“‘But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? ... Right?’” by johnswentworth
Description
One of the responses which one will predictably receive when posting something titled “How I Learned That I Don't Feel Companionate Love” is “... but you’d choose to feel it if you could, right?”.
Look man, your most treasured values are just… not actually that universal or convergent. I’m not saying that you should downgrade the importance of love to you. I am saying that an awful lot of people seem really desperate to find some story for why their most precious values are the True Convergent Goodness or some such. And love sure is an especially precious value generator for an awful lot of people, so people really want to find some reason why even a person who felt no companionate love would at least want to feel it. Empirically, that is just not what happens.
If I had a button which could magically turn my oxytocin receptors to the usual kind, rather than their current probably-dysfunctional state, I would view that button in basically the same way I view a syringe of heroin. It might be interesting as an experiment, just to see what it's like. But it sure seems pretty common for heroin to give people [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
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First published:
November 15th, 2025
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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