>i got the motorcycle too - desmodromic valve induction and all. didnt
>really make this whole attraction thing any clearer.
okayokayokay... i decided to look it up. i still can't find the stuff that explicitly connects anxiety and love, though. HTH =;o
Love As High Intensity Ritual Or Love as the Exchange of Erotic Property
Family relations are relations of property: 1. property rights over bodies, erotic property; 2. property rights regarding children, generational property; 3. property rights over goods held by the family, household property.
Erotic Property
Property isn't a thing in itself, a physical object. Property is a set of social relationships, ways in which people act toward things and one another.
If property is a social relationship, then, rather than the thing itself, it makes sense to look at love and sex as forms of property. The key aspect of property is the right of possession, the right to have a say as to if and how others have access to the beloved. Erotic property, like all forms of property, exist in a social situation which must back up those rights. (CAVEAT: do not think of US property system as the only way to understand property when considering this argument. E.g., Marx had a problem with private property, for instance. But he didn't have a problem with people owning guns and artillery and was quite annoyed when the State tried to take arms away from workers!)
In our own society, erotic relationships are heavily imbued with romance, and emotions of affection and love are a crucial part of this. I am not saying that people fall in love b/c they feel they are supposed to. It is true that our popular culture tends to make ppl expect this will happen, but the experience of love is by no means the result of indoctrination by the media. Rather, it follows naturally from the type of negotiating people must do in order to find sexual partner in a situation of individual bargaining.
Finding a partner involves a good deal of uncertainty. In the process of meeting people, you may have many negative experiences. The process is inherently emotion producing. It tends to generate feelings of anxiety, hope, fear, and also happiness and excitement. Hence, there is usually an emotional buildup when people find someone they like and joy if they find that this person likes them, too. Just how much a couple likes each other may be a matter of degree. Each may still be eyeing the field. A courtship may be uneasy for awhile, until a couple settles into a commitment to one another as the most favorable person they know. But this very uneasiness is what makes love affairs dramatic and arouses emotions. A couple that never goes thru reversals, moments of hesitancy, doubt, and potential breakups likely will not have as strong emotional feelings about each other as a couple that does.
The negotiating process, itself, tends to create strong emotions and these feelings of tension and excitement, when they are resolved into a strong commitment are what turn into love.
A courtship is carried out by conversation and by a series of moves toward increasing emotional intimacy, a process often tied to the ritually symbolic movement through physical intimacy. The typical physical progression is engaged, sometimes at length. These sexual contacts are not necessarily pleasures in themselves. Holding hands, for example, is not much of a physical pleasure, although it can be very emotional. One could even suggest that many forms of much more intimate contact are also largely symbolic of a type of emotional relationship or attitude toward the other. They represent total emotional intimacy for many, perhaps domination and submission as well, rather than simply physical pleasure.
The emotion of love arises from the process of negotiating an exclusive and relatively permanent sexual contract among individuals. It is part of a drama that people go through as they try to manage their fate in a world where everyone else is doing the same. From the ups and down of the dating game come the ritualized establishment of the intense, private world of a couple. It should not be surprising that the emotion is strongest when the bond is first made, and during the period when it is confirmed as strong and sincere.
Here is when the actual behavior of a couple fits closely to the theory of social rituals. The ingredients of ritual are in the romantic relationship, and in a very intense form. The couple if constantly in each other's company and tends to exclude or ignore others. Their erotic talk and play have the patterned, repetitive form of ritual behavior. The emotions they bring are intensified by being shared, just as any successful ritual revs up the feelings of the group. We can say, then, that lovers are carrying out a ritual that forms a solidarity group of two.
Previous theories have bracketed love inside a large-scale frame, as if viewed thru a telescope. Love, after all, is something dramatic and emotional, for us in the West. Can sociology focus on the immediate reality of love at all?
It can, but we must shift our level of attention down to the microstructure of interaction, and consider love as ritual. We can make use of the theory of interaction ritual. <...> An activity that brings people together can be called a social ritual. A ritual has the following ingredients: 1. it brings ppl together 2. focuses their attention on some common object or activity 3. promotes a shared emotional tone, which grows as the ritual proceeds 4. produces an emotionally charged symbol, which represents the partial sense of membership in the group
Romantic love is a ritual in this sense. In fact, it is an extremely high-intensity ritual.
Interaction: In the West, lovers constitute a group of two. They often remove themselves from the rest of society in the beginning that some sociologists have referred to this stage as "dyadic withdrawal".
Focus of Attention: Not only are lovers together, but they have a common object of attention: themselves. Lovers talk about each other and about their love.
Shared Emotion: Love is an emotion. It is other things too; without the strong focus of attention on one another, the emotion could not reach its full power. Love is, initially, admiration and desire, mixed with apprehension. It is the process of going through the high intensity interaction that strengthens those emotions and turns it into passion. The lovers isolate themselves from the rest of the world, focus intensely on each other.
The physical acts of making love have exactly this structuring. Each focuses and narrows one's attention to just oneself and the other. Sexual excitement builds up between one partners and the other; each one's arousal makes the other more aroused. I'm not saying here that love is equivalent to sexual arousal, but that the two are connected, above all by the fact that both of them are highly intense forms of ritual interaction.
Symbols and Sacred Objects: If love is a high intensity ritual, then the ritual must work to attach the emotions to some emblem that can represent them. This symbol serves as a reminder of the emotions and also as a touchstone for setting the boundary between insiders and outsiders. The ritual of love, then, creates little private cult with its own object of veneration--the love person. That is why lovers idealize their loved one to such a high degree: the intense ritual absorption that they are involved in automatically elevates its object into something that is more than human.
Lovers idealize each other most strongly early in a love relationship. Later, they acquire a more realistic view of one anther, probably because the stage of highly ritualized interaction cannot last forever. Lovers find they can't spend all their time together and ignoring the rest of the world. Eventually ordinary life reasserts itself. This is why lovers eventually feel some letdown from their emotional peak. They stop carrying out the social conditions that made up high intensity ritual, and the effects of the ritual diminish as well.
Ritual charged symbols, however, can retain their power for some time after the rituals recede from the foreground of daily life. Its not just things that symbolize love, but also actions: holding hands, kissing, necking, making love, walking together, talking together. Forgetting to perform them--or performing them superficial is akin to descrecating a sacred symbol.
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Randall Collins, "Love and Property" in _Sociological Insight_