Two "kinds" of love

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The first 'type of love' or relationship that biostructure talks about is summed up, curiously enough, by a wonderful passage from the novel 'Niels Lyhne' by the Danish author, Jens Peter Jacobson. Although it describes a love that forms between boys in childhood, I think it can be applied to adult relationships, particularly as experienced by Aspiens:

'Of all the emotional relationships in life, is there any more delicate, more noble, and more intense than a boy's deep and yet totally bashful love for another boy? The kind of love that never speaks, never dares give way to a caress, a glance, or a word, the kind of vigilant love that bitterly grieves over every shortcoming or imperfection in the one who is loved, a love which is longing and admiration and negation of self, and which is pride and humility and calmly breathing happiness'.

I'd say to the contrary. Most of my experiences of the first type of love is from when I was a teenager. Somewhere in my mid to late 20s I simply gave up on this and went more mainstream. Therefore it is extremely interesting and satisfying to experience this again decades later and analyzing it in a context of neurodiverse relationship preferences that I had no idea about when I was a teenager.

That is not contrary to what I said: when talking about my twin sister and me, I primarily meant our toddler to pre-teenage age time. I would assume that biostructure included teenage kids when talking about "other kids", but hardly "people around 20".

Yes, but I don't think it has anything to do with catching up. I've discussed this elsewhere, and it appeared some people could recognize this from their teens as well, and that they thought they've "grown out of it". However, in my opinion, I haven't grown out of it and still find it very rewarding. Instead, I suspect most people just give up on it as they fail to get into committed relationships this way.

In a certain sense, I havent completely grown out of my kid exploration phase either, and I never will. I also imagine that in a good-enough world a playful and exploring cooperation between people would be more common.

I have made some progress though, and since my getting aware of what Asperger is, even a real boost of understanding. I feel like all the bigger puzzles of my life have been basically solved, and that I have the big picture now, and even if there are more than enough spots that remain a bit blurry and worth to be explored, it feels a bit like the end of the exploration phase, and the beginning of a more political engagement. I think engaging in setting up a family of ones own has been - and also for most other people is - a little bit similar to this, just on a smaller scale.

I would still like to say something about the late-development issue. I see so many aspies who suffer from their problems with relationships, and only older aspies that have come to terms with their being different after bigger difficulties in their childhood and/or younger adult lifes (their attitude to life is actually pretty similar to mine). I mean even aspies who used to be content with their life in their 20s, like one man I have in mind who seemed to have been very accepted in his otherness by his surrounding and his wife, later lost this "state of innocence", he now suffers from depression and being rejected by his daughter for his emotional aloofness. There is also one very sociable Aspie woman who is definitely quite O.K. with herself and the life she has (had), and of whom I am pretty sure that she will never develop any secondary psychiatric condition, but the way she emphasized "it is a disorder" and she talked about that there is a link between bondage/SM and Asperger made me believe that she feels less at ease with her condition than one would expect from her talking about herself in the interview.

Sure there is a lot of social frustration in Aspergers, a lot of experience with rejection and so on. But there is also something that goes beyond that. A lot of people here on wrong planet speak about not knowing their true self (and that means much more than just knowing your nature), of having a very limited or overshooting emotional life, of feeling like "putting on a mask" and "acting", questioning that everything is an illusion and blaming others of just doing as if, and also so much anxiety (which is directly related to social cognition and identity issues) that one can hardly ignore it. On the other hand role playing is so intense an occupation in an NT toddler s life, and so essential for social cognition and for identity building, that the links should be pretty obvious for everybody, even if for an aspie much less than for an old and very NT person like me.

For me, since the age of 10 or even earlier, playing and exploring is mostly in order to recognize others better, for an Asperger, during his adolescence and (young) adult life playing and exploring is more forming an identity that he does not have yet. That is a huge difference.

It was more than 10 years ago that I understood the AS-related issues and my differences to NTs in the social domain. While clearly revolutionary, it has taken almost 10 years more to get a good grasp on the relationship preferences. I think that is because the social issues are much more easily observable, while relationship issues are private and there are strong cultural ideas of how it all should work with dating and sex and everything. This makes discovering your true relationship preferences much harder, especially if they are really divergent from the norm like mine are.



Probably the price he pays for involving with an NT. I also have a daughter, and we are best friends and she tells me everything, even as she has turned 20.



I can understand that, but I find it better to explore impopular links rather than to go with "it's a disorder". For me, neither polyamory nor BD/SM or asexuality are a disorders.



Well, my opinion is that I don't need an identity. What I need is to understand my preferences, and especially in the relationship area. The best tool I had to understand it was the realization that I could handle imaginary relationships far better than I thought would be possible.

In my time as a "hopeless romantic" I have found the illusive specimen of love to be quiet possibly the most illogical thing in the world and one of the most sought after. I have also found from my own personal experience that love can be a triangle with three very different forms of relationship. While everyone would prefer to have the former case of love rather than the latter which is a difficult mountain to even consider climbing. We sadly do not live in a idealistic world and sometimes must endure this second route until a path to the first can be forged, but I digress. The three forms of relationship I have found from love are that of family, friend, and love (in the more romantic sense of course).

The simplest, and one of the easiest to obtain, is love in the form of friendship. We all need a little help from our friends to get through the hard times in life and there is nothing wrong with this. One of the great things about friends is the fact that we often get to choice them, find the people who mash well with us and make us feel happy to spend time with. In regard to the triangle this is the bottom point which can either bridge off into family or romantic love. The love we feel toward our friends will evolve if it is either platonic or romantic into the respective field of family or romantic.

Family, family is one of the more rewarding forms of love and one which we are born having, in ideal conditions. We may not like our family but they are who they are and what counts is that they are there when we need them and vice versa. To sight one of my own personal experience of a possible romantic love which turned platonic is the tale of my occasional assistant. She is someone who for a time had considered romantic feelings toward me but overtime, and with knowledge of how most of my romantic ventures in the past have ended, decided that she did in fact love me but not in a romantic way. To her I was a brother, someone she could turn to in times of trouble and want to share in times of great joy. Unlike romantic love the love of family is a much more secure in regard to long amounts of time.

Lastly we have the illustrious one itself, romantic love. Romantic love is the kind of love most of us hope to find in life in the form of a partner to spend the rest of our days with. This again is a idealistic case which doesn't always last. In my own opinion it is the most rewarding and filling of all love yet it stands to cause the greatest pain when it is lost. I still hold the firm belief that it is the only kind of love able to make me whole again, but once again I digress. It is a very difficult task to find romantic love that last for a short time, it is a even more difficult task to find one that can last forever. I am rather biased in my thoughts on this love and feel that going on any further would simply be my own ramblings about the issue.

While some might simply shrug off my notions or find that utter rubbish I have the hope that at least someone out there may find some peace of mind or solve some great struggle of their own life with my own thoughts or the thoughts they spark in the ever thinking mind we all have. Friends may go, love may flee, and family may wither, but we all have the hope of finding something worthwhile in this hectic world of ever drifting souls, love.

I am the same. There's the Madonna/whore dichotomy in my mind. A woman can't be both a friend/partner and a sex object. Sex and love cannot come from the same place. I don't think I would love my partner as much if we had really hot, kinky sex together. For me, girlfriends are for making love to, not f*****g. f*****g is for somebody you don't love.

Yes, that's it, that's the experience I'm looking for.

And Hyperborean, it's interesting that your description of this is between two boys, because although I'm straight, if I ever did have a "romance" with another male it would definitely be of this type. I've even had dreams where I have this kind of relationship with another boy (commonly in my dreams I am implicitly younger than my real-life self, like I have many dreams where I'm still going to my old elementary school, yet oddly I drive myself home). I also think that there's a definite, what would you call it, "subgenre" in the gay community for this kind of relationship, perhaps more than in the straight world.

Yes, many people around my age (30) reminisce about those kind of relationships from their younger days, which they have moved away from. I die a bit inside every time I hear about that, in a way that I don't when I see people happily married. Or rather, the WAY I die inside when I see people happily married is in the sense of "they might have kids who live that before I get to", not "I wish I were married".

I don't have anything against settling down, in fact I like suburbs and small towns and get attached to places. But I want to be there to BE a kid, not HAVE them. The life I'd like is to remain at least emotionally, if not physically, close to family, providing the groundedness and belonging, and then run up on a hill above the houses and lie under the stars with a girl who also hasn't (dating-wise) lived out her teen exploration years yet, all while having an opportunity to do something worthwhile with my intellect and education.

There are not 2 different *kinds* of love, they are stages of love. The first "kind of love" you mention is the initial stage. It's called limerence(or infatuation-which has a negative connotation in peoples minds). The other type that you speak of is actual love, which takes time to develop. I've always believed that limerence is the first stage of love where the attachment is formed. The second state(or second type of love you described) is the more serious bonding stage.

Wow, interesting. For me it just depends on the occasion. I could enjoy all sort of different types of sex with someone I loved. I'd probably get bored if we just did the same type all the time.

Like if we were to go to the movies together, we wouldn't always go see a romcom (heaven forbid!), we'd see thrillers and comedy and action etc. as well. Same person, same activity, different vibe.

yep if only making love was with gf, then I'd be screws. too loyal to cheat, too loving to have meaningless unattached sex.

as for op I want both, I find playfulness hot. so I want a fun, silly playful, but also romantic relationship with a girl

I'm anything but a romantic. In fact, I consider myself to be a "hopeless pragmatic". I don't believe that romantic love even exists; it's just mutual attraction, be it to looks, wealth, strong genes, car, body type, etc.

That said, your words are pure genius. I definitely experienced the first kind of "love" before. It was on a cruise 3 years ago, but I remember it like it was 3 days ago. Mind you, it was with a woman I would normally not only feel ill at ease around, but avoid like the plague. She was 23, had many visible tattoos on her body, dressed a little bit gothic, and had a kid at home. Not only that, she was engaged; her fiance didn't come on the cruise. But on that ship, I felt completely safe around her. Her entire body language seemed to shout: "I'm not a threat to you!".

We hit it off almost instantly, doing exactly what the quote describes: exploring the magic of the world together. Even if the "world" consisted of just our ship. We did "little things" like play-wrestle in the pool, eat delicious multi-course meals, dance to Latin music until 3:00 AM, look at the pitch dark ocean, listen to each other's life stories, ramble to each other about what we saw on excursions (we had separate ones, since we booked them in advance, long before we each knew the other person existed), and make out under the night sky. I felt like an 12-year-old NT guy spending time with his first middle-school girlfriend, only with boatloads (pun intended) of alcohol to add to the whirlwind of fun.

That said, I have no desire to ever get into the second kind of "love". It's looks and feels very boring and confining, almost like a prison. No, just like a prison.

That's not for me. I want relationships to be predictable. And I don't like regular sex, much less with variation of positions and things like that.

A good point, very perceptive. I think you're right about this 'subgenre' in the gay community, or to be more precise among gay men. Being more asexual than gay, it's something that I identify with very closely, and probably has its roots in the sort of relationships that were common among older and younger men/youths in Ancient Greece, described so beautifully by Plato in 'The Symposium', where noble sentiments took priority over sex (although this wasn't forbidden as long as wasn't exploitative). Romantic friendships between boys run very deep and are often characterised by heroism and self denial.

"Heroism and self-denial" are certainly not terms I would use to describe it. "Shared magic and discovery" is more like it. Sterotypical things involved in a relationship like that would be playing by a lake in the summer, catching fireflies, building forts in the woods, and playful competition of various kinds, though of course these are stereotypes and not every relationship like that involves these things. When there is physical affection, it may be purely sensual, but when the two people correspond to each other's sexual orientation (boy and girl if they're straight, two boys or two girls if they're gay) it can get more sexual.