715. Love Cannot Be Defined, But A Loving Relationship Can

715.  Love Cannot Be Defined, But A Loving Relationship Can

Love is an emotion, which is felt and cannot be clearly defined.   It is easier to define, what is not love, than what is.  
The mere urge to copulate with a body is certainly not love but only a virulent expression of the procreation instinct.    Whatever form of attraction there may be, nothing can be called love with justification, unless there is the recognition and appreciation of the cognitive qualities and personality of the partner. 

The relationship of a couple can be defined as loving by behaviors, by which the quality of the bond between the partners is directly or indirectly expressed.
  
The criteria of a loving relationship:

1. Emotional attachment and emotional intimacy
2. Physical intimacy
3. Some amount of intellectual intimacy, depending upon the amount of intelligence and education
4. Exclusivity, each being special to the other in a way, which nobody else is
5. No need or inclination to wish or to search for someone else

When all the above criteria for a loving relationship are present, and when the couple has also explicitly agreed to stay together indefinitely, then they have accepted to be a loving couple.  Obviously both experience sufficiently, whatever love means for them personally.

But when two persons share physical intimacy repeatedly with each other during a considerable time, even for years, and they do not consider themselves as a couple in a loving relationship, there can be very different arrangements.  

In the case, that it is really only physical intimacy and nothing else, then this is just a variety of reciprocal abuse and taking advantage of each other, while they prefer the practical advantage of avoiding the recurrent hunt and search for someone different.

But there is also the concept of friends with benefits (FWB), where the word friend really means true friendship, and is not just confounded as synonymous with mere acquaintance.   

A true friend is someone, with whom there are ties of emotional and intellectual intimacy in some form.    This is the essence of friendship.  When physical intimacy is added to the true friendship, then this combination contains all esential ingredients for a loving relationship.   

When the couple nevertheless explicitly puts emphasis upon the distinction of being FWB, but not being a loving couple, this means more often than not, that their are some serious personal problems.

1. It can be a sign of selfishness and greed, when someone wants all the benefits of being in a loving relationship while also wanting all the advantages of being single.   It is an attempt to get all needs met while not having any obligations to also meet the other's needs.  
   
2. There can be fear and apprehension.  
   Someone may fear commitment and obligations.  
   Someone may fear failure and getting the more hurt, the more he allows involvement.   
   Someone may be torn apart between the fear of a repetition of a very hurtful past experience and the wish to have a better relationship. Someone may fear to fail, would accepting love lead to the next step of further closeness by living together. 
   Someone may succeed to maintain the denial of such fears by insisting on the denial of any emotional involvement.  
   
3. There can be unrealistic hopes and expectations.   The real quality of the present relationship is not appreciated as sufficient in comparison with imaginary ideals.  The relationship is considered as a temporary arrangement until either the ideal and perfect partner is found or until someone experiences that overwhelming sudden sensation, as which love is presented in fictional novels or movies. 

This FWB concept seems weird.

It cannot be explained by evolutionary biology.    By instinct, men want to sire as many offspring as possible with as many different sets of genes.   By instinct, women want commitment and attachment as the best way of provision for their offspring.   

While FWB does not cater for the needs of the instinct driven, it nevertheless also does not serve the specific needs of those with a very low instinctivity, the brainiacs, eggheads and intellectuals. Their needs for intellectual and emotional intimacy, for the companionship of shared extensive cultural and cognitive activities are best fulfilled in a close loving relationship.
 
Maybe FWB suits predominantly the needs of the people in the middle of the instinctivity bell curve, who are the most disturbed by their internal struggle between the contradictory forces of instincts versus rationality and self-control.  

As long as both persons implied want either love or FWB, they can get, what they want.   But sadly enough, often there is a disparity, probably when people differ very much in their level of instinctivity.  While one partner experiences all the criteria as given and thus himself as being in a loving relationship, the other is afflicted with some of the problems listed above and keeps on enforcing a distance by insisting to be only FWB.    

393. Alexithymia

Alexithymia

In entry 390 I speculated, that a man, who does not feel any affection for his partner when passively in his presence, even though his pleasure center is responsive to direct stimulation by the infatuation with her body, could have some form of what I called 'emotional anhedonia'.   

In entry 391 I defined a jerk as someone, who perceives and treats a woman as a commodity, causing her a lot of suffering due to his not feeling affection for her, and who is also afflicted with the narcissistic entitlement and grandiosity delusion, which makes him unable to acknowledge his own attitude and treatment as inappropriate.

After some googling, I discovered the concept of alexithymia as a personality trait.   If someone with alexithymia would develop reactive narcissism as a form of comorbidity, his behavior could be experienced by his victim the same way as in my suggested 'emotional anhedonia', but for very different underlying reasons.

Simplified, alexithymia means limitations to the ability to understand, describe and interpret the own and other persons' emotions.   

A conscious psychopathic jerk, who decides to enter a friends with benefits relationship, which is based upon nothing more than infatuation with her body, lacks affection.  There is no bonded commitment with someone, who is considered as insignificant, who is not trusted, not respected, who is not expected to meet emotional or intellectual needs.    The conscious jerk knows, that he does not love but use the woman.
  
The alexithymic jerk is different.   He can be in a relationship, which is a mismatch, but he is oblivious of this.  He treats the woman as a commodity, but he confounds it with love.  He subjectively may even believe her to be the love of his life, because he is unable to distinguish between infatuation and caring love.  
He treats her in accordance to what he does not feel, as merely a friend with benefits.   His treatment represents his true attitude.     Were he to meet the woman, whom he would experience as someone worthy to respect, to trust, to share emotional and intellectual intimacy with, he would consciously experience the same kind of love, but he would treat her much better, his behavior determined by affection and care.    
As a result of the same confusion, he also cannot understand her expressions of affection any better than his own emotions, nor what she expects from him but misses.  

Therefore he is oblivious and unable to comprehend, why and how she experiences his treatment as a humiliation.   To her, he is a jerk, because he does not take responsibility for her pain.

It is a sad pattern, when a man has some kind of personal problem, no matter if it is by naming just a few examples, alexithymia, asperger's, ODD, ADD, NLD.   With the support of a caring partner, coping with the problem would be a shared task.   
Instead he reacts with narcissism and becomes a jerk, who considers himself as god's gift to every woman.   He hurts her, he dislikes her reaction to the pain, and he blames her to be the one with a personal problem.    It is a sad pattern, that someone in need of a partner's support is locked behind a wall of a delusion that deprives him of what he needs.


Alexithymia could also be a relapse to earlier stages of evolution, as I speculated about hedonists in entry 390.    In those past epochs, when higher emotions like affection and the attraction of bonded monogamy had not yet evolved, men procreated purely by physical infatuation with the body of a woman and they were very successful in multiplying the human species.   But the price for this was paid by the suffering of the women, who were used predominantly as breeding bodies.   
Many of today's jerks would have been successful cave men.   

389. The Pleasure Center In The Brain - 2

The Pleasure Center In The Brain - 2

This continues entry 388.  

In previous entries, I have already been describing the difference between the instinctive and the intellectual relationship paradigm, between infatuation and caring love, between the bonding disability of emotional morons and the bonded commitment of mature men.   
I described the behavior, the impact upon the partner, the viability of such a relationship but without explaining its causes beyond the vague attribution to a difference in the wiring of the brain.

Looking now more closely at individual differences between the sensitivity, perceptivity and responsiveness of the pleasure center to different kinds of stimuli enables me to speculate more plausibly about the dynamics between the partners of compatible and of mismatched couples.   When comparing the pleasure centers of two different brains, one wired to be hedonistic, the other wired to be Epicurean, the different treatment of, the attitude towards and the kind of a relationship with a partner can be logically explained. 

The following does not include survival homeostation by very basic needs of air, water, food under starvation, it is restricted to analysing the dishomeostasis and pleasure center stimulation under the circumstances of every day life.

Based upon the differences between which stimuli are perceived with predominant sensitivity by their pleasure centers, hedonists and Epicureans experience their social and material environment, including a partner in a relationship, very differently.

1.  Hedonists

• The hedonistic pleasure center is very perceptive, sensitive and responsive to any physical stimulation, while non-physical stimulation is either not perceived at all or if, then only by rough and primitive emotions like the pleasure of having power and be able to dominate.   
• Auditory, olfactory and visual stimuli only serve as the information of the presence of agents, which can be used for physical stimulation of the pleasure center.
• Dishomeostasis is a strong force and it is nearly always physical.   Any emotional dishomeostasis like frustration or anger are a reaction to not being able to restore physical homeostasis. 
• Physical dishomeostasis is usually a recurrent cycle.   The perception of the dishomeostasis triggers behavior of homeostation, followed by a latency period of saturation until the next perception of dishomeostasis restart the cycle.   
• Physical dishomeostasis is usually endogenous, its cause is independent of the social and material environment, while homeostation depends on the availability of resources in the environment.

The hedonistic brain experiences both the social and material components of the environment as sources, tools, utilities or commodities existing for the hedonist's convenience to fulfill physical needs, when he perceives dishomeostasis and or discovers something, of which he expects stimulation of the pleasure center.    Whatever causes high pleasure stimulation is experienced as something, that the hedonist loves.    There is no reciprocity between a hedonist and his commodity.    It is the control of the user over the availability of the commodity.

• Due to the cyclic dishomeostasis, in the moment of perceiving the dishomeostasis of being hungry, the hedonist loves cheese.   In the moment of feeling pleasure by riding a bicycle, the hedonist loves his bicycle.    In the moment of sexual dishomeostasis, the hedonist loves the woman's body, with whom he is infatuated.   
• In the moment of saturation, all the commodities, the cheese, the bicycle and the woman become temporarily insignificant and he has no reason to focus his attention upon them.    He wants to have them available in storage for the next use.    When in the state of saturation, any focus of attention on the commodities causes no pleasure or only the pleasure of being in control and of having the power to repeat the use in the future.
• Sometimes the hedonist values the pleasure of using those commodities enough to pay high prices for cheese and for a bicycle and he pampers the woman with expensive gifts to ascertain her availability.   
• The hedonist is aware, that taking care of good maintenance prolongs the usability of his commodities.   The cheese needs to be stored in the fridge, the bicycle needs greasing, and the woman needs food, shelter and health care.    The hedonist considers it as his option, how much maintenance he invests in expectation of how long he wants to keep the utility ready to serve him.  
• Neither a bicycle nor cheese have any feelings and own needs, and the hedonist assumes the same also to be the case with a woman as a commodity.   
• A dysfunctional commodity can make the hedonist angry, but a commodity does not hurt the feelings of a human.   The hedonist feels no personal or emotional connection with the commodities as entities.   His love for the commodities is the love for the benefits.    He feels no affection for a commodity.
• The magnitude of the stimulation of the pleasure center of a hedonist depends only on his needs and his perceptivity and the quality of the stimulus, but not on other commodities.   The piece of cheese does not taste any better, when eaten on the bicycle or in presence of the woman.  
• When a hedonist feels the dishomeostasis of being hungry, then a woman is experienced as either functional, when she contributes to his getting food, or dysfunctional, when she impedes him from getting food. 

2. Epicureans

• The Epicurean pleasure center is very perceptive, sensitive and responsive to any intellectual, emotional, auditory, olfactory and visual stimulation, which overrides physical stimulation in its impact.   
• Emotional dishomeostasis is a stronger force than physical dishomeostasis.  
• Emotional dishomeostasis is usually a persistent state of unpleasant feelings, that lasts, until the reason has been removed.   
• Emotional dishomeostasis is often exogenous, it is triggered, caused or modified by the interaction with the social and material environment.   

For an Epicurean in a bonded commitment, reciprocal caring love and affection has very strong effects upon the pleasure center.   The Epicurean feels bliss, joy and happiness by nothing more than being together with or near the beloved person, while there is no emotional dishomeostasis.     The perception and knowledge of being loved, respected, appreciated, cherished, significant, cared for stimulates the pleasure center.   Reciprocal proactive expressions of caring and loving behavior as described in entry 385 enhances this perception.    Being together is experienced as triggering affection and is a permanent stimulation of the epicurean pleasure center.    

• If there is emotional dishomeostasis, it is very disruptive and a very serious problem.   
• The Epicurean joy and happiness depends on reciprocity, it depends on triggering the same emotions and attitudes from the other as one feels oneself.    Getting the contrary of what one gives and expects causes pain and feeling hurt and this leads to a state of dishomeostasis.    The more one partner has and expresses respect, appreciation and significance for the other, the more s/he feels hurt, when experiencing disrespect, depreciation and insignificance in return
• Emotional dishomeostasis is a serious problem needing to be dealt with, no matter if the trigger of it is real or only perceived as the result of a misunderstanding and misinterpretation.   
• As soon as one partner feels emotional dishomeostasis, this impedes feeling affection, joy and happiness in the presence of the other and as a consequence it also impedes further expressions of love.   
• Emotional dishomeostasis of one Epicurean partner leads to emotional dishomeostasis of both.   Communicating about all conflicts, until mutual respect, appreciation and significance are restored, is a task of paramount importance for an Epicurean couple's bonding and closeness.  
• The Epicurean pleasure center gets stimulated by the intellectual joy of visiting an interesting museum or watching a fascinating theater play and by being together with a beloved partner.   The pleasure stimulation by both sources not only adds its magnitudes, but multiplies it.   
• The Epicurean joy of being together often compensates for discomfort of any kind.    Bonded committed Epicureans are sometimes oblivious of physical discomfort when they are absorbed in the joy of being together.    

3.  Epicureans and hedonists are mismatches.

Both relationship principles are as incompatible as the differences in the responsiveness of the pleasure centers.   

A hedonistic man and an Epicurean woman are a tragic mismatch.   

Being Epicurean does not preclude the occasional indulgence in physical pleasures like delicious food, it is a known experience of little importance.    But the hedonist is ignorant and oblivious of the intellectual and emotional stimulation of the Epicurean's pleasure center, which he has never experienced due to his lacking the perceptivity and sensitivity.    When the hedonist keeps a woman in good maintenance, allowing her the same amount of physical stimulation of the pleasure center as he wants for himself, he firmly believes to be doing the right thing for having her as a long term commodity.    He is void of feeling affection.

Hedonists cannot be blamed for lacking affection due to lacking the perception of emotional and intellectual joy in their pleasure center, just as deaf persons cannot be blamed for not hearing music.    A deaf and a hearing person cannot share the joy of listening to music and the deaf person cannot be motivated to go to a concert, that he cannot hear.  
The hedonist cannot imagine the joy of bonded togetherness just as a stone age man could not imagine to hear the high quality sound of an entire orchestra played from a tiny box into his ears.  
A hedonist and an Epicurean cannot share the joy of being together and of sharing intellectual and emotional stimuli, because this does not stimulate the hedonist's pleasure center.  There is nothing to motivate him to participate in behaviors that contribute to kindling love (entry 385).   He does not feel affection and he does not recognize affection for him.  The hedonist has no reason to be together with the Epicurean woman, except when he needs her for his homeostation or any other purpose.  
Therefore the hedonist is clueless, that she perceives her restricted role as a commodity for his physical stimulation as humiliation, indignation and devaluation.   He is often completely oblivious, that he is causing her emotional dishomeostasis in growing magnitude, until the relationship has become toxic.   If he notices at all, that she has reached the limit of her endurance, he cannot comprehend, why and interprets this as her defect and flaw.

386. Criticizing - Love - Respect

Criticizing - Love - Respect
This continues entries 385 and 382.  

Beneficial criticizing by giving and accepting feedback concerning specific behaviors and habits is an important part of the process of a couple's adaption to each other.   
As long as a couple's mutual respect is due to shared basic values and attitudes, they have no reason to criticize anything, that is part of the core personality of the other.   All criticizing is supportive concerning habits.    Beneficial criticizing implies the respect, that the other is able and motivated to improve some peripheral imperfections.  

When infatuation is experienced as the selfish love for the benefits of using another person's body for instinctive homeostasis, this does not require respect.   Bonded, committed and caring love between adult and mature partners is not possible without mutual respect.  

Bonded love is expressed by behavior aiming to enhance the subjective wellbeing of the partner.    The beloved partner perceives proactive acts of caring as deliberate and voluntary favors, not as duties, dues or something to be taken for granted.   

This has a strong impact upon the perception of being criticized.  The difference between experiencing the other's beneficial behavior as either an expression of caring love or of fulfilling a duty and serving a purpose is also the difference between perceiving criticizing as supportive and beneficial or disrespecting, devaluing and rejecting.   

When someone feels securely loved and respected by consciously perceiving the other's behavior as expressing care and affection, this enables him to interpret being criticized as supportive.    The expression of caring love is an expression of respect and nevertheless interpreting criticizing as disrespect would be a contradiction.   
Caring includes also the Epicurean imperative of not doing harm.    A person, who cares enough to have the wish to protect the partner from harm needs to be receptive to feedback.   To avoid harm to the other requires to know, what the other experiences as harm, and this is not always noticeable.   Sometimes only feedback can convey this information.  


But when a man considers and perceives a woman as a commodity and utility, whose purpose is to serve his needs, then he is unable to ever perceive anything of what she does for him as an expression of love.    He is deprived of the experience of being loved by his own entitlement delusion.   This makes him perceive criticizing as expressing disrespect and this makes him feel even less loved.    As a consequence, he is inclined to use control and coercion to get his needs met, because he projects and believes, that otherwise she would also use him selfishly for her needs.    As long as he feels entitled to the priority of his needs, wishes and whims over hers, he is realistic in his evaluation, that he cannot get this by any other means except control and coercion.    

If her baseline is getting as much as giving, then giving more than she receives is from her point of view an expression of love.    

If his baseline is getting all his needs met before bothering about hers, then he experiences even all her expressions of love only as deficient compared with his baseline, and he feels justified to use pressure and coercion to get, what he cannot get otherwise.  

The result is a very unfortunate vicious circle of deterioration.    A woman, who feels loved, cared for, cherished and appreciated has few reasons for peripheral beneficial and supportive criticizing, and he can appreciate it and do his share in improving the relationship.   
But the man, who uses her as commodity, dominates and coerces her to ascertain his selfish benefits gives the woman real and serious reasons to criticize him and even to lose respect.    He needs much more improvement and he needs much more feedback.  But instead of accepting her support, he blames her for daring to criticize him at all.    His denial and defiance to accept feedback and learn how to treat her destroys the relationship.  

Feeling loved, respected and supported by criticizing is a congruent experience in a bonded couple.   

Without the reciprocal perception of expressions of caring love by the other, there is no respect and no trust, that criticizing is benevolent and beneficial.   This effect is independent of the reason of not feeling loved, either by not being loved by a man confounding infatuation with love and domination or by being oblivious of being loved due to confounding expressions of love with fulfilling a purpose and a duty.   

385. The Dynamics Of Kindling Or Killing Love

The Dynamics Of Kindling Or Killing Love

This is a continuation of entry 277, where I defined 'bonded love'.   
In entry 314 I described the difference between the instinctive and the intellectual mating strategies.
In entry 39 I referred to Epstein and his concept of 'self-arranged marriages'.   I prefer to call it 'self-arranged commitment', because feeling bound by commitment does not require a signature in the town hall.  

Bonded love consists of the combined and inseparable elements of physical, emotional and intellectual intimacy and is the stronger, the more the couple shares basic values, attitudes, tastes, interests and other traits.  

The concept of self-arranged commitment means, that a couple decides to cooperate to create a balanced bond of all three intimacies.        

Physical intimacy is triggered by instinctive urges for homeostasis, especially in men, as long as there is no repugnance or repulsiveness.    This comes by itself and needs therefore to be controlled from getting dangerously predominant.   A man drooling over a woman's body in blind infatuation is not in the state to be rational in his evaluations and decisions. 

But a couple has a lot of control and influence over the kindling or forfeiting of emotional and intellectual intimacy and thus over the quality and intensity of bonded love.    They need to be aware of what influences their love and they need to be motivated to kindle it.   

The proactive strategy of kindling bonded love has two major aspects, associative learning and reinforcement.  

1. Associative learning by sharing any activity or situation, which causes the subjective feeling of wellbeing.
   

   1.1. Simple associative learning
   When sharing joy, pleasure, pleasant thrill, bliss, pleasant sensations of any kind, no matter if it is hiking in the moonlight, enjoying the same kind of music, sharing the fascination of a visit to an interesting museum or place, then the good feelings are associated with the person, with whom the experience is shared.   
   1.2.  Complex associative learning.
   Sharing hardships, difficulties, discomforts of any kind and experiencing the partner as supportive, empathetic, understanding, reliable, trustworthy associates the good feeling of having been successful in dealing with a challenge with the partner. 
   A bonded couple is not affected by spending a night in a bus station, because the positive feeling of being together compensates for merely external discomfort.   It creates a positive memory of a shared adventure.   

2. Reciprocal reinforcement.
   
   Anything perceived as love between two adults triggers an urge or at least a wish to express it or act upon it.  This implies, that it is also understood and received by the target as an expression of love.  
   Verbal expressions of love are very unspecified, as long as the same word 'love' can be used also very selfishly, when someone means about the same love of getting benefits when saying: 'I love you' and saying 'I love cheese'.
   
   Expressions of love by actions and behavior are much more specific.
   Infatuation with a body urges a person towards sexual activities.    Bonded love creates an urge or wish to express love in any way, that makes the other feel loved, cared for, appreciated, cherished, respected, significant, needed, happy, content, in a safe haven.   Love is also expressed by the imperative of never harming or hurting but protecting the other from harm.
   
   The neutral baseline is the commitment governance (entry 185), that both have agreed upon.   Behaving according to the commitment governance is an accepted obligation, not an expression of love.    Expressing love is proactive behavior by a deliberate and voluntary decision to do something beneficial for the partner. 
   
   Such an expression of love is lost, if it is not experienced, perceived and interpreted by the recipient as an expression of love.   Any such proactive behavior of one partner is experienced by both as anything between being only beneficial for the other or beneficial equally for both.   
   It can be that one partner has a skill and uses it to make something for the other, it can be one partner preparing and initiating an excursion to enjoy together.  
   This leads to reciprocal reinforcement.   The more one experiences the other's expression of love, the more this kindles the own love, which enhances the wish to react also with returned expressions of love.    It is like a ball game, in which the ball thrown grows steadily.         
   This works, when both consciously want it to work, and when both are informed, what proactive behavior does make the other feel loved.  

But just as bonded love can be enhanced by applying conscious strategies, it is also fragile to being damaged and destroyed by the opposite behaviors.  

1. The same intensive situations of shared positive experiences, when love can be kindled to grow, are also the situations, where love is most vulnerable to being damaged and destroyed.    Hurting in such situations has the most detrimental effect.    Being the target of an outburst of anger during a moonlight hike meant to be romantic has much more detrimental effects than an outburst of anger while doing chores in the kitchen.     
2. Discomfort, hardship and such are enhanced, when instead of being shared, on the partner blames them on the other.
3. An expression of love is not received as such by a partner feeling entitled to the other serving his needs and taking this for granted.    The one, who considers the other as a commodity existing for the purpose to fulfill all his needs, is deprived of the experience of being loved.    Whatever the other decides to do voluntarily as an expression of love is either not of value or considered a fulfilled duty.
   Expressing love for the reward of being loved back is a decision.    Being expected and even pressed by coercion to serve the other's needs, devalues any act of doing a favor into the experience of being used.    Being under pressure to serve the other's needs impedes and forestalls any occasion of expressing love by a voluntary decision.  
4. Expressing love by proactive behavior requires communication about what behavior is perceived as expressed love.     Projecting the own needs and remaining ignorant about the partner's needs is not enough.    Hurting the other and resisting to feedback is an even worse love killer.   

Expressing caring and bonded love by proactive behavior is a method to kindle and to avoid killing love.   But it is also an important strategy for the creation of 'self-arranged commitment'.   By applying the same behaviors, that can be an expression of love, the process of creating love can also be started and triggered due to the reinforcing effect.  

295. Intrinsic Commitment and Emotions

Intrinsic Commitment and Emotions

A viable relationship has to be a fair balance of giving and receiving, according to the relationship deal.     I can only last, if both partners feel satisfied with the relationship.    

Entries 262 and 98 are about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic commitment.   But there are some more differnces:

• How the satisfaction with the relationship is measured.
• If and how information about satisfaction or dissatisfaction is conveyed and shared.
• How a partner handles dissatisfaction.   

Extrinsic commitment is based upon the balance of material and practical benefits and services.   In extrensic commitment, the compliance of the deal or the dissatisfaction of the failure thereof can easily be claimed and evaluated.     If a man demands a  specific service or benefit from the woman, no matter if by agreement or by his entitlement delusion, it is easy to specify and to blame her for what he did not get.    

A man, who considers the woman as a commodity, has the power to bully her to do and to comply with what he wants.    Bullying it the man's method to deal with his dissatisfaction, that the woman does not agree to be a commodity.   She has only the power to leave, and that is, where his power ends. 
Bullying as a love killer (entry 294) therefore only happens, when the bonding-disabled man establishes extrinsic commitment.    Bullying happens, when either the woman wants intrinsic commitment or accepts extrinsic commitment, but as a fair deal and not as his commodity.  

The man remains ignorant, that the woman's dissatisfaction is caused by the imposed role of a commodity, he is deaf to her complaints and blames her dissatisfaction instead upon her alleged flaws.    Bullies are unable to trust, that makes them such a hazard.   The man does not trust the woman, he never believes any of her statements about her feelings, he cannot be influenced to alter his using her as a commodity.  When she tells him, how much a specific behavior is hurting, he believes, that this behavior cannot hurt anybody, because it is his entitlement.   He attributes her feeling hurt as her own flaw and continues his hurting behavior.   Her pain accumulates, until the relationship has no more value for her and she leaves.  


Intrinsic commitment is about emotions, the relationship deal is giving each other the feelings of wellbeing in a safe haven. Nothing can be gained by power.   A man can never bully a woman to love him.   If he wants to be loved and his wellbeing to be cared for, he can win her good will only by treating her the way she needs and wants to be treated.   

The conscious measurement of satisfaction with the relationship is the perception of pleasant and unpleasant emotions elicited by the partner.   While extreme emotions are usually visible, more moderate emotions are often not visible on the outside, but have nevertheless a significant impact upon a person's general wellbeing.   This impact can accumulate.   A person can feel either content and happy or hurt most of the time, but this can be hidden from the awareness of the person causing these emotions.    Therefore sincere communication about the true innermost feelings is the only way to find out with certainly, if the partner is satisfied with the relationship.   This means to ask, to listen and to trust, that the other tells the truth.  

Each partner evaluates the relationship very subjectively by what he feels.  These emotions are real and valid, they are the true measurement of the quality of the relationship, because the only purpose of intrinsic commitment is to be more happy and less unhappy than alone.   The partners can compare notes about the dynamics of their behavior, but the emotional reactions are subjective.   People can react very differently to the same experience.   What is extremely painful for one person can be of no significance to another.    In this case, the subjective experience has validity, no matter, if the cause of the experience has empathy, understanding and insight or not.  
Therefore intrinsic commitment requires absolute trust in the truth of the other's declarations of how he feels, and it requires taking everything said for serious and at face value.    It requires to ask and show interest in the emotional reactions of the other as a result of the own behavior.   Intrinsic commitment is the never ending endavor of making each other perceive the relationship as emotionally beneficial.   

Whenever a woman tells a man, that she feels hurt because of a specific behavior of his, he knows that he needs to change the behavior.   If he continues his hurting behavior and she reaches the point of feeling more hurt than happy, then the relationship has become worthless for her, and she has no reason to stay.  

A sane, decent and mature man in intrinsic commitment is aware of these basic facts:

1. The emotions of a woman are real, true and valid for herself, no matter, what others think or claim that she should feel.
2. The woman's evaluation of the relationship is based only upon her own subjective emotions, as she experiences them.
3. Disagreement, claims, denials, accusations, interpretations can influence and distort, how the man perceives and interprets the expressed and declared emotions of the woman, but he cannot influence, what the woman subjectively feels.  
4. If the man wants to influence the emotions of the woman, he can only change his own behavior, that causes the emotions.   If he wants her to feel happy, he has to treat her well.
5. The only way to make a woman stay in a relationship of intrinsic commitment is to treat her in a way, that causes her to feel happy, and to abstain from all behavior, that hurts her.    
6. A woman has no rational reason whatsoever to be or to remain in a relationship, where she experiences more pain than joy and happiness and the pain is a result of the man's behavior.  
7. Pain caused by hurting behavior cannot be annihilated or compensated with any other benefit.    Such pain can only avoided by stopping the hurting behavior.  

The jerk or the emotional moron asks, how good he feels because of having control over a woman as a commodity.    

The wise man asks, how good he can make the woman feel, when and because she is with him.

294. The Effect of Bullying upon Love

The Effect of Bullying upon Love

When a man wants a woman to do something for him, no matter what it is, he has the choice between two principally different strategies.

1. He bullies her to do it using pressure, threat, anger, extortion or intimidation.
2. He treats her so well, that she cares and loves him enough to do it by her own good will.

The starting point for both strategies is the relationship deal, in which they have agreed to fulfill each other's needs.   

When the man's focus is selfish, then he chooses the first strategy.  His priority is to ascertain, that he gets his needs met by applying whatever power he has, be it physical strength, situational or financial advantage.   As far as he does give something back to the woman, he restricts it to just as little as he believes is enough to make her function.  

When the man's focus is based upon trust and appreciation, then he chooses the second strategy.   He makes efforts to earn the woman's love and care, he gives first, because he trusts her, that the more he gives, the more he will get in return.    With this strategy, love, attachment, bonding grows stronger over time.


Of course, no woman would consciously decide to become a selfish man's commodity, if she would notice, that this is his goal, before it is too late.   But there are reasons, why a woman can temporarily be in a relationship, where she is bullied.   

1. The man fulfills the woman's needs in one aspect, like sharing activities of traveling and attending cultural events.  His bullying does not drive her away immediately, because she attempts to put up with it, as long as her resilience lasts.
2. The man starts like a nice man as described in entry 285 about the abuse-hoovering cycle.   He only converts into the bullying guy after she had already fallen in love with the apparently kind and caring man.
3. She has become afflicted with the jerk attachment syndrome as describe in entry 268.

So there is the situation, that a woman by mistake loves an unworthy man, who bullies her.   She can rationally come to the conclusion, that he is unworthy, she could even take the decision to end the relationship in spite of her fatal love.  But she cannot just decide to stop loving him as a consequence of her insight, that he does not deserve her love.   

Fortunately for her, he himself helps her to get out of the trap, and he is often oblivious of this.   Every time, when he hurts her, and it is not accidentally but by his choice of selfish behavior, the pain she feels decreases her love.    Being bullied to be a commodity is a powerful love killer and when she is cured of her misplaced love, she is free to end the relationship and feel relief.   

A woman can go through this experience either with a jerk and psychopath or with an emotional moron.    But there is one huge difference.  
The jerk knows, that he can bully a woman to serve as a commodity only for a limited time.    After that time, he has to move on and find another victim and he has no conscience to stop him.   The jerk is not bothered, what the woman thinks or feels, as long as he gets, what he wants.   
The emotional moron has no clue, what is going on.   As long as the woman does, what he wants, everything seems ok for him.    He is oblivious of the difference between a woman acting by her own benevolent choice or by intimidation, and he has no clue, that his bullying is a love killer.      His own behavior could even shock him, were he able to get aware of the woman's real agony.  
The emotional moron is misguided by a logical error.   He believes that when the woman yields to his bullying and does or allows without resistance, what he wants, she has automatically changed her mind to agree with his entitlement delusion. He believes, that he is able to coerce her to think, what he wants her to think.   He does not consider his behavior as bullying, but as doing her a favor against her resistance.  He believes to improve her cognition and to teach her her appropriate role in his life.   He has not perception, that she feels hurt by being bullied and dominated.    

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.  

195. Cruelty

Cruelty

Men are often driven by their instincts and physical needs to get infatuated with a woman's body.   Then they either are jerks, who consciously manipulate the woman to let them use their body.     Or they are immature or emotional morons (entry 156), who seriously believe themselves to love her.
They tell the woman dozens of times every day, how much they love her, they even do little things for her and buy her gifts.   Only from this behavior, there is no way to find out, if such a man's proclaimed love is caring love or selfish infatuation.

But there is a way to find conclusive evidence for the absence of caring love:   It is cruelty.   

 

Caring love and cruelty are mutually exclusive.
 

A man with caring love is never cruel to his partner.    A cruel man does not feel caring love, but uses a woman as a utility for his selfish needs.

The only realistic method to judge a man is judging him by the worst things that he does. 

The difference between cruelty and painful moments in a relationship is the attitude to and the perception of his partner's pain. 
For the cruel jerk, the pain of his partner is either of no significance, meaningless, indifferent, of no importance to him, or he even enjoys his power to be able to inflict pain on her.   He has no conscience about hurting his partner.
For the caring loving man, it is of paramount importance not to cause pain to his partner, he is very motivated to avoid everything, that would hurt his partner.    Having caused pain to his partner makes him feel unhappy, therefore he is eager to learn, what would cause her pain, before it ever happens. 


Cruelty implies three factors:

• A man's behavior causes a woman to get physically or feel emotionally hurt.
• He can know it.   That means, that he either knows already, what hurts her, or that she gives him feedback about it or that she asks him to stop an action, while he does it.     
• He continues or repeats his behavior.

Cruelty is,

• when a man feels entitled to do something, in spite or defiance of knowing that she feels hurt by his behavior.   
• when a woman gives a man feedback, that his behavior hurts her, and he continues his behavior as if she has never said anything.   
• when a woman gives a man feedback, that his behavior hurts her, and he tells her that it is her flaw and defect, that she feels hurt, and he continues or repeats the same behavior.
• when a man disregards her feedback and denies to take it for serious or to believe her, that she feels hurt, and continues or repeats his behavior.
• when a man commits a transgression, but does not feel guilty and does not earn her forgiving, because he considers the transgression as appropriate according to his depreciation, devaluation and disrespect for her.   
• when a man uses aggression and rage to intimidate the woman to give up her resistance to being the target of his hurtful behavior, and to coerce her to do what causes her pain when doing it.    
• when a man does not react, when the woman asks him to postpone some action and communicate about it.
• when a man refuses the woman's wish to communicate how to prevent hurting her in the future.

An example for cruelty is the public scene in the bus, as given in entry 190.   The man can see the growing pain of embarrassment in the woman's face, when she implores him with growing urgency to stop drawing attention from the spectators nearby.   To continue the scene with the intention to enhance her embarrassment is an act of so much cruelty, that I have no doubt, that this man does not love that unhappy wretch.  


It is not cruelty:

• when a man hurts a woman once by ignorance and is keen and eager to learn, how to never do it again.
• when a man commits a forgivable transgression (cheating is not forgivable) and feels as guilty as she feels hurt and makes all amends and restitutions, until she can forgive him, and he learns how to never repeat this transgression.

Example: A man commits a social blunder due to his lack of knowledge of cultural differences and it is embarrassing for the woman.   But he is eager to communicate about the topic until he has learned how not to repeat the blunder. 


It is obvious, that I do not want ever get near a cruel jerk, but I am aware, that learning how not to hurt each other is a process, that needs a lot of communication.