Talk to ze Hand

Talk to ze Hand

Dear Hand,

I’m in love with my new best friend but I’m not sure if he feels the same way for me, too. He keeps giving me weird signals: he’s very sweet to me, he’s visited my place in the province (a four-hour ride!) and he’s told me things he doesn’t even tell his girl. Heck, we’ve even kissed! He said I’m his personal brand of heroin. However, he still doesn’t want to break up with his girlfriend. Do you think he really loves me? What should I do?

Mistress-in-Training

Dear Mistress,

Love is very much like perception. Sometimes we see things that aren’t there, while other times we tend to overlook details jumping out from the fabric. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look and what to look for.

The first question that you have to answer: is there really love between you and him? You have to determine the absolute threshold by ascertaining whether the affection between you guys is enough to spark into a full-blown romance. Remember, just like in neural firing, love is an all-or-nothing principle, and if you don’t have what it takes to fulfill the requirements of a good love affair, then there’s no way you’ll get a serious relationship. Rubin (1973) said that romantic love is made up of three elements: attachment, caring and intimacy. Based from your description (him being sweet to you, taking the trouble to visit you just so he could be with you and telling you matters close to his heart), it can be safe to say that the minimum amount of stimulus energy required for stimulus detection of love has been fulfilled.

But before you jump off your feet from joy because of an expert pronouncement on the possibility of true love, you have to remember that true love, in itself, can exist in many forms. Understanding the difference threshold, which is the slightest change in stimuli energy necessary for a detection of variations in the stimulus, can help you with that. It means that you have to be aware of the different levels of love and the forms that they can take. For example, a person’s love for another can be tantamount to mere friendship, while a greater form of love makes a relationship endure, like the concept of consummate love for Sternberg (1988). You have to know the difference between how he treats other people compared to you to assess how special you truly are in his eyes.

Now that you know the difference threshold of his love for you compared to the affection he shows other people, the final hurdle is magnitude estimation. In this you have to assess how much he really loves you and if it is enough to enter into a long-term relationship with him. Remember Lee’s The Colors of Love (1973)? In it he says that all types of love are based on a combination of three primary kinds: eros (passionate love), ludos (love as a game) and storge(love between friends). You know the difference, now assess the magnitude of his feelings for you. The fact that he doesn’t want to leave his girlfriend for you should be an indication of how he feels for you. Would that kind and amount of love be enough to last through years of happiness as well as sadness? Only you can answer that. Introspection is still the best way of evaluating the stimuli we perceive. :)

I hope this crash course on perceptual studies helped.

Sincerely yours,

Hand Sam

p.s. Though if you really ask me, I think you should dump the two-timing jerk. Why settle for being second when someone out there can make you the center of the universe? There are way too many fishes in the ocean for you to concern yourself with just a single one. ;)

References:

Goldstein, E. B. (2007). Sensation and Perception (7^th Eds.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Lee, J. A. (1988). In R. J. Sternbergs and M. L. Barnes (Eds.), The psychology of love. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rubin, Z. (1973). Liking and Loving: An invitation to social psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Sternberg, R. J. (1988). Triangulating love. In R. J. Sternbergs and M. L. Barnes (Eds.), The psychology of love. New Haven: Yale University Press.