277. Bonded Love

Bonded Love
My purpose for writing this blog is to find my mindmate to spend the rest of my life with.   But I hardly ever use the word love.    Love is such a fuzzy, evasive word.  It has too many different meanings under different circumstances and for different people.

Love is a word like weather, which can mean sunshine, rain or storm.   

People call it love, when they mena

• infatuation with a body
• attraction to benefits
• the closeness to a sibling
• the addiction of a parent to care unconditionally for a selfish, even unworthy child
• the adulation for a person far out of the own league or out of reach
• the attraction to a delusional entity like a deity   

And it can be the emotional expression and perception of intrinsic commitment.    That is, why I prefer to talk of intrinsic commitment as what I am looking for and not of the love that comes along with it.    I could talk of love and implicitly imply, that intrinsic commitment comes along with the kind of love that I want.  But this would not be obvious.    

For the purpose of clarity, I will call it 'bonded love'. 

When a man tells a woman, that he loves her, this statement by itself conveys very little information.   It tells only, that he has a reason for wanting to interact with her.  What kind of love he feels can only be inferred indirectly from the way he behaves and treats her as a result of his attitude towards her.     

There are several indications, if a man feels bonded love or not:

1. Trust
   With bonded love, a trusting man shares his innermost feelings and expects support but never any bad consequences or selfish motives.
2. Esteem
   If a man in bonded love makes a mistake in his evaluation of his beloved, he overestimates her by worshipping the ground she walks on, but he does not underestimate her.  
3. Care
   He cares for her wellbeing at least as much as for his own.   He feels even driven to make sacrifices for her, for which she does not ask at all.   He only feels good and happy, if it is the same for her.  
4. Unit
   He has the identity of being half of a unit.    He cooperates with her to make the relationship as beneficial as possible for both of them together. 
5. Importance
   She is an important part of his life.  
6. Affection
   Affection is an ingredient of bonded love.   Affection is usually noticeable in the tone of the voice, facial expression, body language and gestures.  

Just as in science, a woman can suspect, that a man's love is not bonded.   She cannot prove the absence of bonded love.    But when a man claims to have bonded love for her, she can disprove his claim, if she experiences the evidence of behavior, that contradicts the above list of indications. 

An example of such evidence is a man's use of rage and intimidation to bully a woman to do or to allow, what he wants, but what is unpleasant, annoying, uncomfortable or painful for her. 

This is a clear disproof of a claim of bonded love, if he has made such a claim.   Otherwise it is a disproof of her assumption of  his declared love being bonded love.   She cannot really know, what the word love means to him, therefore she cannot disproof the claim of love by his own definition.

1. Lack of Trust
   He does not trust her, that she is motivated to be fair and caring.  He does not trust her to compromise based upon a consideration for his needs as equally valid to hers.   
2. Lack of Esteem
   He has not enough esteem for her to honor her with rational communication until she is convinced, that they have solved a conflict in a fair way.   
3. Lack of Care
   He does not care for her needs, she is a tool for the purpose to fulfill his.   
4. Not a Unit
   He perceives and considers himself as a single man competing and struggling with her to get selfish benefits..   He wants to gain power to ascertain his control over the benefits.   
5. Lack of Importance
   She is not important enough to convince her of what he wants, by bullying he can procure it faster and with less effort.
6. Lack of Affection
   When a man says 'I love you' and 'I love peanut butter' in exactly the same way, this most probably means, that he has no affection for the woman.  

I am looking for bonded love as a logical side effect of intrinsic commitment, and I do not take words for it, if  contradicted by behavior.   

But I am always willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt.    It is possible, that I experience a man's behavior as bullying, and he has no clue of the impact of his behavior upon me.   Then it is a conflict that needs communication to solve it.    

If I after my explanation of why I felt bullied he still considers the bullying behavior as his entitlement, then this is the verification of the disproof of bonded love.  

If he acknowledges, that he made a mistake and needs to learn, how to treat me better in the future, then the conflict is solved and bonded love is not disproved.