Why Do People Need Someone to Love? Research Paper Example

Why Do People Need Someone to Love?

“Stories of passionate love relationship between men and women exist throughout our literature and are treasured part of our cultural heritage. The great love affairs of Lancelot and Guinevere, Heloise and Aberald, Romeo and Juliet live for us as symbols of physical passion and spiritual devotion” (Branden, 1980). As we all are the products of the culture we are born into, the priorities we identify in the course of life rarely exclude finding someone to love and to establish partnership with. Through the course of our living, we develop values upon affections we feel for other people.

Love is a powerful and multifaceted feeling, implying caring for someone deeply. Romantic love is only one aspect of this strong emotion we strive for so enthusiastically. The friendly love, involving fidelity, understanding and support; family love, based on indestructible, everlasting, requiring no logical reasoning, connections; and even pet love, generated from an ability to find joy in taking care, devoting ourselves to creatures so different and so responsive, – are all the faces of love that make our lives so beautiful and so full of sense.

Many social studies and surveys are concerned with the single people versus married people ratio. The statistics show that there are 96.6 million of unmarried Americans older than 18, representing 43% of the adult population of US. Of this 96.6 millions 53 % are women. Of those unmarried US inhabitants, 61 % have never been married, 24 % divorced and 15 % widowed. It is important to note that “unmarried” does not mean “single” in a given context. Thus, in the year of 2008 only 27 % of all households were represented by singles, while 6.2 million was a number of unmarried couples living together (U.S. Census Bureau News, 2010).

Love is universal and boundless, while the traditions of expressing romantic feelings vary between cultures and epochs. The courtly love of Middle Ages, inspired by sufferings of being unable to possess the desired subject differs drastically from the carefully thought out, pragmatic, modern style of making a choice among candidates. The nicknames and terms of endearment whispered in the ears of the beloved ones sound different in South and North America, Eastern and Western Europe, North and South poles. So do vary the wedding ceremonies: French pouring wine into one common glass; Greek single file line dancing; Chinese bride wearing a red dress; Hispanic lasso being wound around newly-weds bodies in an “infinity” figure, – are all so exclusive, yet are all the equivalent celebrations of love and uniting.

And as we suffer losses, disappointments and delusive hopes, while we get kicked and crashed and thrust by love failures, we keep on dreaming our dreams of romantic idyll, and making our way to finding a soul mate. So why are human beings that obsessed with loving someone, and why can we hardly imagine our lives without making a part of a devoted couple?

One of the reasons which makes loving someone so crucial is a fear of loneliness. “When people are asked what pleasures contribute most to happiness, the overwhelming majority rate love, intimacy and social affiliation above wealth or fame, even above physical health” (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). Happiness or anger, the most powerful and vivid emotions we can experience, are generated through love and hatred respectively, making one impossible without another, while both are impossible if you have no one to either love or hate. People usually interpret the statement “I am lonely” as “I have no one to love and/or no one loves me”. Innate need for social connections makes us panic at the very thought of having no one around, especially when dealing with hard times, or even everyday troubles.

When the relationship is being born, its forming involves a great deal of excitement and passion. Most people would declare a rational opinion that whereas appeal, magnetism, charm may appear at first sight, true love, a deep and an enduring one, necessitates understanding, while in order to be able to identify with each other the two lovers need time. It however does happen sometimes that “the encounter of man with woman, of woman with man, and the discovery, through passion and intimacy, that ‘the other’ is, in fact, the other side of oneself” (Branden, 1980). Thus, passion is fairly viewed as one of the causes people manage to form a couple.

Another reason for finding a partner for life is a desire to bring new generation into life. “Having children is a deep desire of the majority of young Americans most of whom want kids when they get married” (Cherlin, 2010). Humans are inclined to have moments, when whatever one has achieved by the given age bears much sense no more, and new horizons are to be sought. When we have career built, friends acquired and life experience accumulated, we start thinking of bringing new life into being. True indeed, what may be more exciting than giving birth so someone who is a physical representation of one’s continuation? Especially, if a child is born as a result of loving partnership with one’s “the only one”. The affection and care generated to conceive, bear and raise a child are believed to be the most joyfull contributions a person may make thought the course of one’s life.

So why do people need someone to love and why are they so eager to face all sorts of troubles on their way to perfect romance? “When we’re lonely, just as at the every other time in life, we need love, a need that itself can be coercive, even to the point of persuading us to betray ourselves” (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). Either one is motivated by an unwillingness to be alone, or by an obsessive passion to another person, or by a desire to get a sense of being in a newborn child, people are all heading to one and only goal – falling in love, finding, building and treasuring a home of one’s own, a home which can only be found in an embrace of a loved one. As human nature is designed to strive for emotions, and while it is always more peaceful and safe to depend on no one, the power and magnetism of both pain and joy cannot be compared to any sort of tranquility and security. So find love, fight for love and cherish the happiness another person can bring you, because only through love true harmony can be discovered.

References

Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick W. (2008). Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New-York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Cherlin, A. J. (2010).  The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. Vintage.

Branden, N. (1980). The Psychology of Romantic Love: Romantic Love in an Anti-Romantic Age. New-York: Tarcher, Penguin Group.

U.S. Census Bureau News. Facts for Features. (July, 2010). Unmarried and Single Americans week 2010. Retrieved November 13, 2010, from http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb10-ff18.html