In this candid letter, we read how difficult it is for the writer to give up intense sexual activity for the sake of highly desired, long-term love. A single young woman expresses a somewhat similar attitude:
I have three lovers. One of these lovers is married, and it is with him that I have the most profound relationship. Every year, we spend five entire weekends together. My second lover is a “Tuesday person”—we are together in my apartment every Tuesday afternoon for about an hour and a half. The third lover is a kind of fucking friend with whom I have occasional (often, nonstandard) sex. I also have many male friends. I am quite happy with my life, but I would be even happier if I found a man with whom I could combine friendship and sex. He could be my stable and enduring partner, provided that he allowed me (and himself) to have another lover.
The choice people face is between a long and overall high-quality love with moderate excitement and a short and typically overall low-quality love with higher sexual excitement. It seems that for many people the question is not a binary one—not either a long-term profound love or short-term, intense loving relationships, but instead, whether, and how, a combination of the two is possible.
Concluding Remarks
I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.
MARILYN MONROE
The romantic road sets high hurdles in our path, but the journey is an intriguing, meaningful, and often pleasurable one. Coping with the complexity of romantic reality is far from simple: sometimes we need to open our eyes and sometimes to close them; sometimes we have to remember and sometimes we need to forget. Ingrid Bergman said it well: “Happiness is good health and a bad memory.” The challenge in this society is not that of finding love, as love is always in the air: everywhere you look, every sight and every sound, indicates that love is all around. Unfortunately, the air is often too polluted to enable the development of long-term profound love.
We are condemned to yearn for a constant star while knowing full well that the heart needs steering. As we shall see in this book, balance holds the key. Setting one’s mind at rest yet maintaining a certain degree of striving is often a good romantic compromise, one that has the potential to enhance both life and love. It is naïve to believe that love will always win. However, it is usually helpful to maintain the positive illusion that it will.
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Emotional Experiences
Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.
H. JACKSON BROWN JR.
We continue our tour with a discussion of the nature of emotional and romantic experiences. Here’s how things will unfold. The first section describes “acute emotions”; in the section that follows, “extended” and “enduring” emotions are considered. Acute emotions are brief, almost instantaneous experiences. Extended emotions involve successive repetitions of experiences that are felt to belong to the same emotion. Enduring emotions can persist for many years. In light of these distinctions, I further examine the occurrent and dispositional nature of emotions and moods, after which the issue of emotional simplicity and complexity is discussed. The discussion on acute emotions will show their intense and brief nature. This raises the issue of how moderation and balance, which are crucial for lasting happiness and love, can be achieved nevertheless.
Typical Emotions
In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.
JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice
Let’s begin with acute emotions. I refer to their typical cause, that is, a significant change; the typical focus of concern, that is, a personal, comparative concern; the typical emotional object, that is, a human being; and the major characteristics of acute emotions: instability, great intensity, a partial perspective, and relative brevity.
The typical cause. As we have seen above, emotions typically occur when we perceive positive or negative significant changes in our personal situation—or in that of those related to us. A positive or negative significant change substantially interrupts or improves a smoothly flowing situation that is of concern to us.
The typical focus of concern. Emotions emerge when a change is perceived as relevant to our personal concerns. Concerns are matters of interest or importance to us. Emotions serve to monitor and protect our personal concerns. These personal concerns do not make the emotions egoistic, as other people are also included in our emotional environment.1 This is especially true regarding romantic love.
Emotional meaning is comparative. The emotional environment contains not only what is and what will be experienced but also everything that could be or that one hopes will be experienced. We experience such possibilities as simultaneously available and comparable. Comparative concern in emotions is related to the central role of change in generating emotions. An event can be perceived as a significant change only when compared against a certain background or within a certain framework.
While sifting through the possible alternatives and assigning each of them a certain emotional weight, we draw on the mental construction of the availability of an alternative.2 The more available the alternative—that is, the closer the imagined alternative is to reality—the more intense the emotion. Thus, the fate of someone who dies in an airplane crash after switching flights evokes a stronger emotion than that of a traveler who was booked on the flight all along. Greater availability, which increases instability and the possibility that the event could have been prevented, makes the emotional experience more painful. In fact, a crucial element in intense emotions is the imagined condition of “it could have been otherwise.”
The typical emotional object. Since emotions express our personal, comparative concerns, and as other people are highly relevant to our well-being, the typical emotional object is another person. As social animals, people are more interesting to us than anything else. The things that people do and say, including the things that we ourselves do and say, are the things that affect us most.3 Although human emotions are most often directed to situations involving humans and tend to be directed toward a particular person, they can sometimes be generalized, perhaps toward a whole group of people, or even animals and inanimate things. Thus, some people consider a romantic relationship with an artificial being, such as a robot or a sophisticated doll, to be just as meaningful and fulfilling as one with a human being.4
The major emotional characteristics are instability, intensity, partiality, and brevity.
Instability. Reflecting the fact that change is so fundamental to the production of emotions, instability of the mental and physiological systems is basic to any emotion. Emotions point to a transition in which the preceding context has changed, but adaptation to the new context has not yet taken place. Like storms and fire, unstable states signify agitation. Moreover, they are intense, occasional, and limited in duration. At the basis of an emotional attitude is a kind of caring, which is incompatible with complete indifference.
Intensity. Acute emotions are marked by a great deal of intensity. The lives of people low in emotional intensity show endurance, evenness, and lack of fluctuation. Acute emotions are intense reactions. In such emotions, the mental system has not yet adapted to a given change, and, because of its significance, the change requires the mobilization of many resources. No wonder that acute emotions are associated with urgency and heat. In such emotions, there is no such thing as a minor concern; if the concern is minor, it is not emotional. And emotions magnify: everything looms larger when we are emotional. Thus, it would be insulting to tell one’s partner that one loves him a little. Love in such a small measure might refer to liking, but it will not refer to intense love.
Partiality. Emotions are partial in two basic senses: (1) a cognitive sense—they are focused on a narrow target, such as one person or very few people, and
(2) an evaluative sense—they express a personal and interested perspective. Emotions direct and color our attention by selecting what attracts and holds it. They might be compared to heat-seeking missiles, which have no other concern but to find the heat-generating target. Emotions address practical concerns from a personal perspective. We cannot assume an emotional attitude toward everyone or toward those with whom we have no relationship whatsoever. Focusing on fewer objects increases the resources available for each person or concern, hence increasing emotional intensity. Like a laser beam, which focuses on a very narrow area and consequently achieves high intensity, emotions, which express our values and preferences, cannot be indiscriminate.
Brevity. Emotions are usually brief. We cannot mobilize many resources to focus on one event forever. A system cannot remain unstable for a long period and still function normally. A change, or at least an external change, cannot last for long; after a while, the system reads the change as the norm. If emotions were to endure for a long time regardless of what was happening all around, they would not have adaptive value. That acute emotions are temporary states, however, does not mean that their impact is necessarily temporary—a brief emotional state can have an enormous impact on one’s life.
The Temporality of Emotional Experiences: Acute, Extended, and Enduring Emotions
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Lathe of Heaven
Emotions take place in time, last for a specific duration, and often show up again and again. These time-related aspects are especially important in romantic love, where mutuality needs time to develop and deepen. Romantic love does not merely “take” time: it is constituted and shaped by time spent together.5
There is a long-standing dispute about how long an emotion can last and still be considered an emotion. Some say that an emotion must be rather brief, a matter of seconds or minutes, and others say that an emotion can last much longer than that. A cross-cultural study found that fear usually lasts for a matter of minutes—in many cases, less than five minutes, and rarely lasts longer than an hour. Anger often lasts more than a few minutes, but rarely for more than a few hours. We feel sadness and happiness, it has been found, often for more than an hour; in fact, in more than half of the cases examined in one study, sadness hung on for longer than a day. Jealousy, grief, and love usually persist even longer. An attitude cannot be regarded as love if it lasts only five seconds; love has to be made and remade again and again. Nor can relief or pleasure in others’ misfortune survive for years. Other emotions, however, do not have such temporal constraints and can endure for different amounts of time.6
Affective time has four main aspects: location, duration, pace and frequency, and meaningful direction. Temporal location refers to when an experience takes place. Duration concerns the length of an experience. Pace relates to how fast an experience takes place, and frequency refers to its repetition, that is, the rate at which the repeating experience, or at least its major features, reoccurs. To these three quantitative aspects, a fourth qualitative aspect can be added: development or deterioration—the meaningful direction of an affective experience over time.
As temporal location is common to all types of emotions, we can talk about three major types of emotional experiences: (1) acute emotions, (2) extended emotions, and (3) enduring emotions. Acute emotions are brief, almost instantaneous experiences. Extended emotions involve successive repetitions of experiences that are felt to belong to the same emotion—for example, being angry or jealous for hours. Compared to acute emotions, extended emotions last longer and occur more frequently. The intensity varies over the period of the episode, and the nature of the emotion can change somewhat. Enduring emotions are the longest-lasting of the three and can persist for a lifetime. In addition to their duration and frequency, enduring emotions involve a qualitative meaningful development (and sometimes deterioration), and a dispositional nature that unfolds over time.7
An enduring emotion, which includes a series of acute and extended emotions, continuously shapes our attitudes and behavior. A flash of anger might last a few minutes or more, but grief over the loss of a loved one can resonate endlessly, coloring many aspects of our life—our moods, our thriving, and the way we relate to time and space. A person’s long-standing love for her spouse sometimes involves acute sexual desire, but it does not involve continuous, acute sexual desire; it also influences her attitudes and behavior toward her spouse and other people. For example, it affects her interest in her spouse’s activity, the things she does in his company, her desires toward him and other people, and so on.
Occurrent and Dispositional Emotions and Moods
I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.
JOAN RIVERS
Intentionality and feeling are two basic mental dimensions. One’s intentional perspective can be right or wrong, which is not the case, for example, with a feeling such as toothache. Intentionality, “being about something,” involves our ability to separate ourselves from the world and to establish a meaningful subject-object relation. Feeling is a mode of consciousness associated with our own state; it reflects our own state but is not in itself directed at this state or at any other object.
Leaving aside the disputable details of the above distinction, we can say that affective attitudes, the main ones of which are emotions and moods, are a unique combination of intentionality and feeling, consisting of a significant feeling component and a certain (implicit or explicit) evaluative stance (or concern). In complex affective attitudes, such as emotions, intentionality is more specific, and other intentional components are present as well—namely, a significant motivational component (readiness to act) and a cognitive component involving some kind of practical implications. Moods, which have a more general intentionality, may lack these additional intentional components.
We can discuss moods and emotions from several points of view. Let’s take three of them: duration, intentionality, and cause. Moods typically last longer than emotions and have a general (if any) intentionality. In this way, they “integrate” us, and we are less likely to experience several moods at the same time. Moreover, moods are less partial than emotions (at least in their focus). Whereas emotions are often caused by specific events that take place at a specific time, moods usually build up from many episodes. Moreover, as compared to emotions, moods tend to be milder, more stable, inclined to linger in the background, and have a looser link to behavior.8
In exploring the possibility of enduring affective attitudes, such as long-term love, we need to distinguish between occurrent (actual) and dispositional (potential) properties. The dispositional emotional background of long-term emotions has a significant impact on our experience of the world. Thus, if we love someone, we are disposed to react with fear when that person is threatened.9
Dispositional affectivity can be understood in a few senses: (a) having an inherent (built-in) potential to be repeated in a somewhat similar manner either within the same affective episode or in a different episode, (b) having an inherent potential to be actualized in the sense of moving from the background of the affective experience to its foreground, and (c) having an inherent potential to develop.
We find the first sense of dispositional affectivity in all affective attitudes: every type of emotion and mood can be repeated. People tend to regard repetition, which often generates boredom and damps down human capacities, in a negative light. Yet many capacities, such as playing the piano and dancing, are maintained and enhanced by repeated use. In these cases, repetition yields some degree of joy. Here, the repeated activity is valuable because it contributes to the development of a capacity—thus the old adage “Use it or lose it.”
Enduring affective attitudes, such as long-term romantic love or the mood of enduring sadness, are also dispositional in the sense of being able to move from the backgr
ound of our awareness to the foreground. Even when we do not think about them, they are hiding in the wings of our affective experience—like background music that occasionally moves to the foreground and demands our attention. Even when love or sadness is in the background, it is expressed in our behavior.
Enduring emotional attitudes, such as long-term love, can also be dispositional in the sense of involving the process of their development (or deterioration). This sense has a normative aspect in that it leads to behavior that becomes part of oneself. This specific sense of “dispositional” is key for our inquiry into the possibility of long-term profound love.
The Arc of Love Page 3