I'm getting quite impressed with your courage at writing this.

And although this is a public post and therefore presumably free to share, this is starting to sound so private that I feel obliged to ask whether it's okay for me to link this to all those 1000+ people who supposedly follow me on G+ and/or FB.

I would suggest editing the "people like you" paragraph a little, though - it started sounding like you were claiming that your reader would fit every detail of the description you gave, which was a little distracting for someone who wouldn't agree with such a characterization of himself.

(Also, you saying that the kind of propose-on-the-first-day reaction has actually been shown to produce good results makes me a little more annoyed at myself. There's been one time in my life when overhearing somebody's conversation in a café table made me so convinced of her being a potentially good match that I actually walked up to her and asked her out. She politely let me know that she was already taken, but that she was very flattered that I asked. Ever since that, I've been kicking myself for not giving her my card and inviting her to get in touch in case she wanted to be just friends. Because if she was anywhere as cool as I thought, being just friends with her would've been totally awesome as well, and now you're telling me that my intuition was possibly right in that regard. Ah well. :)

I actually don't think this one is too dangerous and I give you permission to share it, but yes, in general please don't share posts of mine on controversial topics like race or gender that might get me in trouble. Also, if you share on facebook, could you turn off the option ("Show Preview") that makes it post my photo along with the post? It kind of weirds me out.

Yeah, sorry about the "people like you" paragraph. I occasionally try to copy the style of ("channel") interesting writers and I was trying to see if I could pull off a Last Psychiatrist. Obviously I can't yet.

Also, I don't think I said that the propose-on-the-first-day reaction has been shown to produce good results, unless you mean the LBJ anecdote which is interesting because of how totally atypical it is.

Hmm. This post was interesting, but confusing; I don't think the sort of 'True Love' behavior you describe is wrong or necessarily creepy at all.
It may be stupid, for example a case of love at first sight and eventually when the two people get to know each other they find they're not compatible at all. But that doesn't make it creepy.
What does seem wrong and creepy and scary is when someone expresses True Love, is informed that it is not reciprocated, and keeps on trying. I can understand that the desperation you describe would find it difficult to accept 'no' for an answer. I can understand that if LBJ had taken 'no' for an answer Lady Bird might never have had her idyllic marriage. But it is still really creepy.

My True Objection is an aesthetic appreciation for fiery dazzling love and a sense of crushing ugliness with the modern culture of "Let's meet for coffee sometime, or not, meh, plenty of fish in the sea, so whatever."
You have, once again, hit close. This is pretty much exactly how the arranged marriage scene works, and why I dislike it. And yet most arranged marriages seem to work very well, so perhaps there's something to be said for the modern culture.

Your two paragraphs starting "I know that True Love is really inconvenient" seems in direct contradiction to your conclusion about "an aesthetic appreciation for the fiery dazzling love that comes out of nowhere". If you feel both preferences strongly at once, then you surely understand the people who feel only one of them. The people who only feel True Love, and the people who are only creeped out by it, are precisely the two kinds who can't get along well. In modern culture, it's being pointed out that e.g. geek men are mostly pro TL, and geek women are mostly against it.

(Sorry to be flippant, but) it's not a problem confined to male classical Islamic poets!




Edited at 2012-09-15 12:04 pm (UTC)

Heavens am I glad that someone finally wrote about this.

According to the Official Narrative, True Love is called infatuation, puppy love, or being in love with the idea of someone. Once you do get in a relationship with your Truly Beloved, you get disappointed for several reasons: you get on the hedonistic treadmill, you lose the thrill of chasing someone, and you discover sides of your Truly Beloved you dislike. Therefore, True Love fades quickly, in about six months. This makes it fake and immature, unlike the kind of love that blossoms well into a relationship.

There are many counterexamples, such as the anecdote you quote, or Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. But this fading is referenced often enough in literature that it's probably real.

"Maybe if anyone were allowed to show True Love, everyone would fake it and there would be an arms race or something?": Have you ever read 17th-century love letters? Our "Let's meet for coffee" is their "I writhe in the flames of the most ardent Love, and if you will not release me from my torment, my despair will leave me no recourse but death". I think they were commonly understood to be hyperbolic, especially the suicide threats.

Hm.

I wonder about this. It seems like the thing about Twoo Wuv - I speak from perhaps a bit of experience (I spent hours speaking to the woman who became my wife the first day we met, and there was no one else for me from that day on) - is that there is a specific place where it becomes creepiness, and it's okay up to that point. And it really should not be that hard to tell when that place is.

It's when she tells you to go the f--k away. Not flirt, not coquettishly feeling amused or flattered and unsure how she's going to react in the long term, not taking time to make up her mind. All that still gives social cues that it's okay to do what you're doing. (One of the points that people are trying to make is also to her - that if she doesn't want what you're doing, she should quit being socialized not to tell you to stop.)

Infatuation is great - nothing wrong with it. But infatuation isn't falling in love with a person. It's falling in love with your idea of another person, because you don't actually know the other person yet.

Without that feeling the species wouldn't propagate. But for it to become a real relationship, the initial infatuation always has to give way to actual knowledge of and evaluation of the other person as a human being. And foremost in that knowledge has to be the understanding of what that person thinks of you - whether they want to continue being associated with you. And if you don't get communication that she wants to continue to be associated with you, then the infatuation has become only about what you want and not what she wants, despite now knowing what she wants, and sorry, that's not acceptable.

My wife-to-be and I spoke for hours almost every night, running up absurd phone bills. But from very early on we were doing equivalent amounts of calling to each other.

So yes, initial infatuation is great. And continual pursuit while getting conflicting or undecided or ambiguous signals is not creepy. It's when she says go away and you don't - well, explain the sort of love that does not involve respecting or caring about what the person you love wants...

Edited at 2012-09-15 02:26 pm (UTC)

That makes sense.

Actually the PUA and the feminist have a deep commonality that lies beneath this one: the lens they view everything through is power relations,.

Power relations and True Love are not like oil and water. Much more like matter and anti-matter.

Thank you for writing this. It's the first new thing I've seen on the subject, and plausible as well.

(Actually, there's something in Brave New World that runs parallel about people in that world having more but much less intense passions so that society will run more smoothly. However, that quote doesn't seem to be part of current discussions.)

Possibly there's a case for research. Even if a lot of it has to be based on asking people what they remember, maybe there are some clues about the difference between assertive courtships which are unreciprocated in the early phases that lead to good relationships and those which are early signs of abuse.

For some reason it took me this long to realize that if the genders were reversed between me and Mike, I would have been fucked.

Damn.

I think this is true for most nerd girls in het relationships.

Note to author: I googled the quote and I cannot find a match. Maybe someone deleted the comment?

In my paranoia, I wonder if it's someone I know talking about me. O.O
It would certainly fit, not perfectly, but spookily well in one of the details.

**Please provide source thread, author.**

#

On another note, I think a great question to ask someone in True Love is:

Are you getting laid occasionally?

And suspect that 90% of the time the answer to that question will be 'no'.

Edited at 2012-09-15 04:46 pm (UTC)

"Are you getting laid occasionally?"

When in True Love:

- I did not want to get laid, and thus didn't.
- I did not want to lay anyone except my True Love, and found that staying in True Love was much more valuable than changing this preference.
- I got laid, with my True Love, and it was absolutely amazing.
- I got laid, with people other than my True Love, and it was boring but took care of physical urges.

When not in True Love:

- I did not want to get laid, and thus didn't.
- I got laid, and it was boring but took care of physical urges.
- I got laid, with people I kinda liked and could see myself dating, and it was boring and diminished my romantic interest, though it was an okay bonding activity as friends.

There is something to be said for "The best way to get over someone is to get under someone", but in my experience it works mostly to make you feel like romance and sex are absolutely gross. Kind of like chewing and spitting out chocolate to stop craving it.

I think this one says more about your personal experience with courtship than it does about the experience of courtship in general. In particular, you are ascribing a level of self-awareness to the general populace which they simply don't have.

A recurring theme in this post is the conflation of desperation with enthusiasm. Women don't have a policy of rejecting men who show strong feelings for them. They're weirded out by men who show disproportionately stronger feelings for them than they can reciprocate, and for good reason. Desperation isn't just unsexy, it's kind of threatening.

Compare and contrast these two gambits:

"So would you like to get together tomorrow? Or Wednesday or Thursday? I'm pretty much free all week, actually, so whenever's good for you..."

and

"I'm supposed to be going out tomorrow with some work buddies, but I'd much rather talk some more with you about [whatever we've just been talking about] than talk shop with them. Do you fancy getting a drink?"

The latter is saying "I am at least this interested in you; are you at least this interested in me?" Our protagonist may very well be prepared to take a swim in a skip full of broken glass to spend time with the woman in question, but he has no idea whether she is as enthusiastic, so he makes a bid which is low on an absolute scale but high on a relative one. If she's cancel-drinks-with-work-buddies interested, but not swim-in-broken-glass interested, she's not going to be scared off.

The former, on the other hand, is saying "I am unconditionally interested in you; are you unconditionally interested in me?" If she is unconditionally interested in him, she won't reject him because of some policy she has. If she's not unconditionally interested in him (which, let's face it, she probably isn't), she's going to think "woah, that's a disproportionate amount of interest. He seems pretty desperate, and there's a whole bunch of reasons I shouldn't spend time with desperate guys".

Chances are that you don't know exactly how keen the object of your affections is. When you are extremely interested in someone, understating that interest isn't a Machiavellian lie, it's a simple point of pragmatism.

And poor people like me who really do happen to be free all week, and don't realize they're apparently supposed to lie about this (?!), will get labelled creeps despite not feeling or intending to demonstrate unusually high interest.

Yep, you're a fellow sufferer from limerence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence). (Even after accounting for the Forer effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect), it explains the aspects of my own romantic experience that a lot of other people Just Don't Get, like the vivid romantic-but-not-even-sexual imaginative episodes.)

A couple things I've learned:

1. There's an extremely rare and specific type of woman who'll trigger a limerent episode, including conditions like "sees the world primarily through an aesthetic prism rather than a practical or logical one". This only became clear around the time of my fourth or fifth limerent experience, when I saw that there were far too many coincidences for chance alone to explain.


2. When my gut tells me that a girl I've met meets that type, I immediately feel it coming on, and within a few hours I'm utterly head over heels.


3. I will never develop feelings like those for a girl who's not that type, regardless of how awesome she is in other ways or how long we date.


4. So far, this feeling has never vanished completely, though I don't think about girls with whom I no longer interact; the women for whom I've been struck with limerence occupy different cognitive categories from every other friend or ex, even years afterwards, and they still have a power over me that nobody else has.


5. My brain has internalized that limerence is something that happens within me, rather than Fate revealing itself. This internalization required not just a materialist outlook on life, but traumatic experiences of (a) a mutually limerent relationship that was a complete disaster due to basic psychological incompatibility (and despite having draining relationship crises every two weeks, we were set on marrying... until we went long-distance and she fell in love with someone else) and (b) having unrequited limerence for a girl who I met, dated and scared off (though without being regarded as creepy, so far as I can tell), who then took to happily dating another good friend, and despite my best efforts to soldier on, this consumed me for three years even as I went through several other relationships of my own. Thank goodness I eventually moved away and had another limerent experience.


6. It is really difficult to have a relationship with someone I'm not limerent towards, because there's an Elephant In The Room that prevents me from opening up emotionally without completely devastating her.

So, um, yeah. This is the part where I should offer advice on how to handle it. And I would, if I had any; unfortunately, I've not yet found my way to limerent happiness (a stable relationship with someone I'm in love with, who loves me back (either limerently or in a way that's OK with my limerence), and such that we're actually happy together and good for each other), though I'm in better shape than I was years ago.

(Not going to de-anonymize this time. From my style, you can perhaps figure out who this is; I'd just rather the essence of my romantic life not be easily searchable.)

Limerence describes the way my romantic attachments formed into my mid-twenties. My late twenties saw some fairly radical changes in the way I thought about relationships and attraction. For the past several years I have not experienced limerence at all. Though there are still special types of people who I am especially and powerfully attracted to, they don't incite the limerent response in me.

I can't say how strongly it's related, because there are a lot of confounding variables, but my contemporary non-limerent attractions appear a lot healthier and easier to manage than those I experienced when I was younger. They also tend to "pay off" more frequently.

I'm not suggesting this is generally the case, but I am curious as to how you would feel if you were matter-of-factly told that one day you would grow out of limerent attraction. Would you consider it a loss?

Burning Life-Consuming Crushes - good phrase for it. Been there, done that, driven a few women up the wall. I probably would've made a marriage proposal if I'd gotten far enough with one.* I tend to doubt that we would've wound up as happy as LBJ^2 did. Finally I found a true partner in my 30s and we've been together for 15 years now. But I had a lot of growing up to do before I made a decent partner for her.

As for why Declarations of True Love are discouraged in our culture today, I think it's because of the change in life priorities. Marriage and kids are supposed to come later, once both partners have established themselves as economically productive members of society. If you let them fall passionately in love with each they'll duck out of work early to go canoodle and then one will quit the job to raise the babies. One night stands are more compatible with grad school / founding a start-up / climbing the executive ladder.

Back in LBJ's day a guy didn't look responsible enough to be promotable until he was married with a kid on the way. Now managers want someone with no life outside work. (I now look at the landmine of how this ties in with the changing role of women in the workplace and leave stepping on it to someone else)

* Well, there was a marriage proposal to one crush, but it was more in the category of I'm-giving-you-one-more-reason-to-get-out-of-my-house-right-now than actually trying to have a relationship.

True Love is regarded as much as an enemy as it was in the days of arranged marriages -- as a way to derail you from the true purpose of our lives.

Which is, apparently, making money.

It's possible that this is a case of "you can't optimize for everything".

Also, it's plausible that disallowing early unreciprocated enthusiasm in courtship leads to an increased chance of unenthusiastic relationships, but how would you find out?

Might your Arabic poet be Hafez? Quoth Wikipedia, which is always right except when it's wrong, "According to one tradition, Hafez had been working in a bakery [...] There he first saw Shakh-e Nabat, a woman of great beauty, to whom some of his poems are addressed. Rabished by her beauty, but knowing that his love for her would not be requited, he allegedly held his first mystic vigil in his desire to realize this union. [...] his further attempts at union became mystic; a pursuit of spiritual union with the divine. A Western parallel is that of Dante and Beatrice." Nothing about camels, though.

Yeah, I saw that last night when I was trying to Google, but it doesn't fit with the story I heard. If it helps, I have a vague memory he might have been from Islamic Spain.

I know the politically-correct get pissed at me for doing things like this - intersectionality and all that - but: assuming you're het - imagine someone falling in True Love with you whom you could not love in return, but who was physically imposing enough to be threatening. Imagine there was a man, built like a football player, who got as obsessed with you as you describe being obsessed. And pursued you. And wouldn't leave you alone because he was sure you were Meant To Be Together.

Of course there's nothing wrong with him just constructing these elaborate fantasies about you and him. Plastering pictures of you up around his room. Delivering flowers. And not leaving you alone.

Maybe that doesn't bother you. It bothers me. I resolved a long time ago never to be that guy, regardless of how attractive I found a woman who didn't know me.

Oh, obviously. That's why I'm saying I can totally see why it seems reasonable to get rid of it. And I agree with your previous post that there are degrees from "flattered but not interested right now" to "seriously, fuck off".

But Supervillain test again. If the solution to a problem is totally eliminating love from the world, maybe we need a better solution or more tolerance for a problem.

Your item (1) says there is data supporting the claim "A sudden intuitive obsession with another person as a romantic partner ("True Love") is often accurate".

This claim does not match my intuition, so I'd be interested in knowing more about the data. Who performed a study measuring the percent of true-love events that proved accurate, and how did they tune the study to make sure that people accurately reported the number of negative events they'd experienced?

As far as I know there is no specific data about love (though trying to collect it would be fascinating.) I do know there is data elsewhere that first impressions are generally accurate - Blink is a good if pop-sciencey collection thereof. One experiment from there I particularly remember is that if you see a five-second clip of a teacher teaching, you are just as accurate evaluating their competence as you are if you watch them for several whole lessons (I don't remember the endpoint; either they found that both correlated highly with each other, or that both correlated highly with objective measures like test scores).

Can we distinguish between "loved her so much he went off to write a lifetime of poems about her beauty" and "thought this effort created an obligation in her" ? Because I would find someone composing a billion poems about me weird and concerning enough to watch if I interacted with them regularly, but not rapey. Rapey would be "how could you go out with that guy, he hasn't written you any poems at all?"

It's tricky because people hate disharmonies like unrequited True Love, and women in particular are more likely to be socialized to feel it creates an obligation. So a woman can feel pressured to reciprocate even if the man is truly happy sitting at home thinking of new rhymes for her name, but men can also (consciously or not) apply a lot of pressure without doing anything overt.

Sure, I agree that's a useful distinction.

As far as I remember the story, which obviously is not very far, al-Fulani didn't know her name, never tried to seek her out, and mostly just wrote poems to "that one pretty girl I met at the oasis that one time". This seems eccentric but harmless.

Edited at 2012-09-15 08:07 pm (UTC)

I suspect a lot of romantic attraction comes down to smell; there's some evidence that smell signals immunocompatiblity, which should be more or less symmetric. This may explain some intense mutual attractions that become stable long-term relationships.

See my long comment above on limerence. Unless immunocompatibility correlates with things like "aesthetically based philosophical worldview", I don't think it's a very good explanation for my experience.

I found (and quite enjoyed) this series of meditations after trying to convey some similar sentiments (http://lesswrong.com/lw/efs/call_for_anonymous_narratives_by_lw_women_and/7fx0?context=1#comments) in the LW thread. (See also here (http://lesswrong.com/lw/efs/call_for_anonymous_narratives_by_lw_women_and/7eeo).) I am actually fairly satisfied with my interaction with the OP from the post you quoted, but you might notice that there is another person with whom my conversation was not as productive. Since it seems to me that we are generally expressing the same ideas* (although you are doing a much more thorough and eloquent job), perhaps you might have better luck explaining things to this person (whom you know much better than I do). At this point, I've pretty much exhausted the energy I stored up for my ~yearly foray into gender issues.

*Of course, if you don't think we're expressing the same ideas, feel free to ignore or correct me.

Edited at 2012-09-15 10:15 pm (UTC)

This is necessarily coloured by personal experience, and your personal experience isn't necessarily the same as mine. I've had all-consuming loves, but I've also had a love or two that developed slowly.

My perspective is that all-consuming loves are not about the person that one loves, but rather about oneself -- they are necessarily about one's projection of one's wishes and desires onto the other person, rather than about who they really might be. When they pan out, it's because the other person coincidentally had interesting depths of their own.

These depths are equally discoverable in a love that develops at a more measured pace.

I think overwhelming crushes are in disrepute because being put on a surprise pedestal can be annoying -- individually, we know that we are not gods, so it is odd to hear a stranger insist that we are.

"I know that True Love is really inconvenient"

I have the poet for you:

"It doesn't make no sense no.
It's not convenient no.
It doesn't fit my plans no.
It's something I don't understand."

I think what is bothering me about this post is the following lines:

he started calling her and writing letters to her practically nonstop; ten weeks later she finally agreed

certain amounts of pestering and wooing and opinion-changing were necessary

When I read these lines I think of two separate statements:

Statement #1: "If you feel True Love for someone, but e doesn't like you, it should be totally okay to try persistently to persuade hir to like you."

Statement #2: "If you feel True Love for someone and e does like you, it should be totally okay to try persistently to persuade hir to marry you, even if you haven't been dating for very long."

I think you will agree with me that Statement #1 is horrible and toxic and extremely dangerous. I have a friend who tried acting on Statement #1, with another friend, and eight years later the two of them still cannot be in the same room together.

I have less strong feelings about Statement #2 because it has not wrecked any social groups in my personal experience. But the more I think about it, the less I like it. When people are making important life decisions, they should be given space and allowed to gather data; they should not feel pressured.

The rest of your essay doesn't seem to be about Statement #1 or Statement #2; it's about what a shame it is that there's a stigma for saying I Love You too early. That seems like a reasonable sentiment. But the examples you're using to support it seem to be examples of really bad human behavior.

Your other commenters have touched on this in the past, but I think you're continuing to conflate Nice Guy(TM)ness with "Firthing".

Nice Guyness is more along the lines of hazarding an opinion on a woman's preferences regarding sexual receptivity – coregulating is really the operative word – particularly when you're an interested party. It also touches on this dynamic: http://xkcd.com/513/ – where your pleasantness is motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by an unspoken hope or expectation (hard to tease those two apart) of sexual favorability. And that might seem benign, but the ugly side of it generally involves bitterness – or a signaled risk of bitterness – at defied expectations, even by those who thought their motivations were entirely positive.

It's a prominent theme, because it's something a lot of geeky guys do, my younger self included. The creepiness isn't just a squick-thing, it's a lingering threat by people who seem or "are" nice, but don't have enough self-awareness about their motivations or what they are capable of. Motivated reasoning makes the worst behavior seem justified. Genuine kindness and moral innocence borne atop of a marked lack of self-awareness is a trap. That's the creepiness.

Edited at 2012-09-17 12:16 am (UTC)

I don't think I'm conflating Nice Guys (TM) with anything. I think it's intended as an inherently fuzzy concept so that people can equivocate it when needed - give a definition of it that makes it look bad when trying to convince people it's a bad thing, then use a much looser definition when you're trying to accuse someone of fitting the template.

As for worrying that my liking someone might be sexually motivated - well, of course. But what's the alternative? You see a girl, you think she's really pretty, and she's also really awesome and would make a good friend. You can either never befriend her because you think your motives might not be pure and so it would be Dishonest - and I spent ten years or so doing exactly that - or you can just say "screw it" and become friends with her.

It's my job not to be a jerk to her if she rejects me. It is not my job to deal with completely counterfactual circumstances in which she might pattern-matches me to someone who might be a jerk to her if she rejected them and so never talk to or approach or befriend women.

Once upon a time, I met a girl at a bus stop. (You needed to take buses to get around to different parts of my college campus.) We started talking. Not too long after, the following dialogue occurred:

Me: What's your favorite Final Fantasy?
Her: Six.
Me: Will you marry me?

Yes, I was kidding, but I really did have exactly that reaction that the commenter you mentioned was wary of. Further interaction with her basically confirmed that she was indeed totally awesome, but she had just started up a relationship with someone else at the time. I haven't seen her in ages...