What is the difference between love and infatuation?
I’ve found myself falling into the infatuation trap before. It’s really easy to confuse it with genuine love. But for me anyway, infatuation is a lot more like a drug.
It’s a feeling that consumes you with temporary euphoric highs, and deep, dark lows. It’s almost like a panicked state of obsession. It fills your brain so all you can think about is that person. You start to care less about what really matters in your own life…your goals, your friends, your work. All that matters when you’re infatuated, is them. And you feel a strong, leeching desire to mold yourself into the person you think they’d want you to be.
When you’re infatuated with someone, when that person gets closer to you in any way, you feel a rush. Like you’re on cloud 9. Like you just popped a bunch of really good ecstasy. And it feels amazing in the moment. But then when you sense them distancing from you in any way…an ignored text. A rescheduled date. Flirting with another person. Going out on the town without you. Whatever. It feels like the world is crumbling…like you’re going through a withdrawal. You panic and fear you’re going to lose them. There’s a constant push/pull. In those moments of panic all you care about is pulling them back to you. Those up and downs can be maddening over time.
At its core, I think infatuation is latching onto the idealized picture your brain paints of someone. Basically, the quintessential putting them on a pedestal. You feel in love with them even though you barely know what’s it like to really be with them. You understand there’s faults in that person, but you never actually fully process them. You start thinking crazy thoughts like “this person is perfect”…”this person is the solution to all of my problems, if I can just keep them I’ll be fulfilled”…or “this is my only chance, if I can’t have this person I’ll never be genuinely happy”. You think you’re madly in love. But it’s all shallow. Once that person actually starts getting closer to you…the infatuation can wear off pretty quickly…and you can be left feeling confused and deflated. Like a spent firework.
I think most “love at first sight”, and honeymoon periods is really just infatuation. It can turn into love, but it’s not really. And sometimes if you’re not careful, it can blind you and drag you down into some really dark places.
Love on the other hand, is a lot more comfortable. It’s less erratic. It grows slowly over time and stays pretty constant. Its the general feeling of caring and warmth towards someone. You can hate someone in a current moment, but still love them overall. You can find someone to be unattractive, or incompatible…and still love them deep down. You can have a fight with the person you love, and not fear you’re going to lose them…you just want to resolve it.
It’s not like a drug…it doesn’t have the highs and lows of infatuation. Its gotta be cultivated and nurtured. You don’t lose yourself in it, or have the drive to turn into the person they want you to be…love helps you find yourself, and drives you to become the person you want to be. Love for a partner isn’t really too different than the love you feel for a blood relative. It can be subtle and mellow…sometimes barely recognizable…but it’s always there. You’re connected to them at a deep primal level.
Why would a parent subscribe to the Anti-Vax movment?
I am NOT an anti-vaxxer, I do NOT think vaccines cause autism, I in NO WAY support denying children vaccines. I just understand where these parents are coming from when they feel the need to blame their child’s autism on something.
As a father of a severely autistic child I kind of sympathize for the parents who blame their child’s autism on vaccines. Not that I’m in any way an anti-vaxxer myself, but, I understand where that mindset comes from.
Autism isn’t diagnosed as an infant. In fact one of the hardest things about having a child with autism is for the first couple of years of their life, they’re completely normal. My son hit every single milestone at or ahead of time in his first couple of years of life. Sitting up, crawling, eating solid foods, he was happy and social and affectionate and in every single way a normal healthy baby boy developing in every way a normal healthy baby develops. He even started speaking a few words.
But then he started hitting speech delays. He stopped using those few babble words he had learned. Suddenly he wasn’t hitting milestones. He was having trouble potty training. He wasn’t playing well with other toddlers. And month after month passed until they turned into years and still he wasn’t talking. And pretty soon you’re looking at that autism diagnosis and you think to yourself “What went wrong? What happened to my son?”
It’s so hard to go from spending years thinking your child is completely healthy and normal and is going to grow up to be doing normal grown up things to realizing your son is going to need special education classes and speech therapy and being told that he may never speak. Like you want to think that SOMETHING had to have happened to cause this.
Around the same time the symptoms of autism start appearing in children is also around the same time you’re finishing off their vaccines. I understand how desperate a parent can be to cling onto some kind of reason. There’s a lot of emotion that comes with this and you feel like you need a place to channel those emotions. Something to blame. This whole anti-vaxxer crap fills the void for a lot of parents.
– divsky
Is “toxic masculinity” just a way of saying men are toxic?
Ever since I first started hearing “toxic masculinity” spouted everywhere, I asked myself (and others) what toxic femininity is.
Not too surprisingly, I got no answers. It wasn’t just that they didn’t have any ideas, all but a few refused to give an example. Women are by default flawless, and anything bad happening to them means they’re victims of men
You hear the phrase, “toxic masculinity” thrown around a lot. Here’s a useful definition, thanks to geekfeminism’s wiki:
- socially-constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth.
- Physically violent
- Unemotional
- Sexually aggressive.
That sums it up pretty well.
- debating “toxic masculinity”: progressive, feminist, recommendable
- debating “toxic femininity” (as you described it here): misogynist, reactionary, to be avoided.
Here’s the thing: feminists got it wrong. “Toxic masculinity” is not a social construct. Rather, it’s the uninhibited expression of base male biological urges: fighting, dominating, and fucking. “Toxic masculinity” isn’t taught; it’s within us. It’s the animal inside every man. If another man mocks you publicly, and you can feel a desire to pound his face into the ground, that’s your inner animal.
“Toxic masculinity” is just another way of referring to the Male Animal.
There are constant efforts to marginalize men and traditional masculinity. We can see it in TV and movies when it’s assumed that old-school masculinity is a facade put on by men. We can see it in feminist PSA’s, commercials, and other propaganda when they tell us that men should be “in touch with their feminine sides”. We can see it played out tacitly when there is no call to women to get in touch with their “masculine sides”.
All of this stuff seems to add up to something simple – there is a default assumption that men need to change. Change to what? We should be more like women! Female behavior is correct, and if only men could see that, then the world would be perfect! Besides, the science behind feminism has already shown us that men and women are exactly the same in every way except plumbing. Nevermind the fact that every cell in a man’s body is distinct from any and every cell in a woman’s body (due to XX vs XY chromosomes), because that couldn’t possibly affect anything.
No, we are all the same. So feminism just needs to “fix” men, and show us how to act. There is no genuine difference between the male and female experience, so this is just a matter of teaching boys to be sensitive. We have to teach little boys that it’s ok to cry – of course the bullies won’t pick on you for it, because we will have taught them to be sensitive! And then if we can just teach boys to stop raping, because they are clearly so dumb that they can’t tell it’s wrong, then everything will be peachy. We have to stop teaching everybody that facts and logic are more important to society than emotions – this is patriarchy and it’s ruining the world. We have to accept “feels > reals” and make that belief codified in law.
What is conspicuously lacking from the discourse is any discussion of the Female Animal.
Many words are spent here describing the female animal, and consensus seems to be that they are the Yin/Yang of the male animal traits:
- Socially violent
- Overly emotional
- Sexually manipulative
When two boys fight on the playground, their goal is to subdue the other boy and win the altercation. When two girls fight on the playground, their goal is to make the other girl cry publicly. That is social violence. If you dump your girlfriend, and she spreads lies about you on Facebook, that is social violence. If a woman induces a man to fight another man, that’s social violence.
To summarize: there is an animal within us all. We have cognition and higher-level thinking processes, but these are layered on top of the more base-level instincts we possess. Feminists and Progressives perpetuate a disgusting half-truth when they rant about the Male Animal, all the while pretending the Female Animal does not exist.
Misogyny? No, just fairness.
This is why feminists downplay every dirty trick women play and aren’t punished for. Divorce-rape, cuckolding, friend-zoning, false rape accusations to name a few. They want the world to keep assuming women are perfect and require no restraints similar to what men have against their natural behaviors. simultaneously, they want to exaggerate the bad apples in the male group to increase our restraints.
Living in society is agreeing to compromise your primal instincts for the greater good. In return you have a safer place to raise your future offspring and can spend more time on intellectual pursuits rather than defending the cave against predators.
They want to betafy the male population because having exclusively compliant betas to deal with does make life an awful lot easier. However, because their theory is fundamentally defective, they totally fail to account for the fact that women don’t want these men; instead, they hamster the unattractiveness of the feminist-approved men away by saying that these men are deep down misogynist assholes who are deserving of solitude.
– Andrew Hardy
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