Can true love be found? Can people find love? Or can friendship love be turned into love romance resulting in the ultimate great love?
Finding love is active rather than waiting for it, which is passive. However, it is not easy as finding friends. With a little bit of science, friendships can be enhanced to progress into a more rewarding great love.
Use some ideas from scientific research to love friends, value love and friendship, sustain friendship love and loyalty and then progress to great love. Here are pointers on how to do it.
the Dynamics of Friendship Love
When people find other people and then love them as friends, this is friendship love as opposed to a love romance.
Graduate research professor and social scientist, Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D., in his book Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion (Harper Paperbacks, 2006) notes how people like other people. He then carefully tested these observations with several experiments.
According to Cialdini, the process when total strangers turn into friends is influenced by the following factors:
1. Liking. People begin to like other people if they are similar, are physically attractive, give compliments and cooperate in certain activities.
2. Authority. People like other people with special knowledge or skills.
3. Consistency. People like people who are consistent in their words and deeds.
4. Reciprocity. People are likely to give back when they receive something and will tend to like the giver.
5. Social Proof. People follow what other people have done and will like those that they follow.
Through magnetic resonance imaging, Aharon, I. and fellow researchers in the scientific study "Beautiful Faces Have Variable Reward Value: fMRI and Behavioral Evidence" published in Neuron in 2001, have discovered that greater neural activity in the left brain indicated liking, which is correlated to physical attraction. Meanwhile, greater neural activity in the right brain indicated wanting, which is correlated to love.
Conversely, all friendships start with liking while love begins with wanting. Wanting is triggered as a need for rewards or something that is suddenly lost or missing. These rewards can be anything from the sight of a beautiful face or the familiar scent of a person.
Finding Love and Transforming Friendship to Romance
How does one find love? These are the process steps:
1. Find friends more efficiently. Social networking sites can help. However, use the dynamics of friendship love to great advantage. Always consider the principles of liking, authority, consistency, reciprocity and social proof.
2. Select a set of new friends that have potential.
3. Invest time and effort in getting to know these friends and give them rewards.
4. After a time, make these friends trigger a need for wanting through controlled periods of absence.
5. Build up the thrill and intensity of getting to know better a select friend for romance.
6. Test for mutuality. When mutuality is present, then true love has bloomed.
7. Sustain love with positive emotions and pleasurable rewards.
Great love is built on positive emotions, pleasurable rewards and mutual support. While trust is key which is common to friendships, romantic love is basically different in the quality of its emotions, pleasures and mutuality.
Positive emotions sustain great love. Pleasurable rewards differentiate romantic love from friendship love. Most significantly, mutuality transforms friendship into true love.
