Animal love...

[fajrdrako]

This was from fizzabith, The Love Test - Animal Test. I'll put the Animal quiz part in italics, my comments without:

1. You are attracted to those who are unbridled, untrammeled, and free.

Well, of course. That's what I find attractive. I think that's the way everyone should be.


2. In the process of courtship, the approach that would make you feel irresistable is moods-swing, blow hot and cold in love, vacillate.

Huh? Me or the other person? I don't think so!


3. The impression you would like to give to your lover is loyal, faithful, never change.

Yes.


4. You don't like it when your partner is insecure.

No.


5. The kind of relationship you would like to build with your partner is one that you care not only about the present but also the future with your partner, a long-lasting relationship that you can grow with.

if only.


6. You can never be stabilized; actually, you are not suitable for marriage and you don't want to make committment.

Possibly true. Sometimes the commitment is made because my heart has reasons of its own. I don't really see it as a matter of conscious choice. When my heart is committed, I can only go where it leads.


7. You always want to get married, but in fact, you don't even know what it really is.

Don't know what marriage is? Sadly, I do: been there, done that. And I don't always want to get married: in fact, I have never really wanted to. To my thinking, relationships are private, and shouldn't be festooned with laws.


8. At this moment, you are quite self-centered; you think of love as something you can get and trash anytime you want.

Yerk! Not true! I am a total romantic, and romantics don't trash love.


The first sentence was the best.

Comments

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

3. The impression you would like to give to your lover is loyal, faithful, never change.

Yes.


4. You don't like it when your partner is insecure.

No.

In an ideal world, all of us would already have achieved personal perfection, no? It's not a perfect world; it's full of mistakes and accidents and misunderstandings and good intentions, and all of us live in it together, doing our best. Allowing a partner the right to grow and improve seems to me to be a great act of love indeed, not to mention a deep indication of respect. Which of us has already matured as far as we either want or need...?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes: everything is an ongoing process. And the problem with net quizzes like this is that none of the questions are necessarily the right ones to be asking, and they aren't always asked in the right way - especially when a yes/no answer is required - and sometimes you can't even be sure what the question means. I would want to be reliable and dependable, which isn't the same as 'never changing'.

In this one in particular, I felt there were linguistic difficulties.

On the other hand, I liked the first question and answer!

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

7. You always want to get married, but in fact, you don't even know what it really is.

Don't know what marriage is? Sadly, I do: been there, done that. And I don't always want to get married: in fact, I have never really wanted to. To my thinking, relationships are private, and shouldn't be festooned with laws.

My dear, you don't know what "marriage" is! You are taking the literal word, as it is defined by conventional society, and making out that you believe that is all that is meant by the concept behind that narrow word.

In truth, relationships are private, and not in the least festooned with laws, no more of them than the members of the relationship choose to rely upon within the relationship for their own mutual comfort.

Might we try that entry again, with less offensive wording?... here: "You always want to get married, but in fact, you don't even know what it really is." Instead, shall we phrase it this way? ...: "You yearn for a close relationship upon which you can rely without question, yet you find it difficult either to enter into one, or (possibly) to believe that one will last and continue to sustain you, once you actually are in one." That's what I grokked when I read that entry, to be honest. Why submit to the tyranny of either language or societal convention?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

My dear, you don't know what "marriage" is! You are taking the literal word, as it is defined by conventional society, and making out that you believe that is all that is meant by the concept behind that narrow word.

I was assuming that was what the question was referring to.

If you rephrase the question, my answer changed entirely. I find it easy to enter into "a close relationship upon which you can rely without question". It's the legal aspects that bother me.

The thing about the tyranny of language: it's a matter of being able to know what the *other* person means, when we already know what we mean ourselves.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

8. At this moment, you are quite self-centered; you think of love as something you can get and trash anytime you want.

Yerk! Not true! I am a total romantic, and romantics don't trash love.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of terms. In the phrasing "...as something you can get and trash anytime you want," you seem to be seeing "trash" as the equivalent of "cut down." Rather, in that usage it means merely "throw away." Think of Melissa Etheridge's lyric: "Set it up, but it's not perfect -- tear it down, 'cause it's not worth it," as a clarification: in that sense, it means to find fault endlessly and then give up on the situation when it does not turn out to be the perfect idyll that the first blush of intense emotion made it seem to be. It indicates that the preference is to disconnect from the situation, in essence to throw it away with all its flaws as well as all its possibilities, at the moment when that first flush starts to dissipate and everyday routine starts to set in.

And that's everyone's tendency, I guess, more or less. We all like to follow the least trying route, no?

And, um, I do beg to differ, and getting back to Melissa Etheridge's take on it, but isn't that exactly what a hopeless romantic tends to do? ...see a love situation as idealized, then realize only later that it's as flawed a human interaction as any other? But that's not to denigrate romanticism, nor romantics. It's just to speak a little bit for emotional maturity.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I guess I don't agree with your definition of a romantic! That isn't what I meant by the word at all.

I don't see romanticism as being in the least unrealistic or immature: it's a way of seeing the world in a way that values certain aspects of reality - valuing the emotional equally to the intellectual or the instinctual, for example, or seeing beauty in things that are not usually noticed. It's enhanced perception, not illusion.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

I think this is where the problems of semantics get completely in the way of communication!

I'm not sure that I actually said that "romanticism [is] unrealistic or immature"; I would not equate "a romantic" with "a hopeless romantic," but I see now that this comes down to my own carelessness in phrasing... sorry for the confusion.

Seeing beauty in the commonplace is, in fact, a feature that psychologists identify as being a component of a person who is "gifted." When I was studying child psychology, I was quite pleased to find that out.

I think we'd quibble pointlessly about your choice of the word "instinctual" over the word "intuitive," so I won't ask whether you just meant "intuitive" by it, or actually did mean "inborn/automatic/primitive responses"....

I agree entirely with your definition/description of a romantic, I'd say. Which I already knew. So, that's even more evidence that the above "disagreement" was just semantic confusion. My point of "hopeless" romantic in the negative sense should have been termed something like "immature" right from the beginning, to be less vague. A "hopeless romantic" is by no means a bad thing!

I guess that's what comes from trying to keep writing comments long after a person should have been in bed from a long day of playing with an active, creative seven-year-old!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I meant 'instinctive', though I'm a little unclear on the distinction between 'instinctive' and 'instinctual'. (Should probably look them up; I've done that in the past, but I've forgotten what I learned.) I didn't mean 'intuitive' at all. I was trying to differentiate between three modes of approach to life:

(1) intellectual - thinking about things, cognition, rational processes

(2) emotional - how we feel about thing

(3) instinctive - what the deeper, older bits of our brain bring that we don't even know how to recognize

I think we all use all three procedures all the time, in varying proportions.