A primary reason that modern relationships and gender dynamics are so fucked up is because pop culture constantly bombards people with an insane, bizarre, psychotic conception of “love.” Pop culture portrays love as pure emotion, and this conception has become the dominant view in the modern world, leading to almost apocalyptic levels of heartache and unhappiness.

Instead of defining what the word love means, pop culture insists that love is undefinable, unexplainable, and “magical,” and furthermore, cannot be rationally understood or logically analyzed. This lack of definition allows love to constantly change form – sometimes it is “strongly liking” (“I love ice cream!”), having sex but not being too rough (“making love”), a zombie-like state you are in (“I’m in love!”), or a selfish, meaningless declaration (“But I love her!!”), etc... The only thing modern views on love have in common is that they all portray love as a wild, passionate emotion, devoid of any obligation or practicality. Nevertheless, pop culture demands that love must “conquer” everything else, including society’s rules, everybody else’s advice, one’s career, one’s interests, and even rationality itself.

According to pop culture, love is something you randomly “fall” into and “fall” out of with no forewarning or rational explanation. If you “fall” in love, you should drop everything and run to the person you love, no matter what the facts are. And when you “fall” out of love, well, you are free to leave, no matter what promises you made.

The pop culture conception of love is so deeply ingrained in modern people’s consciousness that people think it is totally acceptable to make a ton of commitments and promises to a person, and then leave the moment they’ve decided they’ve “fallen out of love.” Pop culture love is why women feel no shame in going on the Jerry Springer show and proudly proclaiming that their affair with a married man is beautiful because they are “in love.” Pop culture love is also why people allow themselves to endure all kinds of abuse and terrible behavior from their significant other.

In this article, I explain what I think love is, and I then briefly describe the historical processes that caused modern man to arrive at this twisted conception of love.

What is love? (Baby don’t hurt me)

To start with, I believe that love, like everything else on this earth, can be rationally understood. The moment you accept that something is fundamentally irrational or “magic” you allow yourself to be controlled by your emotions or whatever nonsense powerful and charismatic people are selling. Love is beautiful and the fact that it can be rationally and maybe even scientifically understood does not detract from its beauty.

True love is a contract between two people where the parties promise to do whatever is best for each other. You should only enter into this contract with people you like and feel attraction to, but once you are in, you must take the contract seriously.

Different types of love exist: love between friends, love between a parent and child, love between a man and a woman in a sexual/romantic relationship, etc... Each different type of love imposes obligations on the parties, depending on the nature of the relationship, the individual themselves, and the circumstances of the relationship. Ideally, you determine what is “best” for your beloved by cold, rational calculation, and not your selfish desires. For example, you may want your child to go to college near you, but it may be better for your child to go to Harvard.

Under my definition of love, you can love everybody commensurate with your relationship with them. Your love for your neighbor will be different than the love for your child, because your obligations to your neighbor are different than your obligations to your child. One day, ideally, all the world will come to love each other, but all we can do now is love people until they prove that they do not deserve our love.

I believe that once two people commit to loving each other, an emotional bond forms that I call the “real love emotion.” The real love emotion is the feeling derived from the knowledge that there is another human being in this cold world that cares about you and will do whatever is best for you. The real love emotion is also the warm, happy feeling you get when you make that commitment to another person. We are wired to both receive love AND give it. When two people commit to doing the best for each other, they create an infinitely positive feedback loop.

The real love emotion is the most primal, important, deepest, and strongest human emotion. It defines the difference between a fundamentally emotionally stable and happy person and one who is not. It should underlie all your other emotions like an operating system constantly running in the background and a person without it will feel empty and constantly need cheap pleasures: drugs, narcissism, distractions, etc... People who feel loved also like cheap thrills, but they do not have the same empty void to fill like a person who does not feel loved.

Because the real love emotion is completely unrelated to the other person’s looks, personality, status, possessions, family, or any other tangible thing, it can form between any two people, no matter how different they are, so long as they commit to loving each other. Real love does not require physical presence either – you can love somebody from afar as long as you are doing what is right for them. You can get the real love emotion from your friends, family, or even spiritual practices.

The constant, primal human desire to feel the real love emotion is best satisfied when we are actually loved. If you feel like your partner will leave when circumstances or feelings change, that bond will feel weaker. We can lie to ourselves that we are loved, but ultimately reality will intervene and crush our soul if it is not true. This desire is why people sometimes form an unhealthy attachment to animals and also why troubled young women, sometimes as young as teenagers, have children just to feel loved.

Some may argue that an alpha male does not have the same desire to feel the real love emotion that a beta male or woman would have because the alpha has no evolutionary need for anybody else’s help to obtain food, shelter, sex, and protection, so therefore evolution did not create that desire in him. I don’t know if this is true – I think it is very possible that the alpha male also evolved to need to feel love from the people in his tribe. But whether or not the alpha male needs love, no human man can feel like an alpha male at every moment. Every man has moments of weakness and vulnerability, and in those moments he needs to feel that there is somebody or something in this cold world that will help him.

Of course, people can feel a connection to each other through other emotions. I call these emotions the “peripheral attraction emotions.” Examples of peripheral attraction emotions are physical attractiveness, sexually desirability, fun, personality, money, status, etc… There is nothing wrong with peripheral attraction emotions, but I do not consider them part of “love.” In fact, peripheral attraction emotions and love are sometimes directly at odds – love requires you to do what is best for the other person, whereas peripheral attraction emotions are fundamentally selfish. My peripheral attraction emotions may want me to make a woman my fuck buddy but if I “love” her, I may encourage her to settle with a guy who will commit to her. Similarly, my peripheral attraction emotions may prevent me from confronting a drug addict friend because I don’t want to ruin our fun, but real love would require me to do so. The peripheral attraction emotions are temporary, which is why conflating them with love has caused so much heartache in the modern world.

My conception of love radically differs from pop culture love. Under my conception, there is no “falling” in and out of love. Love is purely a contract you enter into – after you sign on the dotted line you are in “love” and obligated forever. It is weighty and difficult. Mere pronouncements, promises, and feelings are not enough – love requires daily action. And you cannot love somebody until you have your own life together. Love is not a fun distraction from self-improvement – it is an integral part of it. A drug addicted loser who constantly needs handouts and help from others cannot “love” a woman because he is incapable of doing what is best for her.

In some ways, my conception of love is unattainable because you can always become a better person and do a better job of doing what is best for the other person. But that’s ok – I would rather love be an unattainable ideal we struggle to reach than a goal we feel like we’ve accomplished.

My version of love does not require self-immolation. If the other person cannot or will not commit to doing what is best for you, you are free to break the contract and stop loving them. In fact, you MUST break the contract. If your beloved is a lazy drug addict, they cannot do what is best for you, so they cannot love you, so you should not love them. My version of love actually requires a form of selfishness, where you focus on optimizing yourself first before you try to help others, because you cannot help others if you are ruining yourself. You cannot give if you have nothing to give. If “loving” somebody is diminishing you as a person, you are progressively becoming more unable to do what is best for your beloved.

Some philosophers define love as “doing things for other people and asking for nothing in return,” which sounds nice, but I think that type of love is unrealistic and unsustainable. Also, subsidizing and encouraging bad behavior by somebody is not doing what is “best” for them – it is creating a monster.

I do not intend my conception of love to be too harsh or rigid. I understand that people have problems in their life and it is wrong to leave somebody in their time of trouble or weakness. This is especially true with children. Sometimes you must tolerate bad behavior from children because they do not know better.

But to determine whether you should break a love contract, you should ask yourself certain questions. Is your beloved is acting badly because of genuine difficulties, or because they are just a shitty person who doesn’t care about you? In other words, is your beloved going to get better if you help them or continue to be shitty? Is your love actually helping them or just enabling and encouraging their bad behavior? Are you doing all this stuff because it is rationally what is best for your beloved, or because you are in the grip of irrational emotions? Is your love for this person destroying you? Remember, their blood is no redder than yours, and their life is no more important than yours.

A modern person might criticize my conception of love for ignoring emotion. I respond that the real love emotion is a very strong emotion, and the real love emotion coupled with the knowledge and feeling that the other party will keep their end of the contract will motivate you to keep the contract. Second, although the peripheral attraction emotions are not “part” of love, they are necessary for a healthy relationship, especially in the romantic context. You should not enter into the love contract with somebody you are not attracted to or do not like.

The interplay between peripheral attraction emotions and the real love emotion

Although peripheral attraction emotions are not technically part of love, they are incredibly important because human beings are apes and we have certain emotional and physical wants and needs. We need sex, we need food, we need shelter, and we need affection. If we do not get those things, it will be difficult for us to commit to loving somebody.

A healthy conception of love would view peripheral attraction emotions as necessary preconditions that must be fulfilled so that the real love emotion can form. Peripheral attraction emotions are like a bridge connecting two people that allows ivy to grow from one person to another, the ivy being the real love emotion. If the bridge weakens or falls the ivy also usually goes with it, unless the ivy is very strong. The ivy wants to grow no matter what, so if there is no bridge to another person, the ivy will grow on some other structure, often in a twisted or bizarre way.

However, the same way a cocaine addict cannot enjoy other parts of life if they are deprived of cocaine, people can become addicted to peripheral attraction emotions and ruin their ability to feel the real love emotion. For example, if a guy feels like he must have the hottest blonde at all times, he is naturally going to hop from woman to woman and never develop the real love emotion with any of them. Similarly, if a woman becomes addicted to rich men who buy her shit all the time, she will not be able to form the real love emotion because she will get bored of guys who stop spending money. Also, men will realize she’s just a gold digger and kick her to the curb when they find a cheaper, hotter hooker.

Interestingly, the media and entertainment industry encourages us to become addicted to peripheral attraction emotions by bombarding us with images of beautiful people, huge mansions, celebrities, fabulous lifestyles, crazy porn, etc.... Yet movies and TV shows simultaneously shame people who are attracted to money, appearance, or alpha males as “shallow,” while praising people who are attracted to stuff like personality (whatever that means) or shared interest in movies. Both messages are wrong: there is a room for attraction to appearance, financial stability, etc…, but one must not become addicted to those things, lest you constantly chase a stronger high.

The mixed messages sent by pop culture creates the worst of all worlds: people become addicted to peripheral attraction emotions, yet simultaneously feel ashamed of their addiction, so they date or marry a person whom they are attracted to for the “right” reasons, and then chase their addictions on the side. For many, a vicious cycle develops - because people are starved of the real love emotion, they chase ever more extreme versions of the peripheral attraction emotions, which cause them to have even more difficulty obtaining and keeping the real love emotion.

Ultimately, true love requires controlling the peripheral attraction emotions. Your wife will not be hot forever. Your kid will not be likable all the time. But the goal is to force your rational responsibilities and your real love emotion to overcome your peripheral attraction emotions, which are lower emotions.

The science

The following is therefore a very rough sketch of the relevant science, with the caveat that I am not a scientist.

Scientists have discovered many neurochemicals that are related to attraction and bonding between two humans, including serotonin (a neurotransmitter often associated with spiritual or mystical experiences – what your brain releases when you do psychedelic mushrooms), dopamine (a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure – what your brain releases when do cocaine, have sex, eat chocolate, etc…), adrenaline (a hormone that gives you energy), oxytocin (a powerful hormone released by men and women during orgasm which scientists believe is associated with feelings of attachment), vasopressin (a hormone that works with your kidneys to control thirst and has also been linked to feelings of attachment), testosterone (the male sex hormone), and estrogen (the female sex hormone). Many of these chemicals are associated with human “reward pathways” that are designed to make us feel good when we do something beneficial for our survival and reproduction. Of course, other, undiscovered reward pathway chemicals may exist.

These chemicals, as you may have been observed, are mostly related to the peripheral attraction emotions, at least partly because even scientists’ view of love is influenced by pop culture. Most scientists probably do not even know about the concept of the “real love emotion” and even if they have, it would be difficult to link the existence of the aforementioned neurochemicals to this particular conception of love using scientific methods.

A brief history of love

I present here a brief history of love. I make crazy overgeneralizations and oversimplifications (i.e., summarizing the entire Enlightenment in a sentence) to stay brief, so a real historian/philosopher would probably rip me a new butthole.

When I say “people in traditional societies thought like X” I don’t mean that every single person in those societies thought like X – I mean that X was the general prevailing thought pattern and was enforced by the powerful people in society.

I note that traditional societies did not create social rules by analyzing science, but rather by aggregating the life experiences and feelings of many people, observing subtle nuances of human behavior, creating general rules with this information, and then incorporation and synchronizing these rules into the tradition. This complex process allowed traditional rules to capture complex and subtle truths that science often cannot. This complexity, however, made traditional knowledge vulnerable: most members of the society could not rationally articulate why these rules were correct, and the younger generation were expected to unquestioningly accept the tradition without adequate explanation. An inadequately articulated and defined tradition is vulnerable, which is how modern and post-modern thinkers easily destroyed tradition by simply articulating sensible-sounding counter-arguments.

In my history, I do what I call “back-conceptualizing” – I describe social phenomena in bygone eras using concepts that the people in those eras may not have used or even been aware of. Historians do this all the time – the Enlightenment, Dark Ages, and Renaissance are just labels that modern people created after the fact to help understand those periods. Feminists back-conceptualize all the time. For example, they say that in traditional societies women were treated as “property” although nobody back then was consciously thinking “my wife is my property.”

Love in traditional societies

Most traditional societies viewed love similar to how I view love – as a contract whose terms depended on the nature of the relationship. In a parent-child relationship, for example, the child traditionally had an obligation to obey the parent, and the parent had an obligation to take care of the child. In male-female relationships, the contract was formalized by marriage (most traditional societies did not allow pre-marital sex or even dating), and each party was obliged to remain faithful to the other. Fidelity in traditional societies often had a far stricter definition than in the modern world; in some societies women were not allowed to even speak to another man without the permission of their husband. The man was usually obligated to work and provide for the family, whereas the woman was obligated to take care of the home and the children and to obey the husband.

These contracts were enforced by society if a woman was unfaithful to her husband, not only could her husband divorce her or punish her, the entire society would stigmatize her, leaving her a social outcast, sometimes on the verge of death. Sometimes adulterous women were killed. These rules were supposed to apply to men, but were often enforced unequally.

Biblical love is the epitome of “love as a contract.” In the Bible, God enters into a covenant with the Israelite people. The word covenant just means contract. Each party to the covenant was bound by certain obligations, including the duty to love the other. God promises to love the Israelites and the Israelites promise to love God. This is clearly not pop culture love. How can one be “obligated” to love God emotionally when one cannot see, feel, or talk to God? And when God loves humanity, he clearly does feel emotional the same way a modern person feels “in love.” God doesn’t love people because they have a pretty smile or because they like Seinfeld. In the New Testament (a better translation of the ancient Greek title is actually “New Covenant”), the Old Testament covenant is replaced with a new, expanded covenant that includes all of humanity, but the “love” aspect is similar. Interestingly, God harshly punishes those he “loves” because he does what is best for them, not necessarily what they want him to do.

Emotion was generally less important in traditional societies. Most people were expected to marry somebody that was considered “good” for them according to society’s rules. The match was often made or approved by third parties, and in some arranged marriages the parties had no say it all in choosing their partner. Once married, people were expected to stay in the marriage no matter what, even if feelings or circumstances changed. It was unacceptable to leave because you had “fallen” out of love.

Because emotion was less important in traditional societies, people were often prohibited from marrying people in rival castes, tribes, classes, etc... The idea of a “soulmate” that transcended cultural lines did not exist. Poets in traditional societies often churned out poems portraying a more “modern” conception of love, but the elders in those societies prevented people from putting that mindset into action.

Problems with traditional love

Although the traditional conception of love is similar to mine, love in traditional societies had serious problems. To ensure social stability, people were often matched for stupid reasons unrelated to the parties’ happiness or well-being like family alliances, social segregation, business reasons, etc... Traditional societies aimed for stability, so almost everybody was matched with somebody, even if they were unlikable and unattractive. The peripheral attraction emotions were largely ignored and many marriages were miserable, often from the very beginning.

A defender of traditional marriage may argue that by obeying society’s elders, married couples would eventually develop the “right” feelings for each other. This may be true to some extent, but the truth is that some people will never like each other, no matter how “correct” their relationship is on paper.

The traditional love contract was also often unclear, oppressive to the weaker party, and unfairly enforced. What happens if one person becomes an abusive, lazy, drug-addicted, asshole? Have they violated the contract or must the other party stay? Traditional societies often did not have answers for these questions, and usually erred on the side of keeping marriages together, implicitly accepting that many people would be miserable.

In traditional societies men often abused their position of power by imposing unfair and oppressive contractual terms on women. Women (and most men) have a primal desire to follow the leadership of an “alpha male” they respect, but most men are not alpha males (nor were they in traditional societies), so weak men often held onto their dominant position in the relationship by abuse, threats, and coercion. Furthermore, men that were not alpha males often mistook women’s desire to follow an alpha male for weakness and stupidity, and treated women according to this low opinion. Women, however, are not stupid, and this oppression only increased their resentment and eventually made them amenable to feminism.

Finally, because men were in power, they would often not enforce the contracts fairly, so, for example, a woman would be punished for adultery but a man would not. “Love as a contract” only works if the terms of the contract are fair, clearly understood, and enforced fairly, which was often not the case.

Men, however, were not free of obligations, and it interesting that as social views on love and relationships evolved, many of women’s obligations have been discarded (cooking, cleaning, raising the children), while men’s obligations often still remain (supporting his wife and children financially). Perhaps this shift is influenced by feminism. A woman who does not cook or clean, and passes her child off to nannies is not considered a wrongdoer by either the law or most modern people, but a man who does not support his family is looked down upon and can even go to jail. Feminists sometimes even admit that the evolution of social responsibilities is “revenge” on men for historical misdeeds.

Similarly, there is no enforcement mechanism for marriage vows, essentially making the institution of marriage an outdated relic of the past, like an old clock that decorates a room but no longer accurately tells the time. A few friends or family may shun a cheater because they see him or her as a bad person, but a cheater otherwise will generally maintain good standing in society and be able to date, find a job, etc... There are no legal consequences to cheating, and in fact, with the rise of “no fault” divorce, a person can cheat and still be legally awarded half of their spouse’s assets.

Before you accuse me of being anti-man or anti-woman, I will note that unfair enforcement of relationship contracts is the result of a power imbalance. For example, in traditional societies, parents had disproportionate power in the parent-child relationship, so those contracts were often unfair and enforced arbitrarily. Children in traditional societies were often treated like slaves, and one of the innovations of Judaism and Christianity was to prohibit child sacrifice.

The evolution of love

Western civilization has a unique intellectual history, which led to a conception of “love” radically different from that of most traditional societies. I will briefly and simplistically summarize this evolution.

In the Middle Ages, when Christianity had full ideological and political control in the West, a group of philosophers known as the “scholastics” began trying to justify Christianity with logic and rationality, often using ancient Greek philosophy to help their arguments. Most modern philosophers and respected intellectuals agree that the scholastic philosophers failed at “proving” religion rationally. No matter what you think of Christianity, you must admit that certain aspects of Christianity (god, heaven, angels, etc…) cannot be rationally proven because there are no indisputable “reasons” to accept their truth (remember rationality just means “with reason”). Although some scholastic philosophy was brilliant, much of it was absurd speculation, and the purportedly “rational” arguments were anything but. The joke about “arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” began as a knock against scholastic philosophers.

The scholastic philosophers created an important legacy, however: by re-introducing and emphasizing logic and rationality in European philosophy, and allowing non-Christian philosophers to join the conversation, the scholastics set the stage for the Enlightenment (around 1715 to 1789). Enlightenment philosophers criticized Christianity and tradition, much of which was based on Christianity, in favor of “reason,” turning the tools of the scholastics against them. Most Enlightenment philosophers were nominally Christian, probably because Christianity still held political control, but their work was subversive and often bucked Christianity and tradition.

Much of the Enlightenment, like most Western Philosophy, was a failure from a purely philosophical standpoint. Most of the “rational” arguments philosophers have made throughout history were not actually rational but rather influenced by their feelings, political and religious allegiances, accepted thought patterns of the time, and other unstated and sometimes subconscious assumptions. The Enlightenment was no different. Philosophers of all eras have been pretentious, arrogant snobs, but the Enlightenment philosophers were especially arrogant, anbelieved that they could safely throw any tradition in the trash if they could disprove it with their “rationality.” This Enlightenment tendency still exists in the modern world, and helps explain the horrific conception of love modern people have.

The Romantic movement

The Enlightenment produced a lot of great shit like science, theories of democracy, etc… But human beings are emotional animals, so any philosophy that tries to base everything on reason will lose popularity. Just as the Enlightenment was a backlash against the irrationality of Christianity, the Romantic movement (around 1780 to 1850) was a backlash against the “over-rationality” of the Enlightenment. Romanticism started as a “way of feeling” expressed in art and literature, and was only later articulated by philosophers. The Romantics emphasized emotion, imagination, spontaneity and individualism. And not just regular emotion, but deep, powerful, and crazy emotion. One could even say that Romanticism represented human’s search for transcendence in an overly mechanized and rational world.

Even though most people nowadays have no idea what the word “Romanticism” even means, the Romantic mindset has penetrated the modern consciousness so deeply that people don’t even realize there are other ways to think. In the “History of Western Philosophy” Bertrand Russell argues that Romanticism is the root of many of modern society’s worst tendencies–fake concern for the poor and oppressed, irrational rejection of tradition and morality, an unrealistic, idealized conception of reality, a rejection of practical things in favor of “beautiful” things, and worst of all, worship of wild emotions. Basically, the Romantic movement represents how far-left hipsters generally think. In art, the Romantics preferred crazy scenes of tall mountains, fearful precipices, sea storms, and according to Russell, “what is useless, destructive, and violent” to mundane, practical stuff like a lush meadow or fields of corn. In literature, Romantics rejected stories that could have happened to real people and instead focused on shit like ghosts, decayed castles, and pirates because they were only interested in shit that was “grand, remote, and terrifying.”

The modern conception of love

Modernity has combined the Enlightenment’s rejection of tradition and Romanticism’s embrace of wild emotion to create a completely nihilistic, irrational, impulsive conception of love. Movies, television shows, pop songs, popular novels, and even high-minded intellectuals and university professors constantly hammer this view into our heads to the point where people will shame you if you do not accept that the love is nothing more than a wild, uncontrollable emotion. The dominant conception of love is also irrational, based on an idealized conception of the world, and dismissive of any practical considerations – a legacy from the Romantic movement.

In love stories in movies and TV, two people that are not right for each other according to practical considerations nevertheless “fall in love.” After they are united, the movie ends. In other words, the movie ends before we can see the parties actually try to love each other.

The cycle of heartbreak

Because the modern world conflates “love” with peripheral attraction emotions, and relationships create no obligations, most people at least subconsciously know that the statement “I love you” is a temporary commitment at best and a lie at worst, subject to change when the person’s feelings change or when they find somebody they like more. A collective action problem exists in the modern world – nobody enforces love contracts, so nobody fully commits to anybody else out of fear they will get screwed. This vicious cycle causes people to act more and more selfish and insular.

The following story happens to many modern people, unless they live in a religious community that forbids dating:

In middle or high school, which are unregulated zoos of young apes acting horribly and frequently inflicting massive and lasting psychological damage on each other, boys and girls form crushes on each other. The low status boys and girls are repeatedly rejected and often form intense feelings of inferiority and resentment against the opposite sex. Unless they fix their issues, these people often become forever alone types, raging woman haters, extreme feminists, and all manner of weirdos. This resentment can develop anytime in life, but it is particularly dangerous when it happens in children, because children do not have the cognitive tools to rationally deal with these thoughts and feelings.

The “high status” or attractive boys and girls, on the other hand, get into relationships, often with no adult supervision or even adult knowledge. These relationships are often deep and passionate because teenagers have wild hormones and have never felt these emotions before. They also have not yet built defense mechanisms to getting hurt or rejected. This is why people often say your “first love” is the strongest.

However, because middle schoolers and high schoolers are stupid and immature, and not bound by any obligations, one party almost always ends up cheating or breaking the other’s heart. The pain of being rejected by your first love is extremely traumatic, causing most people to consciously or subconsciously decide to not “love” again and to reject anybody who implicitly or explicitly offers love or a deep emotional connection.

The real love emotion, however, is subconscious and can develop on its own, even if one does not seek a deep emotional connection. People’s fear of love creates a bizarre paradox: we erect a “love shield” to repel love, but we lower the love shield when people do not claim to love us, and because our shield is down, we subconsciously form both peripheral attraction emotions and the real love emotion for the emotionally distant person. In other words, we are attracted to emotionally distant people because they promise to not create feelings of attachment, but we form feelings of attachment to them anyway. This is partly why so many men and women are obsessed with people who do not care about them at all. Relationships are a selfish exercise for most: we choose somebody we are attracted to but who makes clear they want nothing from us, we project our own feelings of love and attraction on them, and then we run away if they ask for anything in return.

Furthermore, even though we try to repress the desire to feel love, the real love emotion cannot be destroyed and will express itself in bizarre and unhealthy ways. The real love emotion is often directed by the “soulmate fantasy,” which is the pop culture myth that every person is entitled to “fall in love” with their “soulmate,” who is “perfect” for them and thrills all of their emotions. Strangely, nobody’s soulmate is ever a fat, lazy, drug addict – don’t those people need soulmates too?

The “soulmate fantasy” is a selfish lie. When we feel deep attraction to somebody, the soulmate fantasy, coupled with our desire to feel the real love emotion, convinces us that our newly found “soulmate” must feel the same way about us. Remember, movies never depict a situation where a person’s soulmate doesn’t like them! Despite its absurdity, the soulmate fantasy provides an ecstatic emotional high which causes us to develop insane, bizarre fantasies about our future with somebody we barely know. The pop culture myth of “love at first sight,” provides further justification for projecting our wildest fantasies onto a stranger, even if that person has not invested in us at all.

When we feel like somebody is our soulmate, we begin to develop the real love emotion, even when there is no rational reason to. This is why people become stalkers. The person being stalked has not shown adequate interest, yet the stalker has created a fantasy in his or her own head that they “belong” together. As you can imagine, most stalkers are lonely and starved of the real love emotion.

The idea of a soulmate is insane nonsense, so people are constantly disappointed, causing them to become depressed and lonely, which causes them to seek their soulmate with even more vigor. Many people are deep in this vicious cycle, causing them to instantly act needy and strange in any kind of relationship or interaction with people they are attracted to.

Pop culture portrays love, relationships, sex, and dating as fun, lighthearted recreation, which causes people to not take these subjects seriously or think deeply or rationally about them. This lack of seriousness is extremely dangerous, because these subjects literally touch our deepest and most primal emotions, and can cause massive psychological damage and pain if they go wrong.

Love and game

Most pick-up artists and seduction gurus focus solely on peripheral attraction emotions and never mention “love” because, like most modern people, they have no idea what love is. They also assume that “love” is irrelevant to what they are doing. If I am correct, however, humans are always subconsciously seeking the real love emotion, even when they think they just want random sex.

Seduction gurus mistakenly think attraction is the "link" that holds a relationship together but the truth is that the real love emotion is the link and attraction is the scaffolding that keeps the real love emotion in place. An alpha male who is pursuing his mission and is not a needy pushover is simply creating a clear portal for a woman to form an emotional link to him. A man who is needy, supplicating, or weak is clogging the portal with selfish emotions that repel women. Pop culture is not wrong when it says that women want a nice guy who loves them - pop culture just leaves out the fact that the man must also be an alpha male who is not needy or emotional towards them.

In fact, women feel MORE loved around the alpha male who does not supplicate to her because he is being honest about who he is (a man whose focus is his mission), and is not trying to manipulate her with supplication. A weak beta male cannot do what is best for her because he cannot challenge her, protect her, be a role model for her, or expand her consciousness.

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