Love By Fredrickson

The mind and body are constantly working together making it hard to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In Leslie Bell’s Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom she brushes upon the battle between these two as seen with women in society. However, in Barbara Fredrickson’s Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become the reader observes how the body reacts to love and creates it in an everyday setting. That is of course, Fredrickson’s own unique definition of love. The two essays intermingle to create an interesting array of possibilities for how we become who we are and what determines it. That is to say it can help establish how one forms identity - our unique

She points out that it is wants not just physical sex, but love in the form of connection from one mind to another. It is her belief that love makes people healthier, makes them grow better and stay better attuned to others. Thus it stands that not achieving enough love can be detrimental to one. In example, the women of Bell’s text on some level all wished for relationships and all seemed to want sex yes, but something deeper as well. Yet, despite what they wanted they were stopped by the decisions of the mind, the fear it had picked up of these relationships. The body still had demands however and these were filled with meaningless sex or flirting. Further, on the whole sex itself requires a large amount of trust to be put into the other partner. And as Fredrickson’s study of investors and trustees showed, “that through synchronous oxytocin surges, trust and cooperation can quickly become mutual” (115). Though perhaps the time spent between Jayanthi and Claudia’s partners were brief, undoubtedly there was some connection between the time they met and the instance they would have sex together. This surge of synchronous connection to another must have in many ways been very fulfilling in addition to the actual act of sex itself. Likewise, Fredrickson wrote that “Under the influence of positive emotions, your sense of self actually expands to include others to greater degrees” (113). Perhaps the one night stands referred to in Bell’s excerpt are not love of the traditional sense but they are certainly moments of love as defined by Fredrickson. During the parties and fun trysts of meeting with strange men, each had an influence on the other’s brain and processes however small and however