Love is not natural

Note: I will not be posting any rebuttals this round and only present my opening case. What is love?( Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more!) Love is a clearly defined emotion as we both agree on in the first round. It starts at birth and ends at death and has it's highs and it's lows as you pass trough your life. But as clearly defined as it is, no matter how wonderful it may seem and how much we long for it, it isn't really that defined, it isn't simple and direct. It has many different forms and figures. It exists in ways far too complex for man to handle and often turns to thorns in our minds. In order to cover as many common aspects of love we'll split them up and prove that each of them is natural, starting with the love that children bear to their mothers all the way up to the topic my opponent is likely focusing on: Sexual attraction. The love of an infant Love begins as soon as we are born. Upon the first moment we are placed into the hands of our mothers we start to bond with her, we start to release oxytocin into the bloodstream and that gives us a chance to bond with our mothers and our mothers to bond with us in a natural process. Nobody teaches an infant to love and yet they express love in a natural way. This implies that love is in fact natural, it's something we are born with the capacity to do despite if we actually have a mother to bond with or not. Children love unconditionally for the first few months and years of their lives; They love whomever loves them and does them no harm. Like I already stated you do not teach a child to love someone, they grow that feeling by themselves. In a natural perspective this is a rational and logical thing to do. If you love your parent and your parent loves you they are more likely to take care of each other, they are more likely to succeed in life and create children of their own to which they'll bond with even before the child has been born. [1] Love of friendship. I'm not going to go too deep into other loves than the one behind parents and children and lovers since it is outside the definition. But in our society the love of your friends is something that we best all have, and in fact it is often that starting foundation of friendship that later drives our love life on. We might one day wake up and realize that this one friend might mean much much more to us than we knew or even cared to admit. We chose our friends, but we don't choose how precisely we will feel about them. Some friends will be close to you than others no matter if you hang out with them more than some other friend. It's a mutual trust that undergoes a transformation and eventually you'll involuntary take on the natural process of falling in love. “And they lived happily ever after” Love often stems from lust, a normal and natural emotion. But this does not mean that love in itself is just the desire to reproduce, reproduction is only a part of the grand picture. The first part of attraction is mainly connected to lust and how we are physically attracted to someone. Put in Laymans terms: We see a pretty girl, we want the pretty girl. This is a natural process to ensure that we desire a mate; and it is here were our subconscious brain searches for patterns and traits that a potential mate would have. If the criteria is matched and returned we have fallen in love and move on to the second stage: attraction. This is the stage where we drown our own brains with hormones, mainly dopamine, Norepinephrine and Serotonin see drastic changes. We feel happy all the times, we crave to be around that person, we desire to feel loved in return. We're basicly high from a natural high. Our pain threshold lowers, our “happy” threshold lowers, we feel happier over smaller things and we have a harder time getting irritated by something and someone. This is a natural process that ensures that we are mating, that we are bonding and sets a perfect foundation to the next step, bonding. When couples enter the bonding stage the lust and attractions stages start to die down and they aren't so easily happy any more. By this time they will start to re-evaluate the relationship and slow down. From this point onward we're looking at a similar situation as between a parent and a child. There is a sudden increase in Oxytocin levels and you'll feel a deeper, more emotional attachment to your partner. From a natural standpoint this makes sense. The woman needs someone to protect her and keep her safe and she needs someone to care for. These gender roles have become somewhat obsolete in our culture, but the idea of love however isn't. Humans have such an absurdly long growing stage that the idea of a loving couple to care for their offsprings is a natural and logical conclusion. Because we need so much love and care as we grow up the idea that love, something that is a chemical and therefore natural process, is a smart move evolutionary wise. It lightens the load for each parent; it provides the parent with someone to rely on when difficulty strikes and the natural need for security, acceptance and care is well satisfied with a natural feeling to bond us to a mate. A natural feeling of love. To conclude: What have we learned by this round other than the fact that I can watch a few Youtube videos? Well, we have seen that love is a natural process in the brain that is triggered and maintained in our brains my a series of natural chemicals and hormones. We have seen that all children have the capacity for love from the moment they are born in order to bond with their mothers. We can deduct from that fact that love is not taught to us, it is gifted to us by our need to be taken care of. If it isn't taught to us it isn't a man made response to social situations and must thus be natural. We know that we never fully control to whom we are attracted to and so we can assume that love is a natural subconscious response to visual and emotional stimuli and is natural. We see that the distinct stages set to ensure that we bond fully to our mate and reproduce and take care of the young together has a natural purpose and thus the method we use to fulfil that purpose is natural. Love can grow and maintain itself well beyond reproduction; feeding on our need to be taken care of, to take care of someone. Our need to have a stable life and be sure that someone is there to catch us. It takes use of our need to be the social mammals that humans are. It takes use of the fact that it, love, is a perfectly natural term, a perfectly normal and natural emotion. 1]http://consumer.healthday.com... 2]youtube.com/watch?v=eDMwpVUhxAo 3]youtube.com/watch?v=EJaY0pOdJfY