1) Confidence is the most attractive quality. If you love yourself, people can tell and are more likely to be interested in you. If you don’t, you could fake it, but you’ll probably only fool people who also have low self-esteem.
2) Attraction is viral. If one person is into you, others will catch on and also become interested. The opposite is also true.
3) “We want the ones we can’t have.” Being distant or unavailable usually makes someone appear more desirable, whereas if they are obviously into you and available, they may appear less desirable.
4) When relationships develop, one partner is usually more distant, while the other pursues. The greater the distance, the greater the pursuit. The pursuer may feel neglected, and the distancer may feel smothered. Often this dynamic hardens into a power imbalance, where the distancer can dictate terms. The only way back to equilibrium may be for the pursuer to stop pursuing.
5) Every relationship (not just romantic) contains a power struggle. Both elements of power-over and power-with are always present to some degree. In healthy relationships, power-with is the predominant element, whereby people work together towards common goals and develop trust. When power-over becomes the predominant element, the relationship is probably unhealthy and both people are likely to get hurt.
6) Because we live in a social system based on power-over (white supremacist capitalist patriarchy), we have each been hurt routinely and therefore carry trauma into all of our relationships. Some people carry more trauma than others due to race, class, gender, and other differences. This may cause them to have difficulty feeling safe or trusting others. In romantic relationships, if someone is experiencing trauma from past abuse, they are more likely to either:
a) seek out scenarios where they may get abused again,
or b) seek out scenarios where they can feel powerful by abusing somebody else.
7) Men, despite being privileged by patriarchy, typically are isolated, lonely, and unable to deal with their emotions. Being emotionally nurturing is perceived as feminine, therefore it is very difficult for hetero male friends to support one another without homophobia shutting them down. This can make hetero men feel desperate to find a woman who will take care of them. If they find one, they may dump all their emotional baggage, which they don’t know how to unpack, onto her. She then becomes the only person who understands him, even better than himself, making him very dependent on her.
8) Love is really, really difficult while living under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. But we can’t wait until the revolution to love others or be loved. Love is the quality that most makes us human. So we need to constantly struggle for love at both the personal and political levels, which are inextricably linked.
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March 6, 2013 at 7:29 am
Tom MacFarlane
Love, as the Beatles clamed in 1967, is all you need.
Not quite the whole truth, but a whole lot closer that “the new iPhone is all you need” consumerism.
We are being condtioned to believe something wicked: namely that things are more important than people, and people are only important for what we get from them.
Humanity was pushed into autism when Thatcher and Reagan pushed the global economy on the world in the 1980s.
March 7, 2013 at 2:37 pm
alex
a friend responded with these brilliant, critical questions to consider:
“What if the romantic project is not the place of abundance we’ve been promised? What if there’s nothing I can do to become the confident, dazzling, sexy being I’ve been told I must be in order to achieve social status and romantic security? Where, then, do I find a sense of personal power–and what forms of relationship support the development of the kind of self I want to create? Where can I find and value love outside of a certain form of couplehood? How can I foster romantic attachment with my friends and autonomy and respect with my lovers? Most importantly–what love is already feeding me, right now, and connecting me to humanity and other forms of life? The more we can focus on the abundance we do have access to, the less we worry about the apparent scarcity of healthy romantic love. And coming to romantic love with the sense of abundance is the best way to avoid the power-over dynamic that often results from fear of scarcity.”