Here's another question

[cosmolinguist]

Is the difference between platonic love and romantic love a matter of kind or just of degree?

Comments

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

A matter of kind in most cases, but one does not exclude the other. Platonic love is more based upon friendship and trust and stuff, whereas, in my experience, romantic love is based more on hormones or pheromones or whatever, and they tend to cloud the mind. I think the best kind of partnership is one where both are present.

I had more to say, but it's all heavily influenced by my views on polyamory, and especially from reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" recently, and you've already read it. Is 'water brother' love platonic or romantic..?

On second thoughts, I think taken in the perspective of "Stranger in a Strange Land" the answer to your question is Mu, though you can use my first answer when considering the question in the classical perspective.

[cosmolinguist]

See, Heinlein messes everything up. :-) I've been wondering whether water brother love is platonic or romantic, now, and I think I've decided that to answer the question I'd have to do something I previously said I wasn't doing: agree with angel_thane. Maybe there isn't a difference in kinds of love.

But we still do choose to display that love differently. There is still the matter of physical attraction (or lack thereof) and what role that plays.

I'm tempted to say that water-brother love has matured or evolved past the classifications we use... which sounds good in my head, but I'm not entirely sure what I mean by it. :-)

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

I think how we choose to display love is based on social acceptability.

As to physical attraction, I think there you are deviating into lust. I guess the trouble comes in extracting social mores from our understanding of these things. Is it even appropriate to try and define them outside of that context.?

I guess I'd be more than happy to fuck anyone I found attractive if I wanted to (excuse my crudeness) get my rocks off. By the same token I think, at least social pressure and indoctrination aside, I'd be more that happy to make love (at least in the sense described by Greg Egan in Distress) with anyone I loved enough to consider 'waterkin', male or female, even though I wouldn't consider myself bisexual or homosexual. In the context of love, physical intimacy is simply another step in the natural progression of things, and involves sharing yourself wholly with someone you care deeply about. Physical attraction becomes irrelevant.