On love

[cosmolinguist]

I asked once if the difference between platonic and romantic love was a matter of kind or degree, and my LiveJournal friends provided the thoughtful and insightful replies I've come to recognize as typical of them.

But angel_thane said that the question was meaningless, because "platonic love and romantic love are all love. Both are the same in kind, and both can be the same in degree." I like this.

It's important to remember that it's a false dichotomy, this romantic/platonic thing.

Obviously there are other kinds of love; it's beyond cliché to say "Love is not that simple," and it's still true, whatever it is you're meaning by "that" at the given time.

It's not just an academic consideration for me. I've never been very good at figuring out how platonic relationships of mine have become romantic ones. I've never made the transition from calling someone "my friend" to calling him "my boyfriend" without some difficulty and many thoughts along the lines of Wow, that just sounds really weird! "What's the difference?" I keep asking. No one can tell me, exactly. There's not exactly a line you cross from one to the other.

This can be a problem when you have to go back over that line. At least then there's a day when I know I'm no longer allowed to call someone "my boyfriend," but what else does that mean? Calling them friends again doesn't seem quite right.

This seems to mess up a lot of relationships. If I remember correctly, it's what paninogirl thinks Billy Crystal means when he says, in When Harry Met Sally, that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. I can see that. There is, or can be, a huge volume of things that you've acquired in the romantic relationship, little physical and mental and emotional intimacies that you know you wouldn't share if you'd always been "just friends." What do you do with them when you no longer have that sort of relationship? I think attempts to deal with that question can bring about a lot of awkwardness, and that could wreck a lot of would-be friendships between exes.

But I don't think it's mandatory. Why? Because I think there are kinds of love besides platonic and romantic. Even though I can't back it up ... and I can, in fact, make the argument to the opposite: Romantic love involves lust. Platonic love is nonsexual. So here you have Sex and No Sex, what other category could there be?

I don't know. But I still think it's there. Even though I haven't figured it out yet.

Comments

[dyddgu.livejournal.com]

It's probably un-figure-out-able, I reckon. Though I know that I love my friends as deeply and fervently as I love BFs, and my friends can all hurt and betray me just as deeply, and make me just as happy.
But I noticed last night that the BF and I have little tiny signals we give each other, even when we're a long way away across a room. I've never had that before with anyone, and it's weird. And cute.

In Welsh, we have two different words for love. Serch is love that is of the more romantic or physical kind. Cariad is just... well, love.

[cosmolinguist]

It's probably un-figure-out-able, I reckon.

Probably. I waste a lot of time thinking about un-figure-about-able things, and I don't even like philosophical questions, most of the time. :-) I've been re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I blame it on that.

In Welsh, we have two different words for love.

That makes sense. I've heard so much about how many words there were for kinds of love in Greek. There are definitely at least two kinds of love. As I said in another comment, English has lots of words, but still not enough. I think that's one of the reasons I'm jealous of people who know more languages than the meager one I have. :-)

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

It depends on a lot of factors. I'm finding it almost impossible to be friends with my recent ex, because of how she ended the relationship... I find myself very bitter and angry about how she treated me, and it's gone as far as to poison my memories of all the times we had before now: I re-evaluate them constantly and they slide further and further down in my estimation.

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

But angel_thane said that the question was meaningless, because "platonic love and romantic love are all love. Both are the same in kind, and both can be the same in degree." I like this.

Wow, were you paraphrasing me, or did I actually used to be that eloquent?

This can be a problem when you have to go back over that line. At least then there's a day when I know I'm no longer allowed to call someone "my boyfriend," but what else does that mean? Calling them friends again doesn't seem quite right.

Isn't that what the term 'ex-boyfriend' is for? Or does that only refer to the most recent former boyfriend - I'm always unsure as to how to refer to previous sexfriends (ie not friends you have sex with, but sex(prefix)friends, as in boy or girl - friends) beyond the ex-sortof.

Definitions, definitions, that's all people seem to care about nowadays. Forget not seeing the forest for the trees, they're not seeing the forest because they're arguing that it's a woods or brush.

[cosmolinguist]

The stuff in quotes is a real quote, from the entry I linked to. See? (And you say I never mention your comments! :-))

And yes, that's what the term "ex-boyfriend" is for, though I don't like it and only if I have a good reason (it's pertinent to the conversation, or some such) will I refer to my two exes as such. It just doesn't sound right.

I'm actually not that concerned with the definitions and the labels, because they can be very problematic, but I can see how you got that impression from my badly-worded sentence. What I really meant to convey there is that it's difficult for my mind to switch from the implications of aa "boyfriend" to those of a "friend". go back to the old label, when they're still somehow more than friends, whether we like it or not.

Incidentally, I like sexfriend. There needs to be a word like that. That particular one requires a little explanation, but I think it's about the best English can do. It's such a clumsy language sometimes. And though it may have the biggest vocabulary ever, or whatever, it's still not good enough sometimes. :-)

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

I'm actually not that concerned with the definitions and the labels, because they can be very problematic, but I can see how you got that impression from my badly-worded sentence.

Oh, I didn't mean you. I meant people

Incidentally, I like sexfriend. There needs to be a word like that.

Well I suppose that now there is!

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

I was curious to examine how my opinions had changed since you last asked this question, and now the more I think about it, the more confused I become. The source of this confusion is a relationship I have with a girl I've known for around 4 years now. We've worked together, lived together, studied together, and now we regularly hit the pubs together. Over the years the relationship has slowly strengthened more and more, to a point now where in every way but physical I think it has surpassed any other relationship I've had, but somehow still it manages to straddle the platonic/romantic divide not from any external forces, but because that's where it seems most at home. I guess this supports your theory that there's more that two kinds of love.

Hey, maybe the platonic/romantic thing isn't a divide, but rather they are two axes you can use to define relationships, where the origin would be used to describe someone you are entirely ambivalent about. The aforementioned relationship would probably get a moderate positive on the romantic axis, and an extreme positive on the platonic one.

As to the continued friendships with exes I think in most of the cases I've experienced, there wasn't really enough on the platonic scale to maintain the relationship, when compared with the strength of the romantic that was there. Actually, something I just thought of, in chaotic systems the basin of attraction is where the absolute value of the derivative of the generating function is less than 1. If you take platonic as the horizontal, and romantic as the vertical, then maybe relationships that will revert to their platonic state are those within the basin of attraction. :)

[cosmolinguist]

You made me go back and look, too, and I see that even then I seemed to think that these two aren't good enough, because I don't think water brother love is necessarily platonic or romantic, even though my brain still nags me with "But how can it not be 'sex' or 'no sex'?"

That annoys me, though, because I don't like to define relationships by sex (or other physical stuff) or lack thereof; it just seems dumb and unhelpful. I mean, yes, I'm not going to have sex with my ex-boyfriends, but am I also going to stop touching them at all? Stop talking to them so much? How much interaction is allowed a platonic friend, as opposed to a romantic lover? Obviously it's different in each situation, but just saying that doesn't really make it any easier, either.

The source of this confusion is a relationship I have with a girl...

Yeah, I know how that goes. :-) I've had and I've seen similarly ambiguous relationships, and that's the source of my own confusion.

Hey, maybe the platonic/romantic thing isn't a divide, but rather they are two axes you can use to define relationships...

I like that idea. I'm wondering now how some of my relationships would look on such a graph. :-)