret this critical response to your post as a statement of love and affection. First of all, I must say I might have misinterpreted some of your statements, please don't enrage if you find my response unfitting.

I found your definition of a relationship as 'an agreement of two people to call eachother boy-/girlfriend' very strange. You return to the notion of literal 'agreements' a number of times in your post. Such an agreement (whether explicitly stated or unconsciously assumed) seems to entail specific cost/benefit relations and an agreement to exchange certain affections. Although I can see how this works, I do not think this is very informative when considering your own, personal relationship and your affections towards another person; in fact I think that this way of thinking prohibits what I would call a desireable relationship, without even giving a correct picture of love, but I return to that later.

People can have a 'relationship' without making any agreement to call eachother boy-/girlfriend, as they do in some cultures where people enter arranged marriages which preclude such designations, but which can equally well entail romance (ultimately) or possibly even 'falling in love'. I do not however want to make cross-cultural considerations and I'll stick to our specific situation; heterosexual, kaukasian males etc.

A pleasant relationship (at least the kind that I desire), and I hope you agree, is always coincidental with what I call mutual love. I don't want a relationship with someone who doesn't love me etc.

I believe that, although relationships and love can share many features between individuals, couples, cultures etc., there is no set of specific features that must exist between people in order for these people to be in a 'relationship' or to be 'in love'. Many love affairs involve sex, some don't. Many (most, almost all?) love affairs involve intense feelings of affection (in the broad sense). However, I will not argue whith people who say their love involves other or even contradictory features, for our literature (and maybe even our lives) are filled with such stories.

My slightly confused writing signals that I'm fighting to stay out of semantics. I believe a more personal account could clear things up:

I think (and that might be obvious) that the relationships one embarks on, are determined by a person's fundamental desires and beliefs, which are very personal of course. When I was a bit younger, I looked for romance in forms that I would now consider naive and even destructive; romance barred with cliché's of cigarette's, rock 'n' roll, poetry and fatalism. Sometimes I long to be 16 again, but never to act like a 16-year old in this moment. I know the love I want when I see it; many people around me, my age as well as much older than me, enjoy relationships that allow both to flourish for their entire lives.

This could be another cliché (and well, fuck me, then) but I don't see any reason to be cynical and assume that something like that is not possible in my life. I don't have the feeling that people in loving relationships are fooling themselves or the other; I observe genuine affection, commitment, trust, dependence; love, and I laugh in the face of people who stand by and deny what is so clearly there.

Of course, I ask myself what the mechanism of this state (love) is. I assume that evolutionary processes have primed us to love only those who we can expect to 'return' the favor. In evolutionary respect, love is nothing more than a social loan with interest you extend to another person. But the evolutionary proces does not explain the psychological state, only the requisite for it. The picture I have of love is quite simple. It's a feeling which we innately desire, like food*. We can only feel it when another person feels the same way as we.

In order to overcome this paradox we fall in love easily; falling in love is a catalyst that enables us to start sacrificing to and benefiting from eachother. Not in simple commodities such as food or even sex (the value of which is easily calculable), but the gold and platinum of human interrelations; affection, dependence, respect, trust; the stuff that makes two people (feel) better than one. If the other is able to compel me to give these to her, and I compel the other to return them, we will be loving. I do not understand completely why (although I have my suspicions), but my love gives them to me and I, ranking both her physical and mental features very highly, return them with pleasure and intended dedication.

Although this state of love makes a lot of things possible (including even an increase in love, commitment and trust for one's self), relationships can still crumble once started succesfully. If I rely on her too much, she will grow annoyed by me. If she glorifies me too much, I will lose my respect for her. There is no way of predicting the outcome from the start (you can prove this impossibility scientifically), but falling in love is easy enough.

So, I also think love depends very much on the response of the other person, although I'm not sure if we agree in what way exactly. I am personally convinced that you must desire a loving relationship with a person, before either can benefit from it. But when both desire this, both can benefit immensly with only a little bit of saccrifice.

Of course, I can give a cognitive deconstruction of trust, reliance, affection etc.: Intrinsically desireable commodities although without calculable value or predictable returns, but potentiators of large amounts of future value. However, this is not the feeling we have when we love. The colour green is not a bunch of neuronal responses but a percept. The last has not been said in this discussion but even a description of the cognitive mechanism by which an affective state (love) arises is simply not decisive for how to deal with such a state.

* Although some people desire it more than others; like food!