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What Love Is NOT!

Uploaded 1/2/2023, approx. 6 minute read

Good afternoon, New Year. Yes, it's the second year of 2023.

And today we are going to discuss love.

No one can define love, least of all me, of course. It is elusive. No dictionary captures it. No poem encapsulates it. There's no way we can truly communicate it.

We use the word love as a shorthand for something. Something ephemeral, something ethereal, something that infuses us with a sense of life. We feel alive when we love.

Love, life, they share a few letters in common.

And so I will not attempt to define love, but I will definitely tell you what love is not, because we know a lot about what masquerades as love, what passes as love, what disguises itself as love, all the manifestations of interpersonal relationships that are mislabeled and mistaken as love.

And this is today's topic.


My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a professor of psychology in CIAPS, Center for International Advanced Professional Studies, and the Outreach Program of the CIAPS consortium of universities.

Before you watch this video, you may wish to watch another one, Toxic Sakes, When Love is Bad for You. It's on my channel. The link is in the description.

So I can't help you with what love is. If I could, I would win all the Nobel Prizes combined. I can't help you with this. No one can actually.

Love is a highly individual experience, a private language, an idiosyncratic state of emoting, a state of mind, a kind of mood.

We have severe difficulty telling apart love from limerence, from infatuation, from attraction. We don't know enough. There's a biochemical background to all of these, which resembles addiction very much and operates in the same centers of the brain.

But today is not about neuroscience and other pseudosciences. Today is about love.

What love is not?

Loving someone is not the same as loving the way that he or she loves you.

Let me repeat this because I adore the sound of my voice. Loving someone is not the same as loving the way that he loves you.

Maybe you like the way that he idealizes you, worships you, puts you on a pedestal, sees no wrong in you, casts you as the most, most intelligent, most beautiful ever. You've changed his life. He's never experienced something like this before. You're incorporated in a shared fantasy. You learn to love yourself through his gaze.

When I say he is, it could be her, of course. I'm using male pronoun for convenience sake. It applies to both genders.

So when you love someone because of the way he makes you feel about yourself, because of the way he loves you, that's not love. That is self-infatuation.

In the best case, it's self-love. It's somewhat auto-erotic. It's a lot narcissistic.

Loving someone is also not the same as loving to be in love.

Some people love to be in love. They feel alive only when they are in love.

When there's no love in the air, their lives are drab, ugly, dragging, pedestrian, mundane.

You see how many words I know? Did I impress you?

Let's proceed.

Yes, loving someone is not the same as wanting always to be in a state of love.

You may be addicted to love. You may be addicted to this all-infusing feeling of arousal, of potency, of flowering, but then your partner is coincidental. Your partner is not really important. It is the emotion that matters. You're invested in being in love. You're committed to this feeling.

And so that's not love. Loving someone is also not the same as merging with your partner, fusing with him, becoming one with him, dependent on him in every way.

Love is not about any of these things. It's never about self-sacrifice. It's never about self-negation. It's never about being engulfed and disappearing into someone. It's never about external regulation. That's where borderlines are getting it wrong. That's not love. That is selfish.

Codependence and borderlines control from the bottom. They emotionally blackmail the partner through their ostentatious and ostensible love, but that's not love.

You don't love someone because you can merge with them. You don't love someone because you can disappear into them. You don't love someone because they can regulate your moods, tell you about reality, control your cognitions and emotions, provide you with a rock-like stability. You don't love someone because of what they can give to you. You don't love someone because of what you can take from them.

You love someone for who they are, regardless of the net profit and the bottom line.

Loving someone is also not the same as hating loneliness or being desperate. Not the same. Desperation is a bad advisor. Loneliness is a state of mind.

Using other people to self-soothe and self-comfort and feel less lonely and be less desperate is just this. Using people, objectifying them, exploiting them for your own needs, self-medicating with people is not love. Promiscuity, emotional or physical, is not love. It has nothing to do with love.

Loving someone never involves fantasy or idealization. It is always grounded in reality.

You see your partner. This is the supreme primordial, atavistic, foundational act of love. Seeing your partner, allowing the partner to be a separate entity with all its gifts and all its potentials, self-actualized. Your partner is another person. It's not a figment of your imagination. He is not a creature in some fantastic space or paracosm. He is not ideal. He is human.

Words in all and all. He is not an object.

Loving someone is also not about assuming a parental role, not about providing unconditional love. Loving someone is a give and take with boundaries, with compromises, with negotiations. Loving is the stuff of life and life is never a clear cut. It's never split between good and bad, wrong and right, black and white, hot and cold. This is dysfunctional pathological thinking. Love is the art of the fuzzy. Love is the art of working together towards common goals, sharing common values on a common path towards that realization of being in each other's life for good and to do good.

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Love is: Process, Not Event; Triumph of Experience over Hope, Wisdom over Fantasy

Love is a process characterized by maturity, growth, and the ability to maintain separateness while enriching each other's lives. It is not an event or a fantasy, but rather a dynamic and ongoing journey that requires resilience, effort, and the passing of life's tests. True love fosters individual development and mutual understanding, avoiding dependency and infantilization, and thrives on the wisdom gained through shared experiences over time. Ultimately, love deepens and evolves, becoming more profound as it withstands challenges and embraces the reality of life.


Leap of Faith: Love Someone! Be Bold! Take Risk: Be Vulnerable!

Love is a paradoxical experience that requires vulnerability and self-transformation. To love is to take a risk and to be open to the possibility of heartbreak and destruction. Love is an act of faith that requires trust and the suspension of disbelief. The younger generations are too afraid to attempt this leap of faith from loneliness to love, and they avoid love and intimacy because they feel threatened.


Abuse is Never Love! (With Zoë Verteramo, Indiana University Bloomington)

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Love as Biochemical Pathology

Falling in love is similar to a mental health pathology, with changes in behavior and biochemistry resembling psychosis and substance abuse. Love is addictive and akin to cocaine and speed, with sex intended to bind partners long enough to bond. Falling in love involves the enhanced secretion of PEA, or the love chemical, which creates a euphoric high and helps obscure the failings and shortcomings of the potential mate. Love in all its phases and manifestations is an addiction, probably to the various forms of internally secreted norepinephrine, such as the aforementioned amphetamine-like PEA.


How to Overcome Obsessive Love Disorder

Obsessive love is a pathological and dysfunctional form of attachment that resembles addiction, characterized by an inability to escape the relationship despite its detrimental effects. It often stems from unresolved childhood conflicts and negative internalized voices, leading individuals to validate their feelings of unworthiness through unhealthy relationships. This type of love creates a cycle of mutual torment and emotional pain, where partners inflict harm on each other while seeking validation and connection. Ultimately, obsessive love is a self-destructive phenomenon that requires individuals to seek healing and self-awareness before pursuing new relationships.


False Hope of Hot and Cold: Intermittent Reinforcement, Trauma Bonding, Approach-Avoidance

Intermittent reinforcement is a complex phenomenon that occurs in various relationships, characterized by a cycle of abuse followed by occasional affection, leading to confusion and trauma bonding. It can manifest in different forms, such as fixed and variable interval schedules, where the timing and predictability of rewards create a dependency on the abuser for emotional relief. This dynamic can result in the victim developing tolerance to abuse, as they learn to endure pain in anticipation of affection. Ultimately, intermittent reinforcement serves to manipulate and control the victim, making them more susceptible to further emotional harm.


Love Addiction: Craving Infatuation, Limerence

Love addiction is a complex and relatively new topic in psychopathology, characterized by an individual's maladaptive and pervasive interest in romantic partners, often leading to a lack of control and negative consequences. Love addicts often fall in love with fantasies or complete strangers, and their addiction leads to extreme emotional dysregulation and unboundaried behavior. The role of fantasy in love addiction is significant, and it is closely related to codependency and other issues. Treatment for love addiction is still limited, but cognitive behavior therapy and support groups like Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous may help some individuals.


12 Reasons to Divorce

Divorce is a complex phenomenon that reflects the entire history and dynamics of a couple, often driven by unrealistic expectations and a sense of entitlement. Modern relationships face challenges such as the "intimacy cloud," where partners compete with past lovers and friends for emotional connection, and a transactional nature stemming from late marriages influenced by past disappointments. Common reasons for divorce include communication issues, perceived lack of love, lack of intimacy, and the impact of addictions, domestic violence, and financial problems. Ultimately, divorce signifies the betrayal of a dream and the culmination of unresolved issues that accumulate over time.


Addicted to Trauma Bonding? WATCH TO THE END! (with Stephanie Carinia, Trauma Expert)

Trauma bonding is characterized by a strong, unidirectional attachment formed through unpredictable and abusive reinforcement, leading to a power imbalance between the abuser and the abused. The dynamics of trauma bonding involve the abused person confusing intensity with love, often mistaking abusive attention for genuine affection, and experiencing extreme separation anxiety that drives them to remain in the relationship. The abuser creates a dependency by isolating the victim and instilling feelings of helplessness, while the victim internalizes the abuser's negative beliefs, leading to a distorted self-perception and a cycle of self-deception. Ultimately, trauma bonding can be seen as a collaborative process where both parties fulfill their psychological needs, albeit in a destructive manner, making it difficult for the victim to break free from the relationship.


Love as Addiction (Global Conference on Addiction and Behavioural Health, London)

Love is an addiction that is similar to substance abuse, with changes in behavior that are reminiscent of psychosis. Passionate love closely imitates substance abuse biochemically. The same areas of the brain are active when abusing drugs and when in love. Falling in love is an exercise in proxy incest and a vindication of Freud's much maligned early puss and electro complexes.

Transcripts Copyright © Sam Vaknin 2010-2024, under license to William DeGraaf
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