• Focus on the other person. Rather than focus on what you are getting and how you are being treated, read your partner's need. What does this person really need for his/her own well-being? This is a very tough skill for people to learn in our narcissistic culture. Of course, you don't lose yourself in the process; you make sure you're also doing enough self-care. • Help someone else. Depression keeps people so focused on themselves they don't get outside themselves enough to be able to learn to love. The more you can focus on others and learn to respond and meet their needs, the better you are going to do in love. • Develop the ability to accommodate simultaneous reality. The loved one's reality is as important as your own, and you need to be as aware of it as of your own. What are they really saying, what are they really needing? Depressed people think the only reality is their own depressed reality. • Actively dispute your internal messages of inadequacy. Sensitivity to rejection is a cardinal feature of depression. As a consequence of low self-esteem, every relationship blip is interpreted far too personally as evidence of inadequacy. Quick to feel rejected by a partner, you then believe it is the treatment you fundamentally deserve. But the rejection really originates in you, and the feelings of inadequacy are the depression speaking. Recognize that the internal voice is strong but it's not real. Talk back to it. “I'm not really being rejected, this isn't really evidence of inadequacy. I made a mistake.” Or “this isn't about me, this is something I just didn't know how to do and now I'll learn.” When you reframe the situation to something more adequate, you can act again in an effective way and you can find and keep the love that you need. The next time I hear someone say “good things come in small packages,” I shall recall the message of this book: Love is what makes the world go round. However, it also makes life “square,” a never-ending series of four-cornered choices that in one way or another ask us to forgive; forgive our own rough-edged shortcomings in particular. But also to forgive the slings and arrows shot at us by our parents, our siblings, our boss, our co-workers, our neighbors, our government, our world itself for these wrongs we have to absorb daily: a careless word or deed that adds up over time to inflict untold suffering. Perhaps, more than anything else what this author is saying to us that have not experienced a life-threatening illness -- yet -- is to give thanks for each day that we have been given. For indeed it is a gift that we need to reflect upon more often as we face the ultimate challenge of mortality; how to live one day at a time, in spite of it all, with a sweet thought in our head and a lovely song in our heart. In other words, we must live until we die. But, if I am correct in my musings, what we experience in the hereafter is indeed only the love that we have sown here. Read this book and learn how to do that gracefully, or go kicking and screaming like the vast majority of us do today. Yet never forget the message of this masterpiece: The choice to love or hate is ours to make each and every ... heartbeat! Truth and love are the only things worth living for and the only things worth dying for. (Rebecca Ann Talcott)
All human beings are sexual creatures and there are few, if any, for whom the whole area of sexuality and relationships is not of interest and concern. (Peter Vardy)
Analise any human emotion, no matter how far it may be removed from the sphere of sex, and you are sure to discover somewhere the primal impulse, to which life owes its perpetuation. The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable. (Sigmund Freud, 1915)
If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. . . . Love and sex do indeed go together. (Edward O. Wilson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1978). On Human Nature) In one sense it is strange how little philosophers have written on Love, Sex and Orgasm, as it is clear from Evolution that Sex and Survival are the two most fundamental forces driving our continued existence. What it does show is how our culture, our religious beliefs, and our emotions have prevented us from writing honestly on this most profound subject. I would venture to say that it is almost impossible for a human to be completely happy or healthy if they are devoid of a meaningful sexual relationship. Further, evidence suggests that where sex is actively prohibited, as within certain religions, then the sexual urge, being so strong, tends to manifest in abusive ways that cause great harm to human society.
In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following: 1. I love chocolate (or skiing). 2. I love doing philosophy (or being a father). 3. I love my dog (or cat). 4. I love my wife (or mother or child or friend). However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here. Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros, agape, and philia. It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes. Love as Union The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to cash out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow comprised of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne (1603/1877) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).
