Do We Love Less, or More?

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I find it hard to love people. I mean, I don't know what love is, I never really get any feeling inside of me that would represent "love".

Shame, really. I'm only familiar with unconditional love I have for my family, friends and cat. But I wouldn't really call it love, more emotional attachment.

My love for animals far eceeds my love for other people. I dunno why, I just see the world through different eyes.

In my experience, I've found that I need to be vulnerable in order to truly love. Throughout my life, I've gone through phases of putting up walls to avoid being hurt and letting them down to try to love again.

In retrospect, I can say for certain that when I was numb, i.e. walls up, I was unable to share and love another. When I let the walls down, I was much more able to experience the highs (and lows ) of my relationships.

I would guess that many of us feel so much for our animal companions is because we don't have any walls with them. We're not afraid of being hurt by them so we allow ourselves to truly emote with them.

absolutely, astro (again!).

we're back to my Venn diagram (i've posted about it somewhere else here, i'm sure, it being a pet theory of mine). the intimacy of a relationship is the amount of trust you have of, and vulnerablity you allow yourself with, the other person.

i am a cynical madam at the best of times (me? i'm sure you're all shocked), but you should see me when i've with a partner - Ms Soppy ain't in it!

Fascinating! I like that. It meshes very well with my experience and is so much more concise than all those sloppy words I use to describe this.
Great insight!

nooooo! i WANT sloppy and soppy! (i am an incurable romantic at heart - whe i'm not busy being Ms Grumpy, that is).

My experience of love is just as Mel describes.

I don't LIKE most people I meet. Those I truly love - my husband, my children - that's about it - I love completely. I would die for them. And when I realized I loved my husband, all those many years ago, I just KNEW it. It was a foregone conclusion that this would be a permanent condition. And it was an incredibly shocking, affirming, sheer joy-filled moment when I realized that he accepted that love and returned it.

This is a great topic - thanks for starting it. Brilliant! It turns out that I share what many of you have expressed, and now I don't feel so bad for not being as "loving" as so many others I perceive to be; they love their friends, their parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers, teachers, co-workers, fellow book club members or workout partners, yoga leaders, the people they have coffee with every Tuesday noon, their next-door neighbors, and on and on and on...........
HOW can a body really love that many people???! But I observe that a lot of it IS genuine. I just watch, with as much fascination as I did in second grade watching sugar crystals form on a string suspended in a jar - which is to say, not extremely fascinated, but something I took note of, said to myself , 'hmm', and then turned my attention to something else.
I, also, am kind of all-or-nothing where it comes to love. I like many people, "like" meaning that I don't despise them and tolerate being around them without any negative effects upon myself , and can even find them interesting or nice to be around.
There are 4 souls that I can say that I love, and one of them is my dog (sometimes I prefer her to people, paws down.). Then there is my grandma, who I love very much and I feel like she loves me too, even if she doesn't understand everything about me. She was the kindest and most wonderful person to me all of my growing-up years. Then there's my younger sister; she's 27, and I'd do anything or give anything to her. If she needed a kidney transplant and I was a match, I'd be there ASAP to give her one of mine. I always spend the most on her present(s) at Christmastime And then there's Brittany, she's grown up now (25) but I was her nanny when she was a kid - hers and her brother's and two other sister's too. (yup, 4 kids total). I feel like I bonded with her the most , probably because I worried about her the most. I was concerned that her negative self body image might lead her to have the same eating disorder that her mom did, even though she was a healthy slender athletic girl she agonized about the size of her thighs and complained sometimes that whatever she was wearing to school that day made her look fat; hearing that made me cringe. I tried to praise her talent for playing the piano, her skill on the soccer field, her creativity, to help her understand that her body wasn't WHO she was, that physical beauty was just the outer layer - the wrapping paper around the gift ; it was a labor of love, nurturing a child to direct her to become a helathy happy young woman. It's funny, we were talking last fall - something that stood out in her mind prominently was the time I came to pick her up from school just as some mean boys were bullying her and giving her a hard time for something, (neither of us remember what the teasing was about), she remembered that I offered to stuff the both of them in a nearby basketball hoop (I'm tall for a woman - I reached 6' when I was 14) and let them dangle there, to think of nicer things to say, while they waited and hoped that the janitor would help them down later. It's funny what people remember - and what different parties consider acts of love.
Anyhow, that's a little more than $.02 worth, but that's how love is for me. When it comes down to the thought of actually uttering the words "I love you" to someone - anyone - it amounts to that much for me. A lot of people reach out to hug me but I pull back most of the time. But if it's one of these 4 souls, I'll throw my arms around them - we have mutual hugs , and I can say I love you to them. And my dog, well, she doesn't exactly 'reach out' to hug me but we have a different language of affection; I let her lick my face (with my mouth closed) and we snuggle, I rub her belly and scratch her back and behind her ears and other favourite spots , and she cuddles up to me when it's time to go to sleep, and the warmth of her body against mine feels like love.

at one point, recently, i have been becoming very close to someone online and over the phone who studying abroad in japan, and each day i hoped that he would never say "i love you" because then i knew that i would have to admit my feelings for him, and i really did not want to before we really met. but then he did it. i said "i feel stupid" and he said "i still love you anyway" and i started bashing my head into my desk.

i don't want to love him yet!

A couple comments that may or may not apply to your situation...
In my life, I found that I would tell people I loved them when I had a crush on them. Then, once I got to know them, I found that I didn't really love them at all!

For me, I was desperate to be loved and mistook what I was feeling as love rather than the neediness it was. In retrospect, I see the little boy inside was just craving love from anybody out of desperation.

In fact, when I finally found what I think is true love, it took quite a while of living with that person, learning about them, and learning my true feelings. But then it was unambiguous so now I know that when I say "I love you", it is for real.

Many people instinctively run when told that they are loved, driving away their admirer. My wife almost did that to me but fortunately she was cognizant of the fact that she wasn't running from me but from intimacy.

Sounds like you and the guy truly like each other. Do you think you're each ready to enter that trust-vulnerability zone? (Please note, I'm not questioning your feelings at all, just posing a rhetorical question for you to ponder).

Oooh yes. There's the "I love you" that means "I care about you and want the best for you", and the "I love you" that means "I don't like to think about what my life would be like without you", and the "I love you" that means "I love talking with you, we really help each other think"...

But the big deal is the "I love you" that means: "I'm really, really scared of you; and yet I trust you."

*leaves to get a drink, slightly terrified for having said this*

***

too right, echospectra! (hic!)

Um... I meant a glass of water with powdered vitamin C in it, not the hiccy stuff...

This is also what I experience, although it concerns very few people.

Love is certainly a VERY all-or-nothing feeling for me.

It is very, very difficult for me to make a connection with people. Not necessairly a lack of interest, but I can't seem to have casual friends.

When I do manage to have somebody break through that shell, it is a wonderful experience, and I fall way, way way, in love. Unfortunately those experiences are few and far between.

Another one who doesn't know what love is.

(And by the way, do you get the impression that the lyrics of this band are Aspie-like?)

It is rare when I feel love for someone, I might say "I love you" to my parents, but in reality I'm not really that overly dedicated to them. I really can understand my father - he has an undiagnosed case of Asperger's.

There was, however, one person I fell in love with, and I wanted to protect them, nurture them, and I would have killed and died for them. When you feel the level of love for this person like I had felt love for them, you feel like not so much a piece as a whole chunk is missing when they're away or when they're sick. You feel it so intensely, it cripples all your perceptions of them. They might look bald, they might be as ugly as hell, but to you, they are the most beautiful person in the world, so much so that it is indescribable. When you realise you can't contact them, it hurts so much that you can't think straight. The only way that you can see your future being happy is if they are happy and/or together with you. If them being together with you is mutually exclusive with them being happy, then you would gladly give them up, even if it meant you would spend the rest of your life alone and miserable.

That's what I think love is.