Thank you for repying to the post content. I'm glad to read your relation to it and sharing your experience of the subject.

I didn't word the sentence you diagree with well enough. I did not exclusively mean love is the need to validate yourself in a person. Now that I ponder it, I don't know. I don't think I've been in love.
But what I meant instead was that the instinctual feeling of wanting to find a partner is like an in-built yearning that you feel must be fulfilled. Say you're single and you hang out with friends who are in a relationship/a couple. Doesn't the thought of when you will next have a bf/gf come up if you kind of step back a bit or if the topic comes up in conversation about you being single/the opposite sex? That's what I mean. It's like the joke you see in sitcoms where a guy stops his girlfriend getting ideas about marriage by changing the subject. I guess that is the social norms thing, that we aspire/yearn for it because we see others in society acting in that way. This is what I was considering in thought, how much of it now is instinct and how much is social influence?

smile,

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