恋爱中和爱别人——一段关于爱的问答
http://www.100md.com
2000年10月11日
Being in love vs. loving someone
SEXPLORATION is MSNBC's forum for your most intimate questions about sex and relationships. You send in your sob stories, and Jennifer Kornreich, MSNBC’s sex-and-relationship columnist, attempts to dry the tears. Keep in mind, though: Jennifer is not a doctor. When she feels it’s necessary, she’ll point you in the proper professional direction.
Q: Is there a difference between being in love and loving someone? Personally, I define being in love as all the feelings you experience at the start of a relationship: wanting to spend every moment with that person, missing them desperately. But as the relationship progresses, you accept your partner’s weaknesses as well as his or her strengths. In essence, you begin to love that person. Am I completely mistaken here?
, 百拇医药
A: Well, this is one of those questions around which people play a lot of semantic games and to which they apply their own personal definitions. I certainly think that in the initial throes of any intense romantic relationship, there’s a lot of idealization and obsession and happy, hormonal stupefaction. This makes you feel like you are “in love,” when you are actually in a mere but glorious state of infatuation, intoxicated with the seeming proximity of true love.
, 百拇医药
At this stage of the game, it’s very easy to gloss over someone’s faults and latch onto their charms. So when do you know that you’re truly in love?
My working definition of true love (take it or leave it) has always been that you and your significant other have seen each other at your ugliest — in a conflict, for instance, or during a stressful time — and you still want to wake up with each other.
Just because you love someone does not automatically mean that it’s optimal or even healthy for you to remain in a relationship with him or her. At this stage, there is, as you note, an exchange of acceptance that occurs — and also an inevitable diminishment of the constant excitement that came with the relationship’s initial novelty.
, 百拇医药
So yes, I do think there’s a more realistic, perhaps less pyrotechnic, version of affection into which couples eventually settle. But I don’t think it necessarily has to be a complete or even large evaporation of passion, as your letter tacitly suggests. Just as there are relationships in which the fire largely dies out within a couple of years or even months, there are plenty of long-term couples (my parents, who’ve been together for over 35 years, included) who still froth at the mouth for each other more often than not, and who still can’t wait to talk to each other at the end of the day., 百拇医药
SEXPLORATION is MSNBC's forum for your most intimate questions about sex and relationships. You send in your sob stories, and Jennifer Kornreich, MSNBC’s sex-and-relationship columnist, attempts to dry the tears. Keep in mind, though: Jennifer is not a doctor. When she feels it’s necessary, she’ll point you in the proper professional direction.
Q: Is there a difference between being in love and loving someone? Personally, I define being in love as all the feelings you experience at the start of a relationship: wanting to spend every moment with that person, missing them desperately. But as the relationship progresses, you accept your partner’s weaknesses as well as his or her strengths. In essence, you begin to love that person. Am I completely mistaken here?
, 百拇医药
A: Well, this is one of those questions around which people play a lot of semantic games and to which they apply their own personal definitions. I certainly think that in the initial throes of any intense romantic relationship, there’s a lot of idealization and obsession and happy, hormonal stupefaction. This makes you feel like you are “in love,” when you are actually in a mere but glorious state of infatuation, intoxicated with the seeming proximity of true love.
, 百拇医药
At this stage of the game, it’s very easy to gloss over someone’s faults and latch onto their charms. So when do you know that you’re truly in love?
My working definition of true love (take it or leave it) has always been that you and your significant other have seen each other at your ugliest — in a conflict, for instance, or during a stressful time — and you still want to wake up with each other.
Just because you love someone does not automatically mean that it’s optimal or even healthy for you to remain in a relationship with him or her. At this stage, there is, as you note, an exchange of acceptance that occurs — and also an inevitable diminishment of the constant excitement that came with the relationship’s initial novelty.
, 百拇医药
So yes, I do think there’s a more realistic, perhaps less pyrotechnic, version of affection into which couples eventually settle. But I don’t think it necessarily has to be a complete or even large evaporation of passion, as your letter tacitly suggests. Just as there are relationships in which the fire largely dies out within a couple of years or even months, there are plenty of long-term couples (my parents, who’ve been together for over 35 years, included) who still froth at the mouth for each other more often than not, and who still can’t wait to talk to each other at the end of the day., 百拇医药