(Stillness in the Storm Editor) The following article describes six reasons why we fall in love. In an effort to make this piece more robust, I’ll also describe the fundamental psychological reality of image association vs. primary phenomena. That’s a fancy way of saying there’s a difference between the actual object of our affection and our impression of that object. Recognizing that this difference exists is essential to cultivate lasting and fulfilling relationships.
When in love, we love our impressions of the person we love, not the actual person in a prima facie sense. That might sound strange, but I think you’ll see the merit of this viewpoint as you read on.
The world you interact with every day is not the real world, it’s a representation of the real world created by your mind, derived from the senses, what I call the biological virtual reality environment. This truth isn’t some wild conspiracy theory, it’s a well-accepted fact of psychology and philosophy.
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I discuss this extensively in the following article.
The fact we experience life through the biological virtual reality environment means that the things we feel and sense, as well as what we think and dream about, are images or representations within the mind. This is especially true for people you know or any phenomenon that is intangible in some way. For example, since you can’t physically touch the happiness of a child playing, an intangible phenomenon, you can only” touch it” as a representation within your mind. You “see” the happiness through creating a narrative or story in your head, and it’s this that causes you to feel something in response.
Unlike a lifeless impersonal object, what makes a person who they are isn’t just the body we see or even the way they behave, it’s much more than this. (This is called the black box problem in psychology, which is that our nature is ultimately obscured or hidden from view, even to ourselves.) We come to know a person through their behavior, but this is only a shadow of the total of who a person really is. In this way, the “person” you fall in love with is your version of who you think your partner is.
Those feelings of love, affection, anger, frustration, joy, bliss, and comfort are generated by your mind as you interact with the image. This internal image “comes to life” when you’re around your partner; the things they do you append or graft onto this image as a kind of anchor. This is why when your partner does things that don’t fit into your definition or version of them, it can feel unsettling as if they’re acting out of character. But more truly, they are being themselves—it’s you who needs to update your impressions.
In the early phases of a relationship, what I call the image or puppy love phase, the emotional charge we feel associated with our chosen lover is largely due to induction. Everyone has an ideal archetype of the perfect person they want in life. Even if you don’t consider yourself a romantic person, somewhere kicking around in your head is your dream partner or at least you’re aware of the concept through culture.
When you fall in love, that archetype of your ideal partner, along with all of its values and attributes, is imbued onto your lover. It’s as if you took all the things you want in a mate and used ducktape to attach them to the person you’re dating. This can be a slow or fast process but in the end, it results in you feeling a quantum leap of affection for them. During this process, characteristics of the ideal partner in your head show up in the behavior of the person your dating, and you take notice, causing a flood of positive emotions. If this happens frequently in a short period of time, you’ll subconsciously hoist onto your partner all your expectations and characteristics of your ideal mate. This is the “I think I’m falling in love” moment.
For example, if you’re a woman, and your ideal man is a rugged guy with a beard and a deep voice, men with beards and deep voices are going to seem “dreamy” to you. If one of these men approaches you in a way that converges or matches up with your fantasy of the ideal—which you may not even be consciously aware of—you’ll start to feel those tingling feelings of love. All this happens subconsciously, although we consciously observe the effects via our feelings and emotions, and especially our fantasies. If you start noticing your mind constantly thinking about someone and they become the main actor in your fantasies—you’re falling in love.
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But here’s the thing, do you truly know this person?
Almost everyone’s had a crush before, where you long to be with someone you either barely know, or are close to, like a friend. In the former case, when you barely know someone, how is it that you can really say you love them? You don’t really know them!
This is a classic example of the image-love effect that was just described. The bottom line is you’re more in love with who you think they are, not the person in totality. And if you’ve ever dated a long time crush, someone you spent time daydreaming about, it can often be disappointing as the real person begins to breakdown your fantasy simply being who they are.
“What? My lover being who they are can breakdown my love for them? That sounds crazy!?”
Yes, this is precisely the potential all romantic adventure has to contend with, as we’ll explore deeply below. Before we do, just think about it for a moment.
Have you ever heard the saying, “I thought they were a really great guy or girl until they opened their mouth.”
What’s happened here is that you presumed that they were someone you’d like, without actually knowing them, only to discover as you did get to know them that you didn’t like them.
The same risks can occur within an established relationship. There will always be a difference between who you think your partner is and who they really are. Just like an iceberg, you can only see so much at the surface with the majority unable to be seen.
In my estimation, this problem causes a great deal of relationship hardship. And if you really think about it, the issue goes far beyond relationships. All of life is the experience of making impressions of things and using those impressions to navigate the world. If our impressions are correct, if the map accurately reflects the territory, we can navigate our way to where we want to go in life. If our impressions are wrong, if our knowledge is inaccurate or incomplete, the path to our desires will be fraught with pitfalls and obstacles.
So whether we’re dealing with relationships or life itself, learning how to solve this image vs. reality problem is arguably one of the most important things we can do.
For sake of focus, we’ll return back to exploring this quandary within the frame of relationships. That said, I encourage you to go meta with this discussion; take the principle we just discussed and apply it in all areas of your life. Allow yourself to explore how the image vs. reality problem affects other areas of your life.
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Falling in Love with an Image Solution
I’ll give you the answer straight away. The solution is humility. The solution is to learn how to follow the truth wherever it leads with an open mind and wholehearted devotion to harmonious (spiritual) values.
More truly, this image-love situation isn’t a problem, it’s a fundamental reality we have to accept and work with.
The “problem” is that most of us never learn about and work with this subtle reality, and as such, we lack the tools needed to properly navigate relationships. I would argue that accepting this reality actually opens up the possibilities of a relationship, revealing benefits and rewards that would otherwise be hidden. It actually liberates us from the shackles of misguided expectations in romance, ones that cause untold suffering in our world.
The bottom line is whether you’re falling in love with a crush, someone you barely know, or you’re falling in love with your best friend of 20 years, you’ll never truly know them completely.
That might sound harsh or unrealistic but it will make sense as you consider some fundamental aspects of human nature and life itself.
The fact is, your mind is finite, it can only absorb so much knowledge and information. But the totality of who you, your essence, is infinite in potential, along with any other person endowed with mind and personality. This means the quest of knowing your partner and loving them more deeply as time goes on never truly ends. Now doesn’t that sound exciting?!
This truth changes the nature of relationships.
Instead of a relationship being about a person who stays the same forever, satisfying your needs, (a kind of selfish factory-line way of thinking about relationship) it opens them up. This new way of seeing relationships, which isn’t really new at all, is one of adventure. Your needs are still being satisfied but those are nested within the greater truth of discovery of self and the other self. Your relationship with another person is more about learning who they are, and through them, learning who you are, and working together in trust and honor to help each of you express your values with greater proficiency and wisdom.
The old relationship model is a dead thing, with change being considered an enemy of love, a destructive force. The new way of thinking about relationships embraces change; it embraces the reality that you’re growing and so is your partner. And that together if you embrace this truth, you can constantly improve the rewards that come from your mutual enterprise and association. In this sense, a relationship is the business of self-discovery, co-creative ministry, and social cooperation.
Consider this.
We often think of life as an adventure, that we want to go out and explore the world, see new things, and so on. Of course, this is true but we’re also exploring ourselves in the process.
When someone asks you if you like a meal you’ve never had before, what will you say? Probably something like: “I don’t know, I’ll have to try it.”
That is an admission that you don’t know yourself, although we might not think of it that way. The grand truth I’m offering for you to think about is that life experience is itself a quest of self-discovery, an unavoidable one.
When we explore life we’re not only exploring the objective outer world, we’re also exploring the subjective inner world.
Side note: In my musings on the difference between objective and subjective realities, I’ve concluded that what we describe as subjective—what we feel, think, and experience internally—is actually the act of observing intangible objective realities in consciousness. That is, ideas and emotions are real things unto themselves that we observe, and this produces feelings, which are themselves real and objective. This is not critically important in order to understand the topic of discussion at hand but I felt it was appropriate to mention given I raised the difference between objective and subjective.
What I’m getting at here is that in life you’re exploring yourself as much, if not more, than you’re exploring the world. Exploration of the world and the universe is simultaneously an experience of exploring the self. But, if you’re not self-conscious, you won’t notice this nor will you enjoy the benefits of knowing thyself as much as one who is.
Really think about that for a moment.
Before we have any kind of relationship with another person, we first have a relationship with ourselves.
Ask yourself, do you really know who you truly are? Or are you, like your potential romantic partner, discovering yourself through experience?
This is meaningful to contemplate because it should hopefully prove to you that your relationship with anything is always limited by how well you’ve taken the time to know that thing. Let me restate that for clarity. The quality of your relationships, whether with people or anything else, depends on your skills with respect to how you define and describe the things in your experience. This highlights yet another an often overlooked fact, which is that how you make sense of your experiences directly affects how you experience the things you’re making sense of. By this I mean, if you tell yourself you hate your job (an object you’re defining from your experience) what do you think you’ll feel when working? You’ll feel all the emotions that come with experiencing something you hate.
We are the authors of our internal world.
Thus, the solution to the image problem is to seek knowledge of who your partner really is. This requires humility. In a relationship, this is a conscious effort to frame your beliefs about your partner as provisional and flexible. That is, you need to keep an open mind because, as we just laid out, your impressions are limited and need constant maintenance to ensure they harmonize with reality. This is especially important in the beginning when emotions run high and idyllic fantasies are the norm.
Let’s consider why relationships fall apart as a way to understand why the solution of seeking the truth about your partner through humility is so helpful.
In my assessment of relationships, most people get into them to satisfy some need; this is echoed in the below article. In a way, we think of relationships like ordering a meal. We want a burger or salad. We go to a restaurant. We order a dish. We get what we expect, and we feel satisfied. The first stages of a relationship are similar, we’re looking for someone that can meet our needs and satisfy the items on our checklist.
We find someone that matches our ideal partner in some way. We begin dating them and, due to our lack of knowledge about them, we feel like we’re getting what we want. That is, it’s easy to let yourself believe that someone you’re initially dating might be “the one.” And in the absence of information that invalidates that belief, the person we’re dating becomes a symbol for our ideal mate.
But eventually, the ideal starts to crumble as the truth of who they really are dawns on us. I’m not suggesting that people are evil, bad, or insidious at their core. I’m simply saying that as you get to know someone, your previous impressions become admixed with new information, fundamentally changing the way we see someone.
Let’s say, you fall in love with a girl because you think she is a diva singer. You see her singing at a club one night, and you see her as high value, she treats people with respect, is kind and giving, and so on. Seeing these traits in her behavior as she interacts with other people is the reason you became attracted to her. You start dating her, and at first, she acts in concert with what you expect. For a few weeks, everything is like a dream. However, you slowly start to see another side of her. At one point, she has a fan come up and ask her for a selfie, and she snaps at them scornfully. She said she’s having a bad day and just can’t take all the appeals for her attention anymore. Then, it happens again a few days later. Then, one night, she snaps at you for something. After a few months, you start to notice a pattern. The diva has a mask that she uses to interact with the public, just like we all do, but under that mask is a real person, with good days and bad says.
At this point in the scenario, you have to make a choice. This is what I call the shadow phase of a relationship because your starting to see the person’s shadow self come to the surface. By shadow, I don’t mean bad parts, although they could be in there, I mean what we can’t see—the things hidden below the surface to use an iceberg analogy. She’s probably starting to see your shadow self too. This isn’t a bad thing because the true ship of love has to sail on the seas of truth, using the winds of humility and authenticity to move across uncertain waters. The choice to be made here is: are you willing to embrace the mystery of your partner; are you willing to explore who they truly are beyond your first impression that you fell in love with?
I would argue that, due to cultural programming from social engineers in Hollywood and elsewhere, most of us never chose love through truth. Instead, we try, as so many do, to cling on to the initial image that we fell in love with.
Looking at the above scenario, if you decide you don’t want to seek the truth, you’ll start to feel resentment for your partner. You’ll start to get a little bit less affectionate. You’ll notice yourself becoming more annoyed by little things that you used to love about her. Eventually, you’ll have a moment where you feel like you don’t know who you’re dating anymore. And finally, in what could be a catastrophic fight, you might even accuse her of changing for the worse. “You’re not the person I fell in love with?!” And it’s true!
What’s happened is that your illusions of your partner fell apart. And as the adage goes, the truth is belligerent; it doesn’t care about what we want, it simply is. I’m not saying this to be callous, merely to point out that the uncompassionate nature of truth can make us feel like our most cherished experiences are being assaulted, which can lead to strong emotional reactions.
The other important factor to consider is that relationships change us.
They are an arena or playground of self-discovery and therefore value exploration and process augmentation. What that means is that when you’re in a relationship you can’t help but seek maximum value, and therefore you’ll fine-tune your choices and thoughts as you go. This is a process of personal evolution and growth.
We can’t help but change as a result of experience. There are two choices in this sense. We can change as a benefit of following the truth, by building accurate bodies of knowledge and using that knowledge to express our values in all ways possible. Or, we can try to avoid change, reject the truth, discount new knowledge, and refuse to adjust our methods to incorporate newly discovered truths and values.
Relationships are simultaneously one of the most rewarding human experiences, and at the same time, have the potential to be traumatic and damaging.
The reason why they can either be good or bad has to do with whether we’re navigating them properly. Just like anything else we do in life, if we misunderstand how something works, if we lack context, we’ll make choices that reduce our ability to get what we want.
I encourage you to think deeply about the beliefs you have about relationships, how they work, and what the rules of engagement should be.
Make no mistake that the powers that be use this deeply entrenched need of fellowship to control us.
By taking the time to better understand the truth about what relationships are and how to make them work well, we can lead fulfilled lives, raise healthy children, and remove the shackles of hardship that make us more easily controllable by the powers that be.
– Justin
Related 5 Ways Couples Manage to Kill Love – and How to Avoid Them
by Gerald Sinclair, December 24th, 2018
Sure, falling in love is a very intense feeling but it also doesn’t have to be. Sometimes love is a lot more gradual than we realize.
Whether we really adore someone or we simply love the idea of them falling in love can be contributed to a number of things. The driving forces behind it can all be quite different for each and every one of us. Below I am going to go over some of the reasons why we fall in love that are backed by science.
While they all seem a bit silly each one is very important. Love is a bit confusing sometimes but if it is there you will know. Why do you love the person you love?
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6 Reasons Why People Fall In Love:
1. We tend to be attracted to people who have similar values to ours.
Studies have found that people are more likely to be friends or spouses if they have similar personalities. If they hold similar beliefs or values they are going to be more interested in one another within reason. While a lot of people assume opposites attract, that is not always the case.
2. We take their smell into consideration.
According to a specific study we all have our own scent and the person who really likes that smell is most likely to fall in love with us. Just like other animals we have our own pheromones. Sure, the concept might seem controversial but you can click here to read more on it.
3. We tend to fall in love with those who have desirable characteristics.
While desirable characteristics could vary from person to person they make up a big part of defining things. If you are not physically attracted to the person you’re with, chances are you won’t be ‘in love’ with him or her. A general attraction is necessary even if most refuse to admit it. That being said, some of the most desirable characteristics could end up having nothing to do with his or her appearance at all.
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4. We sometimes fall for those who can fulfill our needs.
Of course, this one might seem a bit shallow at first but if you really read into it, it makes a lot of sense. If someone can fulfill your needs and you can fulfill theirs you are much more likely to fall in love. Whether you need love, companionship, or anything else when someone is providing it for you it could cause you to catch feelings.
5. If you are ready to fall in love chances are you’d do so with someone unexpected.
When we want to be in a relationship to a serious extent we lower our expectations and find love in some of the most peculiar places. The more ready you are the more likely you are to find what you wish for. While it might seem like you’re settling to the people around you, as long as you and your partner are happy and truly feel for one another then don’t let them bother you.
6. We seem to quite frequently fall for people who look like our opposite-sex parents.
Sure, this one might sound weird but some people are very attracted to those with the same hair and eye color as their opposite-sex parents. This is like imprinting in a way and has shown to be quite consistent. Parental characteristics seem to correlate positively with actual partner characteristics for both men and women.
All of this aside, does it really matter why we fall in love? As long as we are comfortable in our relationship and our partner is just as happy as we are there is nothing to be upset about. Do you think any of these reasons have contributed to your love life in any way?
Stillness in the Storm Editor: Why did we post this?
Fellowship and companionship are spiritual urges that all human beings have to contend with. The dark occult forces of this world have long known that by depriving an individual of their fundamental needs the mind will be distorted and the soul can be enslaved. The preceding article reveals some of the psychological reasons for why we fall in love, which is critical to understand as self-knowledge is the first gateway on the path to true freedom and personal fulfillment. With a better understanding of one’s nature, an individual can avoid a great many pitfalls in life while also positively contributing to making the world a better place.
– Justin
Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools
Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Send an email to corrections@stillnessinthestorm.com, with the error and suggested correction, along with the headline and url. Do you think this article needs an update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at sitsshow@gmail.com. Thank you for reading.
Source:
https://awarenessact.com/6-scientific-reasons-why-people-fall-in-love/
One thing is for sure, in most cases, love at first sight is an illusion……………just look at the number of divorces after 2 years or even less…