The two L’s is what I call it. Our lesson this week captures relationships and everyday life. Love and lies are part of relationships and everyday life whether we know it or not it is a fragment of what is part of being human. Love and lies both are applied in relationships and lives. Relationships are complex. It first starts with attraction and ends with interaction. TV and social media captivate all the adventures and fantasies of being in a relationship but hide away the struggles that come with it. There is no such thing as a perfect relationship. A relationship does not have to be bad either, but it takes communication between two partners to understand each other’s emotions. Let me ask you something. Do you think love is different from attraction? Love and attraction are two emotions that affect society and have a profound impact on social psychology.
Love and friendship are a part of life. Love and friendships give life a purpose as well because they help us with our well-being and influence our own satisfaction of our quality of life. According to the textbook, “To apply social psychology to your relationship experiences, begin by recognizing two practical realities: First, human beings are social creatures who cannot live without closeness to others. Second, the skills we need to succeed in relationships do not come naturally. Like other social skills, relationship behaviors must be learned. This means effort, mistakes, trial and error—and a certain amount of luck!” (Gruman et al., 2016). People need social interaction because it not only helps with developing social skills, but it also helps people regulate their emotions and helps fulfill our needs as human beings. There are people who don’t mind being alone, but I feel as though sometimes interacting with other people even if it’s now for a relationship purpose is beneficial because it helps our mental to not decline into depression, anxiety. Little interaction between people can bring about psychological stressors. We learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “As social animals, all humans need social relationships, and we express this need in different ways. In his classic theory of a hierarchy of needs and motives, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow (1970) listed “belongingness” as the third most important motive after physiological and safety needs. Not far from food, water, and safety, one’s closeness to others is vital to one’s survival and well-being” (Gruman et al., 2016). Human beings need one another to coexist and survive. Fulfillment in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs enables us to feel self-fulfilled, loving a better life and good mental health.
Attraction is another way of everyday life. According to an article, “romantic love can be broken down into three categories: lust, attraction, and attachment. Each category is characterized by its own set of hormones stemming from the brain” (Wu, 2020). Love releases homrones that make us feel good or makes us act irrational. Here is an image I found in the article, which I thought was interesting:
Love releases chemicals in our brains, which can cause attachments and feelings towards people. According to the article, “Dopamine, which runs the reward pathways in our brain, is great in moderate doses, helping us enjoy food, exciting events, and relationships. However, we can push the dopamine pathway too far when we become addicted to food or drugs. Similarly, too much dopamine in a relationship can underlie unhealthy emotional dependence on our partners. And while healthy levels of oxytocin help us bond and feel warm and fuzzy towards our companions, elevated oxytocin can also fuel prejudice” (Wu,2020). There seems to be positives and negatives to love. It gives us a high that is a feeling that is indescribable because of how amazing it is to feel such a connection to someone. Social psychology is important to the power it holds on to humans’ experiences with emotions and attractions in their everyday lives. Feelings and actions shape us into who we are and without these relationships and friendships there are no experiences in shaping our social lives.
My hope with this blog is to show how human connection is important to shape us, to help us conform into who we are. People don’t need to experience love as with just a partner. Love comes in friendships, family, etc. Social relationships are fundamental whether it is between an individual or a community. Love creates a quality of life and a sense of belonging. “Relationship phenomena of interest to scientists encompass both the specific interactions that individuals experience with members of their social networks and the global perceptions of those interactions, which are shaped by past and current interactions with important social network members. The interactions that occur with social network members are often positive, and include the provision of emotional and material support, companionship, and encouragement of health-enhancing behaviors” (August & Rook,1970). Relationships shape society and affect people’s well-being. Social psychology can help individuals work on their relationships and work on themselves to benefit their mental health and shape their lives individuals learn to communicate with one another without the first action is acting out irrationally.
References
August, K. J., & Rook, K. S. (1970, January 1). Social relationships. SpringerLink. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1005-9_59
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2016). Applied Social Psychology (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc. (US). https://ereader.chegg.com/books/9781506353968
Wu, K. (2020, June 19). Love, actually: The science behind lust, attraction, and companionship. Science in the News. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/
Yes, I do believe love is different from attraction. I believe they can exist separately and I believe they can also build from one to another. From what I read, love gets interpreted differently by everyone, though the brain chemistry in our head is the same.
The differences between hormones is noted in the blog. It makes me wonder if there is truly a difference between any relationship that can be seen with the human brain. Different theories are summed up to what love is, for example, there is something called the Investment Theory (1980) and it’s results say it can measure how happy a person is based on how satisfied a person is within the relationship, the more ‘invested’ the person is, the happier they might be.
It has been used not only for romantic relationships but also for friendships. The appeal of this theory is it’s ability to reach everyone and it’s criteria is something that all relationships far and wide value. This model can be applied to all human relationships. It works for homosexual relationships, heterosexual relationships, female friendships, male friendships, and friendships in general and applies to sexual/gender minorities, non-monogamous relationships and different romantic and non-romantic arrangements (Brozowski, A., etc., 2022).
I mentioned this because, I thought this is the framework of many relationships and the fact that there is not such thing as an easy relationship, this might help some to identify or disagree with regarding love. Nice job!
Reference:
Brozowski, A., Connor-Kuntz, H., Lewis, S., Sinha, S., Oh, J., Weidmann, R., Weaver, J. R., & Chopik, W. J. (2022). A test of the investment model among asexual individuals: The moderating role of attachment orientation. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 912978. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.912978
I believe that human connection is an extremely important part of human life as a way to live, grow, and mature. Whether we realize it or not, humans are always seeking other humans either romantically, intimately, or in a friendly way. We rely on others to help us and the connections we form have a major impact on the way we live, learn, and mature as a whole.
There are a multitude of relationships that people develop over the course of their life. One relationships is friendships. Like you pointed out, in a friendship comes love and caring for another person. This love and caring is different than the love and caring one has in a romantic relationship. There is loving someone as a friend, loving someone as a family member, and loving someone as a romantic partner. Each type of love is extremely important and impactful when it comes to growing up and creating connections.
Relationships, in all kinds, also provide a way for someone to learn from new people and depend on others. If there were no such thing as relationships in any kind, everyone would be independent and there would be no learning from others and expanding ones mindset. It is quite interesting to think about a world where relationships are nonexistent, I believe in that world people would not be able to thrive because there would be no dependence on anyone but themselves.
Even though it is important to be independent, it is more important to form relationships with others. It is important for people to know that there are people in the world that care about them and can help them through any tough time they may be going though. No matter what, life comes with so many types of relationships as well as broken relationships. All of this helps us grow and shape the person we continue to become throughout our life.
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2016). Applied Social Psychology (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc. (US).