Reality often hinders both love and human
happiness.
Despite this, the need for love and happiness
remains essential for our standards of living
and, ultimately, it’s up to us and our creativity
if we manage to keep our sanity and moral
conduct or not.
This is your host Amelia, and today we dive
into a challenging matter of social existence:
couple stability.
Synthetic love - sounds a bit strange, like
a sinister invention of the consumerist society.
But it’s not like that, at all.
If there’s synthetic happiness, with such
positive effects on our mental health, why
wouldn't we also have synthetic love?
But let’s just start with the beginning.
Namely, let’s define the synthetic happiness.
The scientists who study happiness, this interesting
phenomenon of human nature, have discovered
that there are two types of being happy: 1.
1. The natural happiness and
2. The synthetic happiness.
While the natural happiness is lived when
our wants come true (that is rather seldom),
the synthetic happiness is experienced whenever
we are able to produce it, regardless of the
context.
The synthetic happiness occurs when, not having
our wishes fulfilled, we are able to do this
Mambo-Jambo which makes us happy.
The Mambo Jambo consists in a particular outlook
on life and a specific way of making evaluations,
that will lead us towards a mental state of
well-being and even to what we call happiness.
For instance, we could appreciate the things
we have and depreciate the things we don’t
- and behold, we are almost instantly happy!
But while there’s happiness of synthesis,
there’s also the love of synthesis, because
after all, love is a way to happiness.
As the natural love (produced via fulfillment
of romantic wishes) is just as rare as the
natural happiness, there’s always room for
a little help if we want to still have love
in our life, maybe not like in the movies,
but at least one that keeps us warm at night
and offers us crumbs of satisfaction, at times.
And we can learn from the synthetic happiness
adopting the same principles:
1. Appreciating what we have - that is our partner
and
2. Depreciating what we don’t have - like other
potential partners.
If we are to apply these two principles, many
couple’s challenges are simply solved.
Of course, this way of tackling a couple’s
problems, excludes more serious things like
emotional abuse, intolerance, and physical
violence, that would need a slightly different
approach.
This cerebral style is meaningful for at least
a few reasons.
For instance, because natural happiness and
natural love are not supported by reality.
Just a few of our wishes come true and it’s
been discovered that passion only lasts for
12 months, until we reach to a better mutual
knowing.
Moreover, it’s been discovered that if we
are stuck in an abusive relationship and kept
there by our feelings, it’s enough to evaluate
it in negative terms: what are the annoying
habits of our partner?
Therefore, if we want to keep a certain partner
and perpetuate our love for them, we may have
to use a positive evaluation of them and even
transform their flaws into qualities.
In other words, the scientifically proven
secret of relationship longevity and couple
happiness is using “pink colored sunglasses”.
And this is what we could very well call as
“synthetic love”.
You will ask: “OK, but is this real love?”
Well, the real love is rather a virtual construction
than an actual reality.
The religions might talk about “The Real
Love”, involving unconditional self-sacrifice
and, why not, altruistic self-destruction
in the name of love, if we really want to
experience something like that.
On the other hand, each one of us might define
“The True Love” just as we please, according
to our own needs or interests: “true love
is when you are still in love while not meeting
your loved one for many years.”
Or maybe, on the contrary: “true love is
if you are still in love after many years
of living together”.
Love and hate, as survival tools, are rather
primal forms of energy that occur naturally
when we interact with the environment, having
an orientation role.
What makes them be “Real” is rather the
product of civilization, a result of religious
and cultural models, than a mere product of
nature.
As studies have proven, nature is weak and
unable to provide resources needed for the
couple’s stability.
If we are to limit ourselves to what nature has given
us, and to what we feel naturally, the social
life would be hideous and our children would
reasonably despise us.
We would have tens of children with tens of
different partners and a hard time remembering
their names and their birthdays.
We are animated by primordial energies that
take the form of our personality: wiser or
more naive, vulgar or refined, hot or cold,
laidback or fierce.
As a matter of fact, the way we love is an
excellent personality test, that gives us
the measure of our moral evolution and our
mental health.
A real love or at least a fulfilled one is
the result of compatibility and context but
also, the result of a well-developed capacity
to synthesize love.
Given the fact that natural love is rather
invalid, it desperately needs synthetic love
so that social life as we know it, does not
go extinct.
