Arguably, we have a culture and education problem, where the idea of love as being invested in someone else's happiness gets conflated with sex as a hook for ro

Arguably, we have a culture and education problem, where the idea of love as being invested in someone else's happiness gets conflated with sex as a hook for roping someone into co-dependency. The whole enterprise is rotten. When you stop using the word, and just mentally recognize, "I feel invested in this persons happiness," it provides for a more sound emotional foundation. When you have lust for someone, you aren't necessarily invested in their happiness, it's really something else. The reason (imo) it gets so messy is because we have elevated and romanticized co-dependency as a culture. Biologically, a woman only really needs a man around for the first few years of infant vulnerability, and not even that these days, however, the flipside of that is that we ignore the weaning and developmental effect of having fathers around to offset the dependent identity a child has on its mother. I'm of a more conservative view that when we started raising kids to become adults, we stopped raising them to be men and women, and so we are left with adult, vaguely defined persons, who take supervision from proxies for their mothers in a co-dependent relationship with interchangeable authorities, and who are not fully actualized men and women. Language itself comes from our mothers, and to keep us surviving as children, the base sentiments complex language is designed to transmit are disgust and shame, to warn you away from danger and misbehavior, so as to keep us safe. Our internal monlologue of self speaks to us in language, so most of our ontology of being is predicated on this substrate. It's that powerful. When you look at traditional or tribal rites of passage, they tend to have an element of disgust and danger in them, where you are forced to become the thing that as a child you were forbidden to be, and then in this state, you are celebrated and accepted into the group as a trusted man or woman, because you have survived the disgusting things that were forbidden, and you are now you, and the tribe loves you for that which is the true you, and not your child identity defined by good behaviour. We don't have those rites of passage anymore, and so we have generations of unweaned "adult people" who aren't accepted men or women, who can still be operated on by pulling these childhood linguistic levers of disgust and shame. Love in a world of adults, and not of men and women, is an absolute disaster as a result, since the long tail of men are treating women like their mothers, and women have to hide who they truly are to represent as these weird sexless adult authority figures. This is a bit much for an off hand comment, but it's important in this context, as by rethinking love as being invested in someones happiness, it creates the necessary personal boundary that enables us to have something to bring to a relationship, instead of self sacrificing for a co-dependent identity regulated by an internal monologue of shame.