Life is full of feeling as we are emotional creatures after all. It’s not just the media around us that makes us want to feel things; but rather something that is also hard-coded within us. Some people might disagree saying that we are mainly animals with primal instincts; but the truth is that our brains add an extra layer of consciousness to our lives. We are aware we are alive and therefore we try to feel; if anything to understand what life is all about. Even people who think we are primitive will probably agree that our feelings only are there to make us reproduce and spread across the planet; as most organisms seem to be designed to do. Two of those feelings that particularly help humanity to spread across the planet are love and lust; so let’s look at those and see how much they resemble each other.
Is love universal?
Religion and fiction will have us think that love is that one constant that keeps the world together; but the truth is a bit more complex than that. In the past people didn’t always have just the one partner, and populating the planet was a much higher imperative as mortality rates were much higher. Love seems to find its place when population increases too much, making people stick to the one partner rather than having multiple children with as many people as they can. It almost sounds as though love works as a sort of population control method; playing on our feelings to make sure we don’t spread across too fast.
What about lust then?
Lust in some ways seems almost the opposite as love. We have been given sexual organs which can give us a lot of pleasure; and lust is all about us enjoying that pleasure. Wherein love might discourage us from reproducing too much, lust seems to have the opposite effect by making us want to have more sex. Some men just want to meet girls looking for sex, and the reason they can confuse love and lust is because both those feelings are very intense; and both are made relevant in the context of coupling.It is this intensity in both love and lust that can make people do things they otherwise wouldn’t consider doing. The bottom line is that as many silly things we can do for love; we equally also do for lust.
Similar but different
Yes those feelings have both commonalities and points of difference; enough to say that they are not the same feelings. We often confuse love with lust because they make us feel very strongly; and it is furthermore easy to amalgamate the two when the media keeps firing all those different ambiguous messages to us telling us how we should feel. That being said it is very beneficial to you if you truly understand the differences between the two. If anything it will make you more stable and you won’t be acting out thinking you are in love when you are really just wanting to fill your biological imperative.
