Need to comment each paragraph with 250 word in total it should be approx 750
Is it possible to maintain your individual identity if you are in love? Love is a major element within life that will affect our sense of who and what we are. It’s a complex set of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with strong feelings of affection, protectiveness, warmth, and respect for another person. Although; the affection and desire between two people when in love can often dominate the relationship, causing them to lack their own individuality. I believe that whether an individual is able to maintain their individual identity when in love is based on balance. Balance within a relationship is of key importance to ensure that your individuality is still able to express itself as it once did in your “pre-relationship” life. Hobbies/commitments that were priorities pre-relationship; such as work, family, friends or studies; are crucial for the “sustainability of pre-relationship you and your individualism (Toone, 2014).” However, individuals that have experienced past trauma or have been mis-treated, often lose their individual identity when in love. Due to horrid mistreatment or past trauma they’ve experienced, their self-worth and perception of themselves is often less than someone else, allowing the continuation of mistreatment in future relationships and treating one-self as deserving of less. To maintain your individual identity when in love, measures must be taken to ensure there is a blend of two lifestyles, as well as an individual life too. In saying so, you and your partner should continue date nights, plan trips away together, and think about your future with one another, all whilst respecting the differences that exist between you and your partner. Love is not a commitment, love is a promise; a promise to love every bit of each other, their individual features and quirks that gives them their identity. So indulge in the ‘you’ time that everyone needs, enjoy nights to yourself, appreciate your hobbies, allow your individual identity to continue to flourish when in a relationship. Change within any relationship is healthy, but staying true to the crux of who you were pre-relationship is critical and easily sustainable. Do we love a whole person or a set of properties? Initially, individuals may become attracted to others due to them satisfying a set of properties both physical and of their character, but as these feelings develop into love, we develop into loving the whole person, rather than their solely their properties. This can be explained as love causes humans to, as Singer asserts, ‘[give] an object emotional and pervasive importance regardless of its capacity to satisfy interests.’ (1984, p. 5) Thus, as our feelings develop, our ability to accept their flaws and value them based on more than purely their characteristics indicates that we love a whole person. One explanation of this is Gellner’s paradox, which explains that if our love for people was based on their properties, we would have to question the exclusivity and monogamy of love, as various individuals would exhibit certain properties which would satisfy us, making multiple people attractive to us, as different people would satisfy different properties. This explanation also puts into question why we are attracted to certain individuals rather than others, despite them exhibiting similar characteristics. This question indicates there is more to love and attraction than purely satisfaction of a set of properties and rather an unexplainable pull to another person, where, as Singer contends, ‘the lover takes an interest in the beloved as a person, and not merely a commodity.’ (1984, p.6) Another note is that such a set of properties would be embodied differently by each individual and thus, by saying we love a set of properties our scale of love would become too broad and this set of properties which our attraction is based upon would lose meaning. Bottom of Form What – if anything – differentiates friendship from romantic love? Although there are numerous factors in a friendship that are similar to that of romantic love, they evidently differ in a number of ways. Romantic love is comprised of two or more people that are physically and/or sexually attracted to one another and have the desire to belong to each other. This is further backed up by Van Hooft (2011) stating that a romantic relationship is ‘expressed in affection for, desire for’ another individual, both of which a friendship does not constitute. Furthermore, friendship does not require the desire to belong to each other. This is due to the fact that there is an unspoken agreement between individuals that friendship may form with an individual whilst still remaining friends with another, hence that lack of possessiveness. Van Hooft (2011) suggests that in a romantic relationship, there needs to be ‘sexual attraction, responsiveness to physical and physiognomic features, shared experiences and memories of romantic episodes, disagreements resolved, shared hopes, shared beliefs, common political affiliations and religious faiths, and so on’. Whilst this is true, a platonic relationship can adopt these features as well. Hence, romantic love can only be distinguished to platonic love by the previously mentioned attributes. This definition includes all relationships that involve romantic love. Open or polyamorous relationships, although constituting of more than two people, both follow the agreement that there is physical and/or sexual attraction between each other and that they belong to each other whilst in those relationships. Furthermore, relationships in which participants do not wish to engage in sexual activity, still follow the agreement that they belong to each other. This further solidifies the differentiation made.