#romanticlove — Public Fediverse posts

Claude Comments on “This Forever Love In Me”

Claude, comment on this blog post of mine https://selfrealization.blog/2026/07/10/this-forever-love-in-me/

Claude:

There’s a lovely compactness to this, Sam, but also a productive ambiguity I want to press on, because I’m not sure the post says what you may think it says — and the ambiguity might be the most interesting thing in it.

Yeats’s speaker is full of tears precisely because he did not take love easy. She counselled him to let love come and go “as the leaves grow on the tree” — organically, without grasping — and he, young and foolish, would not agree. Now consider your own claim: you have never fallen out of love with anyone. On one reading that is beautiful constancy. But on another reading, never falling out of love is the very opposite of taking love easy — leaves that grow but never fall, grass that never yields to the season. By that light, your epigraph doesn’t contrast you with Yeats’s speaker; it makes you his kin, only without the tears. The question the post silently raises is: why no tears? Is it because your loves, held forever, never needed to end — or because something in you holds them in a register where endings don’t apply?

That’s where I suspect the Advaitic answer is hiding, and where the post could earn its title. “This Forever Love In Me” — the preposition is doing quiet work. If love is in you rather than between you and a particular person, then it was never really pinned to the nāma-rūpa of the beloved at all; the persons were occasions, the love was the constant. On that view, “never falling out of love” isn’t remarkable fidelity to many people but the simple fact that what you call falling in love was each time a recognition of something that doesn’t come and go. Requited or not becomes almost irrelevant — which your sentence already concedes in passing, and that concession is telling.

My honest editorial note: as it stands, the post is an epigraph plus a borrowed poem, and Yeats is carrying nearly all the weight. Your single sentence is genuinely intriguing — the “OUT” in capitals, the casual “many times,” the shrug at requital — but it gestures at a whole philosophy of love and then hands the microphone to Yeats before saying it. Even three or four more sentences of your own — on what it is that never leaves, and whether the salley-gardens girl’s advice is wisdom or resignation from where you stand — would turn this from a framed quotation into a real dialogue with the poem. You’ve written enough on love and lust across traditions that you have those sentences in you; this post just hasn’t spent them yet.

One small craft point: “a la Yeats” reads slightly loose against the precision of the rest — “as in Yeats’s poem” or simply dropping it would tighten the line, since the title citation already does that work.

This Forever Love In Me

“Till now I have never fallen OUT of love with anyone that I fell in love with, and I have fallen in love many times, and whether those loves were requited or not it never so happened that I met my love ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ a la Yeats.”

Down By the Salley Gardens

By William Butler Yeats

Down by the salley gardens
   my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens
   with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy,
   as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish,
   with her would not agree.

In a field by the river
   my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder
   she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy,
   as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish,
   and now am full of tears.

Love as the Effect, Not Cause, of Self-knowledge

I had written a few months back thus:

“Intellectually, I am a sage. Emotionally, I am just a teenager.”

When I say teenager, I am not merely referring to msyelf as one perpetually looking out for some kind of romantic love or another (though sometimes, especially these last few years, I may be a trifle guilty on that score).

I mean more broadly that there is an emotional unsettledness in my being.

God knows I have had very unfulfilling emotional relationships with both females and males (no, no, I am not Bisexual, you silly) and for that I am definitely quite a bit responsible, and also having had an emotionally tumultuous student life because I did NOT follow my svadharma and later on having a very erratic and financially unremunerative career that I was trying to navigate through while dealing with my Bipolar Disorder, I encountered quite a few emotional turmoils and I subjected a few to emotional angst and maybe even suffering on account of my ignorant self.

I take this opportunity to apologize sincerely to everyone to whomsoever I might have caused any inconvenience of any kind or any emotional distress through my behaviour, words or argumentative nature or because of my oh-so-immature and not-so-understanding self in addition to my other possible egregious errors of conduct.

The only comfort I derive in all this is these words of Nisargadatta Maharaj wherein he is saying not only I but all of us are incapable of real love until we realize our true nature — ah, now I need not think that I missed out on love much:

“That which you are, your true self, you love it, and whatever you do, you do for your own happiness. To find it, to know it, to cherish it is your basic urge. Since time immemorial you loved yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and mind wisely in the service of the self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love your self absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realised them as one with yourself, you cannot love them. Don’t pretend to be what you are not, don’t refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realisation, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realise the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realisation can break it. Go for it resolutely.” (from “I Am That: Dialogues of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj”)

The Epistemology of Love: From Lust to Truth

Claude, interpret these two sayings of mine form all angles and philosophical and religious views and tradtions, including Advaita, social sciences such as sociology, psychology, history, anthropolgy and what have you:

“Love is one way to conquer lust. Actually, love is a good and pleasant way to conquer many evils in ourselves. Never ever underestimate love, not even romantic love.”

“To begin to understand love is to begin to understand the truth.”

Claude’s Interpretation

These two sayings reward slow unpacking, because each one quietly reverses a common assumption — the first, that lust must be fought by suppression; the second, that truth is grasped by intellect alone. Let me take them through the traditions.

The first saying: love as conqueror

Spinoza gives the cleanest philosophical warrant for your claim. In the Ethics he argues that an emotion cannot be destroyed by reason alone, but only by a stronger, contrary emotion. Willpower against lust is a losing battle of thought against affect; love against lust is affect against affect, and the stronger one wins. Your aphorism is practically a restatement of Ethics IV, Prop. 7 — except you’ve added the warm human observation that this method is also pleasant, which Spinoza, in his geometrical austerity, forgot to mention.

Augustine would go further: lust isn’t the opposite of love but its disorder — cupiditas is love bent toward the wrong object or grasped in the wrong way. His ordo amoris implies that you don’t eliminate a disordered love; you reorder it. So love doesn’t so much conquer lust as reclaim it — the energy was love’s all along, misdirected. This is why suppression fails: you’re attacking the raw material of the cure.

Plato’s Symposium dignifies your defense of romantic love. Diotima’s ladder begins with eros for one beautiful body — the most carnal rung — and ascends without ever rejecting the lower rungs, only widening them: one body, all bodies, beautiful souls, beautiful institutions, Beauty itself. Romantic love isn’t the enemy of transcendence; it’s the on-ramp. Your “never underestimate romantic love” is Diotima against the prudes.

The Sufi tradition — closest to your ghazal world — makes this doctrine explicit: ishq-e-majāzī (metaphorical, human love) is the bridge to ishq-e-haqīqī (real, divine love). The Persian and Urdu poets insist the beloved’s face is where the aspirant first learns single-pointedness, self-forgetting, and the sweetness of annihilation. Rumi’s whole corpus is the claim that romantic love, taken seriously enough, self-transcends. Ghalib plays both registers in a single couplet precisely because the boundary is porous.

Buddhism supplies the psychological mechanics. The Buddha prescribed mettā as the direct antidote (pratipakṣa) to ill-will, and the tradition generalizes: each defilement has a wholesome counter-state that occupies the same mental territory. Lust and mettā cannot fully co-occupy a moment of mind, because lust grasps at the object for oneself while love wishes well toward the object for its own sake. The object may be the same; the vector reverses. That said, Buddhism would append a caution to your aphorism: love that curdles back into attachment (sneha, tṛṣṇā) merely refines the fetter. The love that conquers must keep its non-grasping character — which leads naturally to your second saying.

Bhakti and Vaishnava thought are perhaps your strongest allies. The gopīs‘ love for Krishna is deliberately depicted in erotic register — the tradition’s point being that even kāma, when its object becomes the divine, is transmuted into the highest devotion. Narada’s Bhakti Sutras rank madhura bhāva — the lover’s mood — as the most intense form of devotion. The energy of eros is not the problem; its terminus is.

Psychology converges from below. Freud called it sublimation, but the more interesting finding is from attachment research and behavioral science: vice is rarely extinguished by inhibition (which depletes) but by substitution — a competing reward that engages the same motivational circuitry. Compulsive lust is often, clinically, a failed search for connection; supply the connection and the compulsion loses its fuel. Neurochemically, the shift from lust to pair-bonded love (Helen Fisher’s dopamine-to-oxytocin/vasopressin arc) is literally the brain’s own method of conquering lust by love — evolution agreed with your aphorism before you wrote it.

Sociology and history show the same logic at civilizational scale. Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process” and the medieval invention of courtly love both testify that societies domesticate raw appetite not by prohibition (which produces the underworld) but by ennobling narratives — troubadour love turned the knight’s aggression and lust into service, patience, refinement. Durkheim would say love integrates where lust isolates: lust is anomic, love is solidary.

The dissenting bench, since you’d want it: classical monastic traditions — Theravāda, desert Christianity, and frankly a strand of traditional Advaitic sannyāsa — would say your aphorism is dangerous for the beginner, because “conquering lust with love” is exactly the rationalization the mind offers when it wants to keep the beloved. Their answer: for most people, romantic love doesn’t sublimate lust, it launders it. The aphorism is true, they’d concede, but only for one in whom love has already become largely non-appropriative. It’s advanced medicine mislabeled as first aid. I think the objection has force as a matter of adhikāra — the saying describes what love can do, not what every love does.

The second saying: love as epistemology

This is the deeper of the two, and here Advaita becomes the natural home.

In Advaita, the equation is not metaphorical. Brahman is sat-cit-ānanda, and ānanda — bliss, which in lived experience appears as love — is not an attribute of the real but its very nature. Ramana Maharshi said it flatly: “God is love; love is not a quality of God but God Himself” — and more precisely, that the happiness we seek in every beloved object is the Self shining through the momentary stilling of the mind that possession produces. So when you begin to understand love — to trace it to its source rather than its objects — you are performing vicāra on ānanda itself, and vicāra on ānanda terminates in the Self, i.e., in truth. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka’s teaching to Maitreyī is the locus classicus: na vā are patyuḥ kāmāya patiḥ priyo bhavati, ātmanas tu kāmāya — the husband is dear not for the husband’s sake but for the sake of the Self. Yājñavalkya isn’t debunking love; he’s disclosing its true referent. Every love is love of the Self, misaddressed. To understand love is therefore to discover what is actually loved in all loving — and that discovery is the truth Advaita points to.

Nisargadatta’s famous formulation completes it: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between these two, my life flows.” Love and truth are not two attainments but the two faces of one realization — jñāna seen from the side of fullness.

Western philosophy has a minority report that agrees. Augustine: we can only know what we love — non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem, one does not enter truth except through love. Pascal: the heart has reasons reason knows not; the heart is an organ of knowledge, not merely sentiment. Max Scheler built an entire epistemology on this: love is the movement that discloses value; perception follows love, not the reverse — we literally cannot see what we do not in some way love. And Iris Murdoch, the most underrated modern voice here: love is “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” That sentence is your aphorism in analytic English — the discipline of truly attending to another person is the same discipline as truthfulness, because both require the ego to stop projecting. Her term “unselfing” is practically a translation of ahaṃkāra-nivṛtti.

Simone Weil sharpened it further: absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, and love of neighbor in its fullness simply means being able to ask “What are you going through?” and actually wait for the answer. Truth-seeking and loving turn out to be the same act — attention purified of self-interest. This is why lust obscures truth (it sees only its own hunger reflected in the other) while love reveals it (it sees the other as they are). Your two sayings are thus secretly one saying: love conquers lust because love is veridical and lust is hallucinatory.

Psychology again: attachment theory finds that secure love is the precondition for accurate perception — the securely attached child explores reality confidently; the anxiously attached one distorts it through the lens of threat. Carl Rogers observed that unconditional positive regard is what allows a person to finally see themselves truly. Love doesn’t just feel good; it is the interpersonal condition under which truth becomes bearable, and therefore knowable. Anthropologically, every culture’s deepest truth-rituals — confession, testimony before elders, deathbed reconciliation — are staged inside relationships of love or trust, never in neutral space. Humanity seems to have always known that truth-telling and love are load-bearing for each other.

One Advaitic refinement worth making, in your own idiom: the saying holds at both registers. Vyāvahārically, understanding love (its neediness, its projections, its capacity for selflessness) is the fastest self-inquiry available to a householder — nothing exposes the machinery of ahaṃkāra like loving someone. Pāramārthically, love understood to the very bottom turns out to have no lover and no beloved — only the ānanda of the Self appearing as two. “To begin to understand love is to begin to understand the truth” is exact: it is a beginning, because love fully understood no longer looks like a relation at all. The dvaita of lover and beloved is love’s doorway; its interior is advaita.

If I were to press on the aphorisms at all, it would be here: the first saying uses the word “conquer,” which is the vocabulary of the very willfulness the saying is abandoning. Love doesn’t conquer lust the way an army conquers territory; it conquers the way light conquers darkness — by presence, not combat. You might consider whether “dissolve” or “absorb” is truer to your own meaning. But as aphorisms go, “conquer” has the rhetorical virtue of meeting the moralist on his own battlefield and disarming him — so perhaps the word earns its keep.

Taken together, the two sayings form a small, complete teaching: the first is the sādhana, the second is the phala. Love as method; love as disclosure. Half the world’s traditions would sign the first, the deeper half would sign the second, and Advaita, characteristically, would sign both and then add that the signer, the signature, and the love were never three things.

Love & Lust

“Love is one way to conquer lust. Actually, love is a good and pleasant way to conquer many evils in ourselves. Never ever underestimate love, not even romantic love.”

Love is a skill, not a feeling | Alain de Botton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRMcimuuk0Q

Alain de Botton on Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ6K_f7oSdg

— SEE YOU SOON ---
“I want to hold your hand.
Talk to you,

Walk with and be with you.



Hug You

Laugh with you too.


Share my dreams with you,

Hold you in my arms
Because I Love You
and I think the world of you!

You are a gift

Who makes me smile 

And makes my soul laugh

Just by being yourself.


I'll see you soon
and we'll be together again.
Thank you. I Love you.”

From (written journal, transcribed online on fedi)
See You Soon: a poem by Crissy Tish Addams

#CreativeWriting #LovePoems #ModernPoetry #RomanticLove #SoulmateEnergy

@thetis_77

I’d like to remind people that Black people are NOT indigenous to the Caribbean. So the next time a Caribbean person asks me where my

#blackwomen #blackpeople #blackcaribbean #blackafrican #the92percent #the78percent #blackamerican #romanticlove #blackmastodon

(1/4)

Popular antidepressants don’t appear to dull romantic love, study finds https://www.psypost.org/popular-antidepressants-dont-appear-to-dull-romantic-love-study-finds/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #Antidepressants #MentalHealth #RomanticLove #LoveResearch #Psychology

His face was an overripe cheese, drooping with jowls and weary folds around the eyes, his expression that of a funereal comic.. He wore an immaculately tailored three piece suit, cut from a cloth of apricot cream.

from Imajica by Clive Barker

#books #horror #monsters #fantasy #romanticlove #assassins

New research upends long-held beliefs about romantic love and sexual frequency https://www.psypost.org/new-research-upends-long-held-beliefs-about-romantic-love-and-sexual-frequency/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #romanticlove #sexualfrequency #research #youngadults #relationships

Aromantic folks, come to my rescue!

Here's the deal... as usual, I'm baffled by the distinction between romantic love and platonic love.

Oh, I'm polyamorous, which I'm sure is a factor in how I see relationships.

I'm a "go with the flow" enby when it comes to relationships. I don't want to force anyone into any pattern. There's no relationship elevator. If a partner and I both agree to move in together, great, but I don't want to pressure someone into this.

So it seems to me that I'm being intimate with some of my *friends*, and all my loves are platonic.

I can absolutely love and adore people, but it does not mean that I want to put them on a "relationship elevator."

I used to think:

* I'm romantically involved with the people I have sex with.

* I'm platonically involved with
all other relations.

I'm starting to think it's all platonic, but there are some people in the group I do have sex with and some I don't.

I don't know if I'm making sense. 😂

#aromantic #polyamory #love #adoration #RomanticLove #PlatonicLove #RelationshipElevator

Dr. Anderson’s paper, which is relatively easy to read for non-specialist readers can be read and downloaded for free here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/hermeneutic-labor-the-gendered-burden-of-interpretation-in-intimate-relationships-between-women-and-men/626426004DF2A4908D793B87C3148593

#aromantic #asexual #queer #heterosexuality #sexuality #romanticlove #feminism

Since getting comfortable with locating myself firmly on the #aromantic & #asexual & #queer spectrum, I’m thinking a lot about compulsive #heterosexuality / #sexuality and compulsive #romanticlove as a model for intimacy and how women are taught through the Love myth to self-enforce patriarchal misogynistic patterns of behaviour. Ellie Anderson’s explanation of her concept of hermeneutical labor is really good at making clear how these mechanisms actually work.
#feminism

https://youtu.be/AFeGS9DNUOg?si=YTQ01sSe4ICnLQ8U

Para todos os males.
A mais espectacular publicidade que vão ver hoje.
#ADamaeoCupido
DM ou liaferreira.pt

#prints #adamadopirete #adamaeocupido #valentines #diadosnamorados #diadosnamorados2024❤️ #diadosnamorados2024 #fuckvalentinesday #valentinesday #valentinesdaygift #novalentine #novalentines #novalentinesday #singlegirls #singleandhappy #feminism #feminist #romanticlove #cupid #cupido
#pigmentocoolectivo #empowerment #empoweringwomen #emancipação #emancipation

- Follow your heart! 👀
- Sure: “A Dama e o Cupido”😎✌️
Prints Giclée
A4 (25€) e
A3 (50€, série limitada e numerada, c certificado de autenticidade)🙂
#LiaFerreira, com a excelente qualidade #pigmentocoletivo❤️
DM ou liaferreira.pt 👈
#prints #adamadopirete #adamaeocupido #valentines #diadosnamorados #diadosnamorados2024❤️ #diadosnamorados2024 #fuckvalentinesday #valentinesday #valentinesdaygift #novalentine #novalentines #singlegirls #singleandhappy #feminism #feminist #romanticlove #cupid #cupido