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Romantic Love, Transactional Relationships, and True Love are Distinct Issues
The following are distinct issues, but are almost always confused for each other: (1) romantic love, (2) transactional relationships, and (3) true love.
Addressing and resolving this confusion could reduce an almost infinite amount of internal/subjective suffering such as in heartache, depression, anxiety, and despair…as well as negative external/societal impact such as infidelity, divorce, medication, murder, and suicide.
1. Romantic Love
This is selfish and what people usually think of as love, when you’re actually “love sick” and actually insane/psychotic with physical symptoms resembling drug addiction and suffer from severe stress, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, etc. It’s when you want someone so much that nothing else in life matters and you no longer can control yourself, as if you cannot even breathe without them.
It based on the idealization of the “other” and external reality as perceived and filtered by your own insanity (which is temporary, thankfully), so it’s a selfish process involving your own mind creating the thing that does not actually reflect reality that you want so bad. It is the central theme in movies, myths, novels, songs, poems, etc.