Episode 118, Romantic Love (Part II - What Love Is)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2023
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introduction
I was told not to think too much about love. Obsess over it, let it dye the very fabric of my being: but do not think about it. Why, after all, would I want to overanalyse the magic and mystery? Would this not reduce a storybook to words and pages?
I was told that I was incomplete and was to search for another who would make me whole. This search, I was promised, would lead me to a partner I would love and be happy with forever. And are love and happiness not required for a good life?
Yet, these demands, these stories, and these questions feel restrictive and misleading. Why must I not think about what you say is so important? Why must I believe a story I have seen end in tears countless time?
It is time we started taking control of love rather than letting love control us. There is no one size fits all approach given to us by nature: not everyone finds 'the one', not everyone wants to find the one, and not all relationships need to last.
Imagine the lives we could craft if we loved proactively, with honesty and freedom. If we all did this together, we could choose what we wanted and not be pressured into what we've been told is good. And given the importance of love, is this not worth a try, even if the magic fades?
Contents
Part I. Happily Ever After
Part II. What Love Is
Part III. Sad Love
Part IV. Further Analysis and Discussion
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, |
| 0:07.0 | Scicast! |
| 0:08.0 | Part two. What is love? |
| 0:24.2 | I want to know what love is. What's the next line? |
| 0:27.6 | I want you to show me. |
| 0:30.1 | That's great. Well, we can tell you. We can't show you what it is. |
| 0:32.7 | It'd be hard to show every one of our listeners what love is, especially through a microphone. |
| 0:37.1 | But in our last |
| 0:37.7 | installment, we spoke about some of the different approaches to what that love would involve, |
| 0:41.9 | whether it's the union between two destined soulmates cut up by Zeus at the moment of creation, |
| 0:48.2 | whether or not we just want to share our identities and some of the problems with maintaining |
| 0:53.5 | our authenticity when we engage in these |
| 0:56.0 | relationships. Now, in this installment, we're going to mainly be focusing on Carrie Jenkins's |
| 1:01.0 | book, What Love is, in which she tries to understand the notion of loving somebody through |
| 1:08.0 | two lenses, that of biology and that of social scripts. |
| 1:11.6 | So that's going to be our focus for this installment. |
| 1:15.6 | Before we dive right into the discussion, there's some kind of like conceptual things that are worth bringing up here, |
| 1:21.6 | because Kerry Jenkins, one, makes an issue of it with talking about love purely on a biological level, but also |
| 1:29.0 | we might just want to start asking general philosophical questions about, is there a difference |
| 1:33.2 | between lust and infatuation and what we might call love? |
| 1:37.4 | When somebody has a crush or what somebody might describe as puppy love, is that the same |
| 1:43.2 | as real love if there is a distinction to be made there? |
... |
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