8 ms·

Initially, people do not fall in love. Rather, they fall in lust. This is typically short term. Love emerges when there is deep, long term compatibility and com

by every 5y ago

Initially, people do not fall in love. Rather, they fall in lust. This is typically short term. Love emerges when there is deep, long term compatibility and commitment. Humor helps as well. This is an anecdotal observation from someone who has been "in love" for over four decades...

cm2012 5y ago
Same here, been with my wife for more than half my life now, we build on our love all the time. It's funny, I've had infatuation before for a couple acquaintances and celebrities and it's amazing how on a timer it is. Six months, like clockwork, that strong feeling is gone if you don't feed it.
xwdv 5y ago
What happens if you never fall in lust with a partner but then fall in love just because of compatibility reasons? Is it really still as satisfying?
- pm90 5y ago
  It depends on the people in question and how open minded they are. If either one wants good sexual compatibility but the partner isn’t able to provide it, that’s a recipe for disaster. If you both don’t have much of a sex drive then it’s probably fine.
- every 5y ago
  I don't know. But as you age, the lust factor tends to diminish. The relationship tends to depend on more than the mere carnal. Like being friends and enjoying each others company for instance. Partners in life, as it were...
- kadoban 5y ago
  As long as there is some sort of intimacy (including non-sexual and non-physical), I'd say it can be. Lust is just really convenient socially and biologically for getting an intimate relationship started.
- vecinu 5y ago
  Personal anecdote here but over the long term (decades) you'll regret not being passionate with each other if passion is important for you. I overlooked that aspect for the longest time based on how compatible we were on all other fronts. Unfortunately that turned out to be an expensive and hurtful drawn out lingering issue that exploded down the line. As Jordan Peterson says, the best, best case scenario is being with a partner you're compatible with and being physically attracted to. Never let go of that person.
  - rosstex 5y ago
    [flagged]
- i5heu 5y ago
  You don’t have to have intercourse with everything you love. Love is a big term for a wide variety of feelings. It’s an never ending endeavour to explore it.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  Sexual attraction is different than lust. The first is good as such because it leads to procreation; the second is a vice, an excess of sexual appetite that darkens the mind and, like all vice, corrupts you from the inside. So ultimately, it is best not to "fall in lust". Lust will lead to misery in a relationship precisely because it is the condition where sexual pleasure is sought for its own sake; the other is reduced to an object of sexual exploitation. Because lust is sexual appetite that is no longer proportioned to reason, someone "in lust" will grow tired of his or her partner and will look for the next, often increasingly more risque thrill. Quite a miserable way to live. Romance as such is also different from lust. It is sexual in nature, but with a greater emphasis on the affective than on just sexual attraction on its own. Romance is what people often mean when they say "fall in love". Typically, romance only lasts a couple years, hopefully having gotten the couple far enough to procreate. Of course, it is possible to cultivate romance, but the main point here is that relationships are supposed to mature, and clinging to the pleasure of passing emotions experienced early in the relationship and using that as a standard against which the relationship is constantly measured is a sign of immaturity. Love is something we often seem incapable of understanding. Love is not an emotion as such, even if lovers experience emotions. Ultimately love is a desiring and a willing of the good. Love can be broadly divided into two basic varieties, namely, the erotic and the agathonic. The erotic (which should not be understoodd as sexual only) is a desire of the good for one's sake. Whenever we desire something for our own good, we are speaking of erotic love. Agathonic love is desiring the good of the other for their sake. A relationship requires both.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    I don't get it. You guys seem to have sex in your mind all the time. What about brotherly love? What about motherly love? What about fatherly love? What about love of one's country? What about love of humanity? What about Love Supreme expressed by John Coltrane https://youtu.be/ll3CMgiUPuU https://youtu.be/ll3CMgiUPuU
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  I think this really depends on the person. There are lot of people who have deep and satisfying relationships with limited intimacy. For other people it's very difficult. Check out the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/. You'll see a lot of people on both sides of the equation. People who aren't really attracted to their mate but happy in the relationship, and mostly people who are deeply unhappy because their mate doesn't have romantic/sexual feelings for them.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Having had a fair share of both, I'd say yes, if not moreso. My partner and I never had the hot passionate need to be together. We became friends, we got closer, things made sense, we talked about the nature of relationships, we got closer... and we keep falling deeper in love. Sometimes I wish we had more intense sexual passion, but I've had that with lovers in the past, relationships where the loss of initial passion was notable, where depth in the relationship gradually overtook that loss. So, I guess I processed that loss, to the point where I don't see it as necessary. And, gained the perspective, that depth truly is the goal; passion only blinds us to what's not working and risks souring into passionate discontent.
mrxd 5y ago
See also Diotima’s ladder: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima's_Ladder_of_Love https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima's_Ladder_of_Love
Epenthesis 5y ago
I'm not sure that's true. I have little to no sex drive (am "asexual" as the kids say), but I've had intense crushes/obsessive feelings about individuals with no associated desire to have sex with the targets thereof. I imagine that for people with normal sex drives, both components play a role in initial relationship formation; ie, there's an emotional component in addition to "lust" as conventionally defined. You could quibble that these (relatively short lived) intense emotions are "lust", as opposed to the "love" of a longer relationship, but that seems to be playing a semantic game that doesn't really concord with how we generally use those words.
- danachow 5y ago
  Infatuation?
- seibelj 5y ago
  There are edge cases to anything in biology. I would say you are an edge case. Love and sex are fundamental to humanity and our continued existence. You being a 0.001% outlier, who will likely not produce any offspring who would have a chance to inherit your asexual-ness, does not refute the parent comment whatsoever.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    Love and sex are two different things. There's a reason we have two separate words, not just one. And, people can love their parents, children, and siblings. Does not mean they want to have sex with them.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    What little research that has been done on asexuality puts us at closer to 1%.
  - Epenthesis 5y ago
    I'm certainly an outlier, but it seems intuitively likely that I'm experiencing a subset of what other people experience, rather than a disjoint. Ie, other people feel the socio-emotional component as well as the lust component, with me lacking the latter. However, it might be difficult for most people to orthogonalize these two components, since for them they occur simultaneously. That's the relevance of my asexuality to my comment: I suspect it allows me to experience the socio-emotional component without also experiencing the lust component, and thereby more easily see them as different. If it's true that there's both a lust and socio-emotional component, it still seems inaccurate (or at least, idiosyncratic) to refer to the combination of the two as "lust".
punchingpeople 5y ago
This, been married for 6 years already, but didn't start loving my wife until around year 3, lots of lust before that. We talk a lot about it, we talk a lot about everything, our love keeps growing and lust doesn't play such an important role anymore. I have never understood how some people can fall in love with just a few sexual encounters, have had my share of women falling in "love" with me... It was quite a scary thing, now I understand I need a long time to develop any feelings. But for the majority of my life, it made me wonder if there was something wrong with me. *edit for formatting
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I don't know the exact quote, and I usually hate quotes. I once heard, "True love is letting your wife/husband have sex with other people if that makes them happy.". I belive that is from Eric Fromme. (To lazy to check the spelling of his name, or quote." I always had trouble with this one though. I love my mom, my pets, and a best friend I had for 20 years.
DeathArrow 5y ago
>Initially, people do not fall in love. Rather, they fall in lust. This is typically short term. Love emerges when there is deep, long term compatibility and commitment. Humor helps as well. This is an anecdotal observation from someone who has been "in love" for over four decades... Maybe there are different kind of ways to love. If you've just met someone, you can have in the first months some kind of attraction that is different than the sexual attraction you might be feeling. We can call that love.
astura 5y ago
This doesn't match my lived experience, I've fallen in love with a person I've never had any lust for (and actively found unattractive when we first met). After falling in love the sex was just fine even though I wasn't physically attracted to them.
- bscphil 5y ago
  Yeah, for a highly upvoted comment OP is unbelievably presumptive and universalizing about human nature. The sort of dating culture in which such an account is even natural didn't even exist prior to 50 years ago or so. When I lived in small town America about a decade ago, very few people used dating apps. Hookup culture existed but was not really the norm; most people had a pre-existing friendship before they began dating. Moreover, my understanding is that many women describe their experience as something closer to what you talk about. They usually do end up feeling physically attracted to their partners, but this is something that happens after they develop romantic feelings for them. I'd have to say my personal experience mirrors this in part, though not completely. Also worth pointing out the effects religion may have on this. In some Christian sects, for example, adherents are expected to not feel (or at least repress) lust towards their partners until marriage. Assuming that some of them are even partially successful, they will likely have several years of a romantic relationship before lust is allowed to act freely.
y4mi 5y ago
you seem to really like freud...
moneywoes 5y ago
Yikes getting some PTSD reading this
CallingCalliope 5y ago
Now I’m a very curious chap who when an interest rises, I likes to explore that interest. One day in the past I was lucky enough to meet a lady who was very Interesting. Talented in so many mediums. Now if I had not known her I would have innocently, as I have done with many other of my hero’s found out as much as possible about her and her talents, but didn't because It felt creepy. I could never forget her, which for me with no visual memory is not normal, out of sight out of mind. I did not know her well, I did not know much about her works, I cant reminisce due to lack of visual memory and not much to reminisce about. My denied curiosity would be a powerful reason why my mind would find itself thinking of her, but It was more her goodness and kindness, her frequency that captivated me. A number of years later I wrote a letter or two and she responded. Now from narcissist’s wood Nymph, Echo, to other invaluable writings throughout the human struggle, love at first sight exists for some people, be that a biological or a spiritual matter ( IMO its got to be a symbiotic relationship). We eventually met up at her house, I screwed up and turned up a bit pissed, I wasn't drinking much at the time and underestimated my capacity, nervousness and thirst. She politely put up with it for a bit then asked me to leave. There it should have ended, about a year later I looked up her Facebook, I seen photos of her that bewitched me, the powerful feelings from just seeing her photo blew to pieces! I was not in a normal frame of mind, I sent letters and such but came off looking like a weirdo due to my temporary insanity, she responded it was obsessive and there the tale ends. It wasn't just curiosity, lust infatuation mixed, it was all consuming, she said in our previous letters I must be infatuated, and I in return wrote her a short story to try and approach the subject which she liked. I'm upset I’ve annoyed the lady by turning up pissed and sending unwanted messages, but not in any other way I just hope she is OK and happy. Whatever it was I was lucky it didn't develop before the trouble, I don't know what it was, but it created a cascading reaction throughout my entire being that I had no control over, it was my master, by a long margin.

by every 5y ago

cm2012 5y ago

Same here, been with my wife for more than half my life now, we build on our love all the time. It's funny, I've had infatuation before for a couple acquaintances and celebrities and it's amazing how on a timer it is. Six months, like clockwork, that strong feeling is gone if you don't feed it.

xwdv 5y ago

What happens if you never fall in lust with a partner but then fall in love just because of compatibility reasons? Is it really still as satisfying?

pm90 5y ago
It depends on the people in question and how open minded they are. If either one wants good sexual compatibility but the partner isn’t able to provide it, that’s a recipe for disaster. If you both don’t have much of a sex drive then it’s probably fine.
every 5y ago
I don't know. But as you age, the lust factor tends to diminish. The relationship tends to depend on more than the mere carnal. Like being friends and enjoying each others company for instance. Partners in life, as it were...
kadoban 5y ago
As long as there is some sort of intimacy (including non-sexual and non-physical), I'd say it can be. Lust is just really convenient socially and biologically for getting an intimate relationship started.
vecinu 5y ago
Personal anecdote here but over the long term (decades) you'll regret not being passionate with each other if passion is important for you. I overlooked that aspect for the longest time based on how compatible we were on all other fronts. Unfortunately that turned out to be an expensive and hurtful drawn out lingering issue that exploded down the line. As Jordan Peterson says, the best, best case scenario is being with a partner you're compatible with and being physically attracted to. Never let go of that person.
- rosstex 5y ago
  [flagged]
i5heu 5y ago
You don’t have to have intercourse with everything you love. Love is a big term for a wide variety of feelings. It’s an never ending endeavour to explore it.
bobthechef 5y ago
Sexual attraction is different than lust. The first is good as such because it leads to procreation; the second is a vice, an excess of sexual appetite that darkens the mind and, like all vice, corrupts you from the inside. So ultimately, it is best not to "fall in lust". Lust will lead to misery in a relationship precisely because it is the condition where sexual pleasure is sought for its own sake; the other is reduced to an object of sexual exploitation. Because lust is sexual appetite that is no longer proportioned to reason, someone "in lust" will grow tired of his or her partner and will look for the next, often increasingly more risque thrill. Quite a miserable way to live. Romance as such is also different from lust. It is sexual in nature, but with a greater emphasis on the affective than on just sexual attraction on its own. Romance is what people often mean when they say "fall in love". Typically, romance only lasts a couple years, hopefully having gotten the couple far enough to procreate. Of course, it is possible to cultivate romance, but the main point here is that relationships are supposed to mature, and clinging to the pleasure of passing emotions experienced early in the relationship and using that as a standard against which the relationship is constantly measured is a sign of immaturity. Love is something we often seem incapable of understanding. Love is not an emotion as such, even if lovers experience emotions. Ultimately love is a desiring and a willing of the good. Love can be broadly divided into two basic varieties, namely, the erotic and the agathonic. The erotic (which should not be understoodd as sexual only) is a desire of the good for one's sake. Whenever we desire something for our own good, we are speaking of erotic love. Agathonic love is desiring the good of the other for their sake. A relationship requires both.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  I don't get it. You guys seem to have sex in your mind all the time. What about brotherly love? What about motherly love? What about fatherly love? What about love of one's country? What about love of humanity? What about Love Supreme expressed by John Coltrane https://youtu.be/ll3CMgiUPuU https://youtu.be/ll3CMgiUPuU
JamesBarney 5y ago
I think this really depends on the person. There are lot of people who have deep and satisfying relationships with limited intimacy. For other people it's very difficult. Check out the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadBedrooms/. You'll see a lot of people on both sides of the equation. People who aren't really attracted to their mate but happy in the relationship, and mostly people who are deeply unhappy because their mate doesn't have romantic/sexual feelings for them.
klyrs 5y ago
Having had a fair share of both, I'd say yes, if not moreso. My partner and I never had the hot passionate need to be together. We became friends, we got closer, things made sense, we talked about the nature of relationships, we got closer... and we keep falling deeper in love. Sometimes I wish we had more intense sexual passion, but I've had that with lovers in the past, relationships where the loss of initial passion was notable, where depth in the relationship gradually overtook that loss. So, I guess I processed that loss, to the point where I don't see it as necessary. And, gained the perspective, that depth truly is the goal; passion only blinds us to what's not working and risks souring into passionate discontent.

mrxd 5y ago

See also Diotima’s ladder: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima's_Ladder_of_Love https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diotima's_Ladder_of_Love

Epenthesis 5y ago

I'm not sure that's true. I have little to no sex drive (am "asexual" as the kids say), but I've had intense crushes/obsessive feelings about individuals with no associated desire to have sex with the targets thereof. I imagine that for people with normal sex drives, both components play a role in initial relationship formation; ie, there's an emotional component in addition to "lust" as conventionally defined. You could quibble that these (relatively short lived) intense emotions are "lust", as opposed to the "love" of a longer relationship, but that seems to be playing a semantic game that doesn't really concord with how we generally use those words.

danachow 5y ago
Infatuation?
seibelj 5y ago
There are edge cases to anything in biology. I would say you are an edge case. Love and sex are fundamental to humanity and our continued existence. You being a 0.001% outlier, who will likely not produce any offspring who would have a chance to inherit your asexual-ness, does not refute the parent comment whatsoever.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Love and sex are two different things. There's a reason we have two separate words, not just one. And, people can love their parents, children, and siblings. Does not mean they want to have sex with them.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  What little research that has been done on asexuality puts us at closer to 1%.
- Epenthesis 5y ago
  I'm certainly an outlier, but it seems intuitively likely that I'm experiencing a subset of what other people experience, rather than a disjoint. Ie, other people feel the socio-emotional component as well as the lust component, with me lacking the latter. However, it might be difficult for most people to orthogonalize these two components, since for them they occur simultaneously. That's the relevance of my asexuality to my comment: I suspect it allows me to experience the socio-emotional component without also experiencing the lust component, and thereby more easily see them as different. If it's true that there's both a lust and socio-emotional component, it still seems inaccurate (or at least, idiosyncratic) to refer to the combination of the two as "lust".

punchingpeople 5y ago

This, been married for 6 years already, but didn't start loving my wife until around year 3, lots of lust before that. We talk a lot about it, we talk a lot about everything, our love keeps growing and lust doesn't play such an important role anymore. I have never understood how some people can fall in love with just a few sexual encounters, have had my share of women falling in "love" with me... It was quite a scary thing, now I understand I need a long time to develop any feelings. But for the majority of my life, it made me wonder if there was something wrong with me. *edit for formatting

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I don't know the exact quote, and I usually hate quotes. I once heard, "True love is letting your wife/husband have sex with other people if that makes them happy.". I belive that is from Eric Fromme. (To lazy to check the spelling of his name, or quote." I always had trouble with this one though. I love my mom, my pets, and a best friend I had for 20 years.

DeathArrow 5y ago

>Initially, people do not fall in love. Rather, they fall in lust. This is typically short term. Love emerges when there is deep, long term compatibility and commitment. Humor helps as well. This is an anecdotal observation from someone who has been "in love" for over four decades... Maybe there are different kind of ways to love. If you've just met someone, you can have in the first months some kind of attraction that is different than the sexual attraction you might be feeling. We can call that love.

astura 5y ago

This doesn't match my lived experience, I've fallen in love with a person I've never had any lust for (and actively found unattractive when we first met). After falling in love the sex was just fine even though I wasn't physically attracted to them.

bscphil 5y ago
Yeah, for a highly upvoted comment OP is unbelievably presumptive and universalizing about human nature. The sort of dating culture in which such an account is even natural didn't even exist prior to 50 years ago or so. When I lived in small town America about a decade ago, very few people used dating apps. Hookup culture existed but was not really the norm; most people had a pre-existing friendship before they began dating. Moreover, my understanding is that many women describe their experience as something closer to what you talk about. They usually do end up feeling physically attracted to their partners, but this is something that happens after they develop romantic feelings for them. I'd have to say my personal experience mirrors this in part, though not completely. Also worth pointing out the effects religion may have on this. In some Christian sects, for example, adherents are expected to not feel (or at least repress) lust towards their partners until marriage. Assuming that some of them are even partially successful, they will likely have several years of a romantic relationship before lust is allowed to act freely.

y4mi 5y ago

you seem to really like freud...

moneywoes 5y ago

Yikes getting some PTSD reading this

CallingCalliope 5y ago

Now I’m a very curious chap who when an interest rises, I likes to explore that interest. One day in the past I was lucky enough to meet a lady who was very Interesting. Talented in so many mediums. Now if I had not known her I would have innocently, as I have done with many other of my hero’s found out as much as possible about her and her talents, but didn't because It felt creepy. I could never forget her, which for me with no visual memory is not normal, out of sight out of mind. I did not know her well, I did not know much about her works, I cant reminisce due to lack of visual memory and not much to reminisce about. My denied curiosity would be a powerful reason why my mind would find itself thinking of her, but It was more her goodness and kindness, her frequency that captivated me. A number of years later I wrote a letter or two and she responded. Now from narcissist’s wood Nymph, Echo, to other invaluable writings throughout the human struggle, love at first sight exists for some people, be that a biological or a spiritual matter ( IMO its got to be a symbiotic relationship). We eventually met up at her house, I screwed up and turned up a bit pissed, I wasn't drinking much at the time and underestimated my capacity, nervousness and thirst. She politely put up with it for a bit then asked me to leave. There it should have ended, about a year later I looked up her Facebook, I seen photos of her that bewitched me, the powerful feelings from just seeing her photo blew to pieces! I was not in a normal frame of mind, I sent letters and such but came off looking like a weirdo due to my temporary insanity, she responded it was obsessive and there the tale ends. It wasn't just curiosity, lust infatuation mixed, it was all consuming, she said in our previous letters I must be infatuated, and I in return wrote her a short story to try and approach the subject which she liked. I'm upset I’ve annoyed the lady by turning up pissed and sending unwanted messages, but not in any other way I just hope she is OK and happy. Whatever it was I was lucky it didn't develop before the trouble, I don't know what it was, but it created a cascading reaction throughout my entire being that I had no control over, it was my master, by a long margin.