Empathy and Love
Empathy is the ability to recognize the sentience and suffering in another
being. Empathy is the basis of high-level altruism that does not depend on the
barter principle. The ethic of empathy is the Golden Rule: do onto others, as
you would have them do to you. Empathy depends on knowing that the other person
feels pain as much as you do or will feel happiness as much as you do if they
are well treated. If another human is grieving, you feel their suffering and
offer help. If another human is injured, you stop everything to help them and
you treat their injured body with care to avoid increasing their pain. This
ability to feel the experience of others in your own consciousness is one of the
great accomplishments of brain evolution.
There is no doubt that more empathy is better than less. There is little
doubt that empathy is one feature of human nature that competes with other more
powerful and more adverse features of human nature. Empathy is not evenly
distributed among humans, nor is any individual constantly empathetic towards
others. Some humans lack empathy and are selfish, impulsive and do harm to
others with no remorse.
The human tendency is to treat only a few other humans well, members of your
immediate select group, and to be suspicious of and hostile towards everyone
else. Empathy can turn on in one situation and turn off in another. Once a group
establishes that outsiders are enemies, empathy is turned off and members of the
group treat the outsiders cruelly as if they were non-human.
You might observe that children are naturally empathetic and that this
feature of their nature can be cultivated by well informed, empathetic adults. A
the same time, you will notice that children are naturally possessive,
competitive, and fight often. Observant parents and teachers will realize that
encouraging empathy and discouraging conflict is a challenging task that is
never complete.
Love
Love is often identified as the solution for human conflict. You might argue
that genuine love requires big empathy. But, the word “Love” is fuzzy, because
it refers to any and all the emotive and cognitive forces that bind people
together. Love includes different ingredients such thoughts, feelings and
several emotions. Love is not a single emotion nor even a coherent mix of
emotions. Love is a biosocial complex inflected at different levels of intensity
and meaning. Sometimes, love is just a word that fails to have much meaning.
Romantic love is temporary glue that sticks two people together and is most
evident in younger people choosing a mate. Successful bonding creates feelings
of contentment and a sense of long-term commitment to the partner. The essential
feature of falling in love is a fascination with one other person coupled with a
drive to be with them and to protect them. This exclusive focus is deviant from
all other social involvements that require lower intensity attention to many
people. Both lovers will tend to fell euphoric and powerful; their devotion can
overcome all obstacles and accomplish wonders.
Falling in love is not a smooth ride. There are existential love problems. As
soon as a couple falls in love, the freedom of each is constrained. The
progression of the bond requires the exclusion of other mates and is regulated
by a potentially destructive force, jealously. The lover’s problem is not
letting the other person exist as a free being. As humans become more conscious
and more sophisticated in their understanding of relationship, a deep paradox
emerges. While pleasurable feelings, tenderness and concern tend to occur in the
early stages of falling-in-love, the pleasant feelings soon diminish and are
interrupted by more routine, negative feelings that emerge in the mix and will
often dominate the couple’s experience. Lovers will display a variety of
emotions: affection, laughing, crying, anger, fear and grief will all be
displayed in the course of a romance. Jealousy is another cognitive-emotional
complex that accompanies love. When you examine the experiences of lovers, you
identify flaws in empathy – it is temporary, conditional and can be replaced by
conflict and hate.
The problem of freedom versus captivity continues to plague more insightful
married couples and is not resolved by the marriage ceremony enforced by moral
authority that insists on life-long fidelity. Women will often feel trapped in
servitude and will hunger for more self-determination. Men will feel trapped and
obligated to relinquish most personal choices in favor of wife and children. A
person who is no longer free replaces the more desirable and alluring person
with the freedom to say no to an aspiring mate.
Even deeper challenges facing couples involve the underlying assumptions of
the self. Every human has an overriding sense of his or her own importance.
There is prevailing sense that I am the center the center of the universe and
what I believe to be true is true always and forever. When two people form an
intimate, dyad they confront each other with this deeply imbedded premise. Their
interactions are necessarily tense because each has the same conviction that "I
am center of the universe." The primordial conflict among self-centered human
beings is about whose version of the universe is the most valid.
One model of altruistic love is maternal devotion to children. The ideal
mother is deeply bonded to her children, is self-sacrificing and unusually
attentive to the needs of her children. While romantic love briefly contains the
elements of maternal love and may lead to lead to marriage, pregnancy and
life-together, the biological basis appears to be short-lived leaving the bonded
couple needs other motivations and constraints to sustain their relationship.
The ideal mother attracts a supportive man and sustains his interest in the
children by providing affection, sexual favors and sharing the labor of
maintaining a home. The ideal mother’s love for her children tends to be less
conditional and lasts a lifetime, but the love of the father or fathers of the
children is conditional and may be short-term. The ideal father provides
protection and support, devoting all his resources to one mother who has given
birth only to his children.
Home should be the refuge where each family member feels safe but often
becomes the battleground where diverging interests and experiences conflict. The
family formula sends males and females on divergent paths that guaranteed little
common ground, except at home, evenings and weekends. The different worlds are
also full of other humans who appear to be attractive, available and will more
compatible because they share work schedules and environments. There is no
couple commitment that blocks interest in other potential mates. The search for
an alternative mate and fantasies about other lovers continue daily in the minds
of every happily married couple. As discrepancies in the couple's experience
accumulate and conflicts escalate, the partners create distance that protects
each from the other. Once the home is no longer a safe refuge, dysphoric
feelings dominate and the relationship is in peril. Most humans will tolerate
unsatisfactory relationships for a while, but eventually a threshold of
no-return is reached and the relationship collapses. This is an avalanche
effect. The timing of the avalanche is unpredictable, but once it starts to
move, no one can stop it and the relationship is over.
