Infatuation Rules
Infatuation Rules
Photo: Katya Wolf
Impossible love is desire for someone that has little likelihood of fulfillment. Typically, the object of impossible love is thought of as someone who can appease your desires, but for various reasons is beyond your reach.
The 72 hour rule applies to times when we may be upset or mad or frustrated. The basics is that if it won't matter in 72 hours it probably doesn't...
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88 days The average time for men to fall in love is 88 days, while those same feelings of true love take women 134 days. Another dating site, Elite...
Read More »Impossible love is desire for someone that has little likelihood of fulfillment. Typically, the object of impossible love is thought of as someone who can appease your desires, but for various reasons is beyond your reach. Since humans are motivated to savor and maximize positive emotions and minimize negative ones, experiencing impossible love is stressful. The obstacles in impossible love may vary. The object of your affection may be attached to someone else, unmanageable geographically, disinterested in your gender, deceased, or incapable of returning your affection. These obstacles can lead you to experience distress, anguish, grief, or anger. However, since an everyday relationship is not possible, the participants in a situation of impossible love may be safe to experience intensity that otherwise would be threatening. Impossible love is shaming. Shame experienced in impossible love is not ordinarily how you would expect shame to feel. As I’ve noted in other posts that have to do with intimate relationships, in such situations shame is felt as disengagement, as a letdown, a disappointment, or as a frustration (Catherall, 2012). Beginning in early childhood, shame is activated whenever an anticipated outcome—the expectation of excitement or enjoyment—is impeded and leaves one crestfallen (Tomkins, 1963). When you are in a situation of impossible love, fantasies of the love being realized may activate moments of enjoyment and excitement. However, when your attention turns to reality, such fantasies are negated. Humans have a need to experience and express what they feel, and thus such suppression of emotion is punishing or unpleasant (Tomkins, 1963). The inability to express emotion in situations of impossible love turns a positively directed emotion into a distressing negative one. Why would we stay with love that is impossible? Emotionally laden scenes in one’s life later become personality features, a process which Silvan Tomkins (1963) referred to as psychological magnification. Through socialization experiences, the emotional life of some individuals becomes monopolistic; that is, dominated by a single emotion, such as distress, anguish, or shame. Children who experience trauma related to broken interpersonal connections may, as adults, enact conditions that perpetuate the sense of an undeserving self. Consider a child who hungers for a parent’s love or acceptance, for example, and instead continuously experiences shaming disinterest that is interspersed with occasional exciting and hoped-for moments of engagement. As an adult, an impossible love becomes a proxy that revives shame-laden emotional memories and evokes childhood longing. One hundred years ago, Freud (1914) described how unconscious memories become repetitions; the repetition compulsion was the means by which memories are avoided through action in the present that serves to keep them unrecognizable. However, given that the experience of intense emotion in the present will activate emotional memories, perhaps we repeat so that we can remember. What’s possible in impossible love is the potential to remember the past, and, in doing so, recognize what may need to be reflected upon in order to learn.
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Read More »He leans toward you during conversation. People tend to naturally lean toward people they like in conversation, according to Battle. If the guy you like tends to lean his face in closer to yours while he's talking to you or listening to you talk, that's a good sign that he might be into you.
Here's the thing about trying to know if a guy likes you: Sometimes looking for small signs is never going to give you an accurate full picture of what's going on. Some guys will do all of the above with their friends, while other guys will like someone but not do any of the above. "Some folks may be less able to express their attractions as overtly as this," Battle says. "For instance, my shy clients sometimes struggle with externalizing their feelings for a crush even in subtle ways. That means that even though they like someone, it might be harder for the other person to tell. When in doubt, talk about it!" If you're not sure if a guy likes you but is hiding it, just ask him and let him tell you directly how he feels. It sounds scary, but it definitely doesn't have to be! A simple "Hey, I think you're really cool, and I'm kind of into you—are you into me?" is casual, direct, a little sexy, and also nonthreatening. If it's a no, at least you know! And if it's a yes, now the fun stuff begins.
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