Person: “This, and this, and this happened to me… and then he did this to me, but I still loved him afterwards… and then he hurt me again, but I still love him…”
Me: “You know, maybe you should try to be more rational in the future…”
Person: “Oh, no! I could never become cold and unfeeling like that!”
The above is a conversation I’ve had more than ten times in my life, each time with a different “Person”.
Somehow, after that retort, I never had a good answer. It was almost as if it took all the possible “logic” out of the conversation - what do you say to something like that?
After the Nth variation of that somewhat bizarre piece of dialogue (which happened a couple of days ago), I decided - shudder! - to think about it. And here’s what I believe.
People equate - wrongly - emotions with irrationality, and cold, unfeeling, robot-like logic with rationality. To most, saying “you should be more rational” is exactly like saying “you should feel less”. Of course, most healthy people don’t attempt to renounce their feelings - while they can bring pain, they are still an important part of us, and “repressing feelings” is something you only do for a while, after an unusually intense pain, like your loved one leaving you. So far, so good.
But rationality is not the lack of feelings! That’s one of the most common errors in the world, apparently, because you tell people one thing and they reply as if you had said the other.
Rationality means believing in reason as an absolute, it means grasping reality as it is, instead as you want it to be, or fear it to be. It means having no preconceptions and being able to think about anything, even if it’s something that “everyone knows”, so no one thinks about it. It means being able to realize that a loved one doesn’t really love you, but is only using you instead. It means, for a battered wife, realizing that her husband doesn’t beat her “because he loves her”, but because he’s a sick bastard. It means realizing you’ve sacrificed years of your life to someone who didn’t deserve you, and putting a stop to it, instead of trying and going on trying through all the humiliation. It means learning that, if you do you’re in situation A, do action B, and C happens (C being a bad thing), that means that if, later on, you’re in situation A again and you do B, then C will probably happen again - that this time it won’t “be completely different” just because you really, really wish it to be.
Rationality doesn’t mean feeling any less. It just means not feeling the wrong things, the things that harm you. It means putting a stop to wishful thinking, one of the greatest causes of pain in the world.
An irrational person believes reality is fluid, that it can be shaped by one’s desires or fears. He doesn’t believe in causality, that is, that there are a set of rules governing causes and effects. He believes “things will be different this time”, even though nothing has changed in reality to alter the results in any way. If he falls in love, he will believe the loved one to be perfect, flawless, and nothing she does can dispute that. He is incapable of learning, of acquiring knowledge, since to be able to know something means learning some of the rules of reality - and he believes there are none.
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“It hurts to love someone and not be loved in return, but what is the most painful is to love someone and never find the courage to let the person know how you feel.”
Anonymous quotes
I think that we can not go straight to rationality versus irrationality. Trough the century’s Human behavior allays ran towards understanding rationally and explain rationally everything that surrounds him. Whenever not possible religion, gods, magicians, whatever else comes in…
It’s true that we can not control desire; it’s true that you can somehow feel what’s called “love at first sight” although I wouldn’t call it love… I’d rather call it “first impression” looks more like it…
Love is not desire — love is a feeling that can be expressed and can include the experience of fulfillment. (Desire is lack of fulfillment.) In love, the thoughts, feelings, actions and opinions of the beloved matter. There is a focus of interest, attention & caring on another person and their words & actions impact our emotions. Loving is a deeply involving process which can entail profound emotional interactions with the beloved.
Someone who only feels comfortable in giving and not in taking is lacking in trust or other qualities necessary for closeness & intimacy.
Those who most easily turn love into hate are those most at the mercy of their own ego.
“obsessive lover” may suffer something like stage-fright in the company of the beloved — too much is at risk. Love can undermine rationality
About the above phrase: what I meant was that everybody should express feelings without fear of being rejected… “You don’t ask, you don’t get”… this doesn’t mean you should humiliate yourself, there’s a limit. The problem is that most people don’t respect, don’t love themselves… and I must agree 100%: always dream of the impossible… “The frog will turn into a prince” but sometimes is “The prince who turned into a frog”.