Emotions play an essential role in how we think and behave. We make decisions based on whether we are happy, sad, bored, or frustrated. We chose activities and hobbies based on emotions. Understanding emotions help us to navigate life with greater ease and stability.
Emotions=Feelings?
For most people, feelings and emotions are very much the same. However, for a little more clarity: Emotions describe physiological states as responses to internal and external events. A feeling can be defined as the person’s response to the emotion from a situation’s perception.
This means that we can have emotions without having feelings, however, we simply cannot have feelings without having emotions.
What is Love?
Love often starts as an intense feeling and deep affection for someone. Most people have their own sense of what love is: for some, love is more than just being interested physically in someone; for others, it’s an emotional attachment or Love can mean to be deeply committed and connected to someone or something. The basic meaning of love is to feel more than liking towards someone. It’s like your heart tells you that it is right for you.
Sometimes someone comes into your life so unexpectedly, takes your heart by surprise, and changes your life forever.
Love isn’t an emotion/feeling?
Love certainly feels like an emotion, an incredibly strong one. But in the scientific community, the conservative definition of a feeling is a facial expression. Happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise: these and the other expression can be seen easily on the face. Feelings come and go. We are hungering in the morning and happy in the afternoon. But if you are in love at dawn, you will remain in love all day and night — often for months, even years. Real love stays, so we can say that love is not a feeling or emotion.
Love is a drive.
A drive focuses our behavior on a goal and lasts until that goal is fulfilled. Hunger is a classic example. When you are hungry, the goal is food. You remain hungry until you get food. Like hunger, love is a drive. Like all drives, Romantic love is difficult to control. You can’t control everything, especially in love. You have to accept that you can’t control every situation, you can’t restrain passion, and you shouldn’t try.
As Stendahl wrote, “Love is like a fever; it comes and goes quite independently of the will.”
Romantic love is an urge, a need, a homeostatic imbalance, a craving, a drive to win a mating partner. Perhaps most significant: like all drives, love is mostly orchestrated by the brainstem’s reward system. This the level that controls involuntary reflexes like Breathing and Heart rate. No wonder it’s nearly impossible to restrain this primordial passion. If you truly love someone, then the only thing you want for them is to be happy even if it is not with you.
“If you love someone, love them completely. And if you find someone that loves you, then hang on to that love”.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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