Tom Waits - Watch Her Disappear from Phil Bebbington on Vimeo.

"Love is a powerful emotion. Passionate love is stronger yet, so much so that it generates a congeries of other emotions: euphoric joy, fierce anxiety, episodes of despair alternating with exultant hope. The individual cannot sustain the intensity very long. Passionate love has, historically, been the stuff of poetry and legend. In real life, most cultures thoughout the centuries and, until recently, in the West have placed a terrifying penalty on passion, making it forbidden, sinful, and punishable in quite fearful ways. Religious and secular rulers have unambiguously disconnected passionate love from marriage and family. Despite tendencies to sentimentalize the experience, such love has had little place to go except to disaster and death. Authorities have feared its awesome force and its celebration of individual feeling over communal order.

Add to the combustible power of passionate love the igniting agency of sex, and one produces an explosion which all institutional authorities have conspired to suppress for thousands of years. By and large the authorities succeeded. But no longer: Today passionate love is expected to lead to sexual union, perhaps even to marriage and family. The consequences for individual and society are enor­mous, and we now turn to that "igniting agency"—sex—to examine some of those consequences,"

source: Love, Sex, and Intimacy / Their Psychology, Biology, and History

Elanie Hatfield, Richard L. Rapson

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind:

I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.

I hate my legs, I hate my hands,

I do not yearn for lovelier lands.

I dread the dawn's recurrent light;

I hate to go to bed at night.

I snoot at simple, earnest folk.

I cannot take the gentlest joke.

I find no peace in paint or type.

My world is but a lot of tripe.

I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.

For what I think, I'd be arrested.

I am not sick, I am not well.

My quondam dreams are shot to hell.

My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;

I do not like me any more.

I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.

I ponder on the narrow house.

I shudder at the thought of men . . .

I'm due to fall in love again.

Dorothy Parker

Sternberg's (1986) triangular theory of love

-How can we understand what type of love we are having at the beginning of a relationship?
-How can we chose the type we want?
-What happens if we want both of them in one type?

source: Happiness Hypothesis (2006)/ Jonathan Haidt

why do we love and cheat?

human brain connections

source: Technology Review

an interesting metaphor to understand the human mind

If we want to be able to understand universe, society, religions, relationships and each other...., we need to first understand our minds. Whatever we percieve is the result of our brain. The things around us just happen. According to our perception we just label them, we are the creator of good and bad...

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses an interesting metaphor which is derived from the ideas of Buddha, Plato and Freud, to explain how human mind works. According to his metaphor, we see the mind as an elephant and a rider.

The rider represents the controlled process of the brain which can be named conscious and it allows us to think about long term plans. The rider is an advisor or servant; not a king or president. The elephant, in contrast, the automatic process of the brain was shaped by the natural selection. It is related to our genes. The elephant includes feelings, reactions, emotions and intuitions.

The relationship between the rider and the elephant is not always simple and if they don`t work together very well, the internal conflicts appear. When the rider wants to go in a certain direction, the elephant might follow its own direction instead of obeying the rider. Then, either we start to complain about doing stupid things out of control or not expressing our selves because of too much control.