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Dear Dish Person,
I am in love with my half sister, we’ve been in love for 12 years!
Despite all the scandal it would create around our family and the
subsequent press coverage as we are well known I am willing to give
everything up just to be with her!
I know this is, even though it sounds trite, true
love, but we can’t go on living in secret. Any advice before we leap
into the big mess.
Thank you for anything help,
Bob
Dearest Leaping Bob,
Know what love is first. Then leap.
The biochemistry of love is like a fireworks display inside your body
-neurotransmitters do a dance releasing peptides and hormones triggering
a multitude of feelings and body sensations. The electrical chemistry of
love does really exist, but not by itself, but against a background of
the connected memory of millions of neurological pathways that make up
what we call ….our experience. The love emotion becomes something
like a pre-programmed electrical circuit that hooks up smells, heart
rate, digestion, memory of places and faces into a ball of excitement –
it forms a very personal love equation or recipe. A smell, a song, or
gesture and certainly “her face” can activate a whole experience
completely without our permission. That's life! and that’s what love
actually IS.
When two people experience the "fall in love" emotion
two bio chemical circuit equations are created like recipes in each
person, and set into memory always ready to go off. That love experience
is triggered by a touch, face, voice, place, song , or smell. For
simplicity imagine the recipe of love expressed playfully as 3 parts
each other, 2 parts yearning to be together more, 1 part memory of
shared experiences, 1 part sexual primal urges to procreate, 1 part past
lovers, 1 part need to nurture etc and the by product being total
pleasure.
This is true. One of the chemical by products of this
equation is the production of endorphin (the pleasure hormone) which has
the affect of a high similar to the drug induced highs of cocaine. This
is what creates the pleasure sensation around love that compels us to
repeat the experience as often as possible.
Here's the rub. Prolonged proximity to the object of
love (living together) is not part of the original recipe. Yearning for
each other is the basis for being in love and is lost when two people
spend too much time together as in marriage. The 2 parts "yearning to be
together" goes missing from the recipe.
We mistakenly think that the goal of being in love is
always to be together in order to repeat that experience as often as
possible, not unlike the need for drug induced pleasure sensations.
Living together or marriage most assuredly will throw
a monkey wrench into your "love's recipe" You will without question stop
being “in love” in that way. What couples do with that is another story,
but I think in life there are many "loves' that should just stay forever
captured in that one snapshot and held dear to your heart...acting on it
will assuredly destroy it..
My advice is to hold on to that love. Keep it pure.
Don't act on it. Marriage is a separate and different life decision and
should be made for different reasons.
Think about it,
Yours,
The Dishwasher
Read: Candace Pert's book 'Molecules of emotion'
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