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RE: 5 Reasons Why I Don't Love You
Respect and love are two very different things.
You can respect others, their differences and not love them.
Love comes from intimacy. ( I don't mean the romantic kind)
It is biologically impossible to give that much energy to everyone, to love everyone.
(dunbars number, the monkey sphere theory)
Humans are tribal - and all the 'it shouldn't have to be like this' desire, in the world, doesn't change what actually the reality is
Just my opinion.
This is perhaps a redundant conversation, because it would seem that we are arguing over what the definition of love, which is entirely subjective. But to entertain your assertion, I would have to disagree with most of what you said.
Why does love need to come from intimacy? Perhaps it is very difficult for us to love one another without intimacy having arrived first, but, my post was speaking to the possibility that this is simply because our environment has conditioned us otherwise.
But in my opinion, love ought to come with no conditions. That means no limit on how many people you can love. You say that the more people you love, it would be too much of a drain on your energy resources, where as from my experience, it would seem to me that love is a source of energy if anything. There have even been studies, though I cannot speak to the integrity of them, that have returned results that suggest the more people you have a social connection to, the longer you live.
If true, this would certainly help the argument that love could be something that replenishes, rather than subtracts from our well-being.
The monkey sphere theory sounds pseudo-scientific and potentially political to me. However, supposing the results are honest, the interpretation of them is selective. The power for our bodies to adapt is absolutely mind-blowing. So much is pre-programmed into our DNA that allows us to adapt to our environments. From the simple shit, like a callus developing when you play guitar frequently to protect your fingers from further trauma, to the complex psychological alterations that the mind can perform on itself in order to allow someone to better deal with a trauma they experienced.
Why when we find a correlation between the size of a monkey's brain and the amount of monkeys in their tribe- if that's what its called, do we choose to interpret that as the brain dictated the social group? Does it not make more sense that the social group affected the size of the brain?
It seems somewhat fantastical to envision every monkey with a brainsize that equates to a social group of 50, just happening to find and form a community with other monkeys who just happened to have a brain the same size. But, it doesn't seem as far-fetched for a group of monkeys who are already in a community, to go through physical and mental adaptions that make them become a little more like one another-- because they would need to be more like one another to deal with whatever environment and community they are now all a part of.
In closing, I will say that, regardless of this theory and any other. This only speaks to love as interpreted by you. I don't think that you need to know someone's name, face and personality to love them, as this experiment suggests. To me, love is merely the recognition and acceptance of another sentient being's connection to you, and a conscious decision to do or avoid doing whatever you can to ensure that their journey, which is separate from your own, is no more difficult that it needs to be.