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Comment response -- Love
Apr. 18th, 2009 02:59 pmOOC: reposted from comment in this thread at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sages_of_chaos.
It's absolutely possible to love someone without romance. Romance, in fact, is merely courtship behavior, mindless plays re-enacted by males and females since the dawn of time to suggest that one partner would be of value in reproduction to the other. Whether it's bringing your desired lover flowers, making them a nest with especially shiny tinsel woven into it, or challenging other tomcats to a duel for the fair furry female's favor, romance is about nothing more than saying "I could give you nice things/protect you/have great kids with you! Have sex with me!"
I have also found that it doesn't actually work. Sentient beings won't have sex with you if they don't want to, regardless of how many flowers you bring or the fact that you can transport them back to their home 70 thousand light years away in the blink of an eye. (Sometimes sentient beings won't have sex with you if they *do* want to because they don't trust you, but that's beside the point.)
Love, as a concept, covers far, far more than courtship behavior between two beings negotiating for sex. Love is, in fact, a necessary requirement of sentience. There are no sentient species incapable of love (that I've found, anyway, but I've explored an entire universe in *painstaking* detail, and done some spelunking through various other universes, over the course of five billion years, so I know what I'm talking about.) And the reason love is a necessary requirement of sentience is that it is the nature of life for the strong to prey on the weak, but sentient beings that reproduce must produce young which are significantly weaker than adults (or, more to the point, significantly dumber), and if the adults then prey on the kids the species dies out. Love was invented by evolution to make sure that parents would care for and protect their children, and that children would listen to their parents. Sentient beings repurposed it for cooperation, because there's not much point to being sentient if you have to re-invent everything in your lifetime; sentience works best with cooperation between members of the same species, and cooperation depends on love.
Love is a dire weakness, a flaw in the heart of the vast majority of sentient beings that leads them to sacrifice their time, their energy, their resources, and sometimes even their lives for the sake of another being, often without getting any reward for it, ever. Love is also the glue that binds beings together in cooperative networks that allow them to achieve far, far more than they ever could separately. My people are gods because we loved each other enough to risk literally losing ourselves in the others in order to achieve power and knowledge. This doesn't stop us from being vicious to one another, but then, love isn't necessarily nice.
For the individual sentient being who is capable of feeling love, the point to feeling love is that it gives your existence a purpose. If no one loves you, if no one cares about you, if your existence has no point to anyone but yourself... unless you're a complete sociopath this usually renders your existence meaningless and empty, and self-destruction starts to seem like a valid life choice. Sentience is *designed* to exist in cooperative networks, and the urge for sentience that is cut off from such networks to simply remove itself from existence is powerful. Some sentient beings are damaged in that they cannot feel love, and for those beings love doesn't appear to be necessary to their survival. But if you *can* feel it, you must, or sooner or later you'll feel that your life is worthless.
Don't confuse it with sex, or romance -- the love of a friend or a child or a parent or a sibling or a group you feel you belong to is just as profound as the love of someone you want to exchange pleasure with or have babies with. Don't assume it is invariably sappy and sweet -- love can kill, love can break people who could have resisted the worst of tortures, love can enslave, love can shred people's minds and shatter their wills. It is a perilous force, but without it, no civilization would be possible. It is a terrible weakness, and the meaning of existence.
sages_of_chaos.It's absolutely possible to love someone without romance. Romance, in fact, is merely courtship behavior, mindless plays re-enacted by males and females since the dawn of time to suggest that one partner would be of value in reproduction to the other. Whether it's bringing your desired lover flowers, making them a nest with especially shiny tinsel woven into it, or challenging other tomcats to a duel for the fair furry female's favor, romance is about nothing more than saying "I could give you nice things/protect you/have great kids with you! Have sex with me!"
I have also found that it doesn't actually work. Sentient beings won't have sex with you if they don't want to, regardless of how many flowers you bring or the fact that you can transport them back to their home 70 thousand light years away in the blink of an eye. (Sometimes sentient beings won't have sex with you if they *do* want to because they don't trust you, but that's beside the point.)
Love, as a concept, covers far, far more than courtship behavior between two beings negotiating for sex. Love is, in fact, a necessary requirement of sentience. There are no sentient species incapable of love (that I've found, anyway, but I've explored an entire universe in *painstaking* detail, and done some spelunking through various other universes, over the course of five billion years, so I know what I'm talking about.) And the reason love is a necessary requirement of sentience is that it is the nature of life for the strong to prey on the weak, but sentient beings that reproduce must produce young which are significantly weaker than adults (or, more to the point, significantly dumber), and if the adults then prey on the kids the species dies out. Love was invented by evolution to make sure that parents would care for and protect their children, and that children would listen to their parents. Sentient beings repurposed it for cooperation, because there's not much point to being sentient if you have to re-invent everything in your lifetime; sentience works best with cooperation between members of the same species, and cooperation depends on love.
Love is a dire weakness, a flaw in the heart of the vast majority of sentient beings that leads them to sacrifice their time, their energy, their resources, and sometimes even their lives for the sake of another being, often without getting any reward for it, ever. Love is also the glue that binds beings together in cooperative networks that allow them to achieve far, far more than they ever could separately. My people are gods because we loved each other enough to risk literally losing ourselves in the others in order to achieve power and knowledge. This doesn't stop us from being vicious to one another, but then, love isn't necessarily nice.
For the individual sentient being who is capable of feeling love, the point to feeling love is that it gives your existence a purpose. If no one loves you, if no one cares about you, if your existence has no point to anyone but yourself... unless you're a complete sociopath this usually renders your existence meaningless and empty, and self-destruction starts to seem like a valid life choice. Sentience is *designed* to exist in cooperative networks, and the urge for sentience that is cut off from such networks to simply remove itself from existence is powerful. Some sentient beings are damaged in that they cannot feel love, and for those beings love doesn't appear to be necessary to their survival. But if you *can* feel it, you must, or sooner or later you'll feel that your life is worthless.
Don't confuse it with sex, or romance -- the love of a friend or a child or a parent or a sibling or a group you feel you belong to is just as profound as the love of someone you want to exchange pleasure with or have babies with. Don't assume it is invariably sappy and sweet -- love can kill, love can break people who could have resisted the worst of tortures, love can enslave, love can shred people's minds and shatter their wills. It is a perilous force, but without it, no civilization would be possible. It is a terrible weakness, and the meaning of existence.
