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kaigouA series of thoughts I've been turning over in my head while I scrape popcorn from the ceiling, tear down the ugly ceiling beams, cover the paneling with drywall, plaster and prime and paint, and so on: it keeps the hands busy and frees the brain to ponder at length. Okay, pondering has reached maximum capacity and now I am at point of please to be getting additional inputting.
Here's the premise: you've met someone, and are solidly falling-in-love -- whether that be a love-at-first-sight or gradual drift from friends into something deeper. You might safely say that this person is "the one" for you; the first flush of lust/infatuation has become the brink of something longer-term.
Alrighty, now let's say someone you trust -- or at minimum has authority satisfactory enough to you -- explains that you are not, in fact, in love, and your experience/emotions are due to A) a magical spell, B) a drug/medicine, or C) due to tagging an ineffable instinctual landmine. (The last being inescapable/unstoppable akin to non-autonomous functions like heart-beat and breathing; I leave it open to your interpretation whether the landmine could have been avoided in the first place.) Those are the three options for externalities, with me so far?
What do you think would be the one aspect of your relationship that:
1a. Would prove to you that your relationship would continue -- as true love (forgive the romanticism but what else to call it?) -- even if A/B/C were removed from the equation?
1b. Could not be duplicated/mimicked by A/B/C and therefore by its existence indicates your love is real?
(I break those out because A/B/C may only inculcate but without damaging upon withdrawal: much like potting soil may boost a seed's preliminary growth but that at some stage the plant could survive on sun, water, soil without additional fertilizers.)
2a. Would the means make any difference in your reaction -- that is, whether the in-love is thanks to magical whammy, misfired neurons, or survival instinct gone haywire?
2b. Which of the three would be most offensive as a means of manipulation (or is it all-the-same)?
2c. Which would you consider most easily forgiven? (eg, "I can accept drugs but if you magic on me, that's way worse".)
3a. Would it make any difference if your in-love state were caused by a specific person's actions (as opposed to honest mistake/accident like tripping a long-dormant spell or drinking the wrong medicine)?
3b. Which would be worse: to learn it was purposeful, or that it was purely accidental?
4a. If you knew it was purposeful but didn't know the perpetrator's identity would not-knowing be better (or worse)*?
4b. Would you try to find out the perpetrator's identity, anyway?
4c. What if the perpetrator were the person you'd fallen in love with?
As an addendum to that last one, I find myself applying #1 and #2 specifically to the situation upon learning the falling-in-love was due to artificial causes. Would even determining that it's 'true love' be irrelevant, due to considering such acts/intentions completely unforgivable?
* the 'better or worse' idea could be applied to your sense of integrity, or to your faith/trust in the relationship... it could be that not-knowing assuages your sense of autonomy yet also causes you to doubt whether this person is really the one for you.
Here's the premise: you've met someone, and are solidly falling-in-love -- whether that be a love-at-first-sight or gradual drift from friends into something deeper. You might safely say that this person is "the one" for you; the first flush of lust/infatuation has become the brink of something longer-term.
Alrighty, now let's say someone you trust -- or at minimum has authority satisfactory enough to you -- explains that you are not, in fact, in love, and your experience/emotions are due to A) a magical spell, B) a drug/medicine, or C) due to tagging an ineffable instinctual landmine. (The last being inescapable/unstoppable akin to non-autonomous functions like heart-beat and breathing; I leave it open to your interpretation whether the landmine could have been avoided in the first place.) Those are the three options for externalities, with me so far?
What do you think would be the one aspect of your relationship that:
1a. Would prove to you that your relationship would continue -- as true love (forgive the romanticism but what else to call it?) -- even if A/B/C were removed from the equation?
1b. Could not be duplicated/mimicked by A/B/C and therefore by its existence indicates your love is real?
(I break those out because A/B/C may only inculcate but without damaging upon withdrawal: much like potting soil may boost a seed's preliminary growth but that at some stage the plant could survive on sun, water, soil without additional fertilizers.)
2a. Would the means make any difference in your reaction -- that is, whether the in-love is thanks to magical whammy, misfired neurons, or survival instinct gone haywire?
2b. Which of the three would be most offensive as a means of manipulation (or is it all-the-same)?
2c. Which would you consider most easily forgiven? (eg, "I can accept drugs but if you magic on me, that's way worse".)
3a. Would it make any difference if your in-love state were caused by a specific person's actions (as opposed to honest mistake/accident like tripping a long-dormant spell or drinking the wrong medicine)?
3b. Which would be worse: to learn it was purposeful, or that it was purely accidental?
4a. If you knew it was purposeful but didn't know the perpetrator's identity would not-knowing be better (or worse)*?
4b. Would you try to find out the perpetrator's identity, anyway?
4c. What if the perpetrator were the person you'd fallen in love with?
As an addendum to that last one, I find myself applying #1 and #2 specifically to the situation upon learning the falling-in-love was due to artificial causes. Would even determining that it's 'true love' be irrelevant, due to considering such acts/intentions completely unforgivable?
* the 'better or worse' idea could be applied to your sense of integrity, or to your faith/trust in the relationship... it could be that not-knowing assuages your sense of autonomy yet also causes you to doubt whether this person is really the one for you.
no subject
Date: 29 Oct 2008 03:14 pm (UTC)1a.
Probably two questions:
i) Am I better person towards self and non-lover others when I am with this person?
ii) I tell this person about my discovery of the spell/drug/landmine. How do they react? Do they promise to love me whether or not this is true? Deny that it could be true? Or aver that it is true and that this is better?
If the answer to i) is yes, I'm a better person to self/others,
and the answer to ii) is that they tell me they'd love me whether or not this whammy happened, then I would have faith in the relationship continuing once the whammy was removed.
1b.
Do I love the person both when I am with them and when I am not with them in equally intense but personally variant ways? This may be too me-specific, but I would assume: a) that a magical effect would vary depending on proximity to person (either stronger or weaker) but not vary in type, b) that a drug effect would not vary in type or intensity as I was with them/away from them (which would be suspicious to me) [I'm assuming that the drug there is being administered to me. If it's being administered through the other person, then of course it would act more like c)], c) that an instinctual response would be powerful when I was with them but very faint and somehow odd feeling when I wasn't with them.
2a.
i) magical whammy - would want to know if it was on purpose or not. some people ooze attractiveness or hit your buttons for near psychic-magic levels of same and it's not necessarily their fault. Other people know better and could not do it if they wanted. If it's a third party magic, then obviously not the lovers fault. ii) misfired neurons. This would disturb me as a loss of personal internal control to something I would have an [unrealistic culturally based] expectation of self-control over. iii) survival instinct - no judgement from me. we're already wired with so many weird survival mechanism attraction things that it would seem just a high/low point on an existing scale.
2b.
The drug would probably be most instinctively offensive to me on the assumption that it couldn't have happened by accident or confusion.
If that presumption was proven wrong by in story events, that could be a whole different argument.
2c.
Accidental magic, because sometimes we just don't know yet, Then instinctive response stuff, again if other person just didn't know. If the lover knows ahead of time and doesn't warn the other person, all three become equally difficult to forgive for me.
3a.
Yes. If someone did it on purpose that would be unforgivable. And possibly require some kind of revenge.
3b.
To learn it was purposeful would be worse. To learn it was accidental but that the person had done it before and made no attempt to avoid a repeate accident would be worst.
Stupid carelessness is worse than deliberate evil because the person can't be reasoned with or accounted for.
4a.
Not-knowing would be worse. Doubt would damage relationships.
4b.
Probably if at all possible.
4c.
Oddly, I don't notice till we hit 4c that that isn't the automatic assumption. I answered all the questions until 4 with the pretty steady assumption that the lover had done it.
Answering addendum - I can think of many situations where a third party has previously (and not with intent to make me fall in love) altered the person I fall in love with either chemically or magically so as to create a change in them that would force me to love them. This would make the person's action on me (since involuntary) forgivable.