Love is not natural

Readers of the debate, my opponent is no longer it seems fighting for the resolution “Love is natural” but is instead starting to address a topic completely unrelated to what we are discussing: “love is eternal.” He indirectly claims that natural processes cannot end and as such love cannot exist simply because it does not last forever. Let's run trough his arguments quickly, shall we? Opening case rebuttals:He starts by saying love is not an emotion, that the two are distinct from each other. This is complete nonsense, and we can quickly address that by looking at two things: What emotion means and what my opponent has accepted as the definition of love: Emotion 1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love. See that underlined word? Love? So we have a dictionary example of love being described as an emotion. We can also look at the definition my opponent used for love: he described love as an affection. If we take the less elegant route and ask Google for the definition of affection he spits out the synonyms Love and Feeling, the latter that has the synonym Emotion. We don't put effort into falling in love and thus the feeling is an emotion. Moving on:Next up he says that love needs to be grown, hatched and harvested and refers to those things as unnatural. Let's look at the concept of growth which these three terms describe. Love has to be grown, it is growing. Growing is not an unnatural process. Small saplings grow over time into trees, strong and flowering. Are trees not natural just because they start small and need time to reach full strength? Is the uprising of a child not natural because we need to put effort into the safety of that child? Nothing can happen without growth, the universe grows, the land under you grows and the every single being around you grows stronger every day. Some grow fast, some slowly and some die before growing into that big tree. But that does note make growth an unnatural process. Now, the blinking of your eyes is natural, it has a purpose to clean and cleanse your eyes. As does love, it has the purpose of providing us with feelings needed to attach to a mate for the duration of mating, for providing children. But just like you cannot choose to blink your eyes, you cannot choose who will trigger your love. I quote [3]: “We are inherently programmed to love, whether it’s biologically, psychologically, or by some other mechanism we have yet to understand. “Contrary to what philosophers, moralists, theoreticians, in-laws, and counselors have always argued, love is not a choice. It is a biological imperative. And just as evolution favored human beings who were able to stand upright, it favored human beings who felt love. It favored them because love has great survival value.” Reading that paper showed us that love is an involuntary process from that first shot of adrenaline when you see something(one) you desire and start to evaluate him/her to the natural desire to be safe and have someone provide for you. It isn't an eternal process anymore than the growth of your hair, but it is still natural. Comparing the two processes (eye to love; love to hair) is a weak comparison. It is as you had compared our inability to fly to those of a bird and said: “To my best knowledge, flying is natural. We cannot fly, hence we are not natural.” They have a different purpose and a different drive behind them. So let's refrain from using them My opponent then asked me if a three year relationship that ends did not contain love. I answer: it did. Did they not fall for each other? Did they not fail to see the sun for the other person? Did they not get a primal desire for each other to the extent that they got married? We are to assume that they didn't get married for the gifts at the reception. It was not a love that lasted. Love is a feeling that is temporary as all other feelings, nobody feels happy every moment of his life, there will always be a time where they stop and will be sad instead for example. Then that feeling vanishes. Both feelings are natural, yet neither are eternal. Love isn't a greater feeling, love isn't excluded from this temporary nature. All three are natural, but all three can come and go as your surroundings demand. Next he asks me if bouncing from love and falling for another person is natural. Why shouldn't it be? If I for some reason stop being happy I'm going to feel happy again eventually. Love is a natural process that can be repeated. Nowhere in your definition does it specify that love has to be eternal by default, so you can drop those arguments in the next round. Counter rebuttals:Firstly, Don't try and refute the introduction to a speech. It's pointless. That part served to be a better start than “Love is natural and here is why!” But since my opponent mentioned it, he might have wanted to read the first source I cited in my case where infants and mothers are shown to develop and express love from the moment of birth, and even well before birth:“The love you feel for your baby isn't just cultural -- it's a basic part of your makeup. In recent years, scientists have started to explore this mysterious but crucial part of human nature. They've discovered that parents are hard wired to love their babies. “ Next up he somehow, again, treats love as an eternal entity and asks why we have heard of people killing their own mothers. I respond with a question: how often have you heard of infants killing their own mothers? In a large majority of cases the birth of your child will trigger a lot of hormones to keep you going and to strengthening that bond. In the rare cases that other hormones and situational reasons do not interfere with this “bonding time” a natural love will start to form. Once more he fights for the eternal value of love. With children it's simple; if you love them and do them good they will love you and maintain it. They may have ups and downs, but if you love them they will love you. In the next part my opponent criticized me for not responding to the argument that love is a choice. I had already stated that I would not be doing rebuttals in my opening case, responding to that point included. I'll address it here: Love isn't a choice [4]. You cannot point a finger at someone and go: “ohh, I'm going to fall in love with that!” and you cannot point a finger at your partner and say: “I'm going to stop loving you for no particular reason.” Love is biochemistry, it starts within your body before you realize that it is happening. It is this natural love inside your body that you cannot control that keeps you stuck in unsatisfying relationships. It is this chemistry that makes you crave the person that rejected you. Conclusion: My opponent needs to see that we are not arguing about whether love is eternal, we are arguing that it is natural. Love isn't a man made feeling, we can measure the reaction of a human in love and we even have animals that show apparent signs of displaying some form of love. My opponent needs to know that something that can end in disaster, something that eludes us and avoids, that needs time and effort can be natural all the same. That love isn't a given process, it is something that we cannot grow, only nurture. We can nurture our love to love. 1) http://www.thefreedictionary.com...2) https://www.google.is...3) http://digitalcommons.uri.edu...4) http://www.psychologytoday.com...