Honors College Art & Science of Emotions Fall 2017 (1:20 p.m.) Love Journal | Page 27

This “in-itself” state creates an emotional barrier, making talking about love as a man taboo. With this impediment, father and son
relationships have faltered, often never truly beginning in the first place. Keeping this in mind, men are not living to their full potential,
neglecting to explore the “for-itself,” failing to reach their true potential in fear of being viewed as soft by their counterparts and relatives.
If women are viewed as having the ideal framework for a love connection, why aren’t men viewed the same way? Why is it that
men “don’t want to talk about love” when it is present in both genders? Physiologically speaking, men are wired for love in the same way
women are. The various chemicals involved in a true love connection such as dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine and present in both the male and
female bodies (Love, Actually: The Science behind Lust, Attraction, and Companionship, Harvard University). While testosterone and estro-
gen are thought of as distinctively male or female chemicals, both are found in both genders when pursuing love. Women as well as men both
go through the same sort of emotional response when seeing someone attractive, both having butterflies in the stomach, and both having the
fight or flight response generated by the brain with noradrenaline (Love, Actually: The Science behind Lust, Attraction, and Companionship,
Harvard University). With this sort of research being undebatable and inherently true, why are men not encouraged to embrace these feel-
ings that their female counterparts also experience?
In response to men finally being able to express love rather than turning to other things such as drinking in the case of the song,
it is imperative that young men are taught love in every sense of the word. Being an ever-changing complex emotion, fathers must teach their
son the philia, eros, and agape sides of love collectively, and then encourage their sons to talk about them afterwards. The idea of philia, love
of friends and colleagues, and the idea of agape, love for humanity, is instilled in youth but not in a way where they can talk about it
(Philosophy of Love, Internet Encyclopedia of Psychology). Eros, passion and desire for something is neglected in most of teaching youth
about love, but this too must change. If fathers and men can remove themselves from the “in-itself” role and analyze their own feelings on
love, they can convey their ideas of love successfully to their children. To shatter this barrier, men must first assess their own situation and
take the time to realize that feelings of love are essential to the genuine human experience. Constantly internalizing emotion, only saying “I
love you” on rare occasions is not healthy, and leaves others to wonder if you truly love them.
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