If you have read my blog topic on marriage in the Social Contract series (see http://joastler.blogspot.com/), you may have discerned that the approach I took involved a benefit-obligation analysis that answered the question, Why be married? It did not specifically refer to the needs of the individual that could motivate his entering a 'lasting' relationship. Yet, in taking up the issue of how social love is omni-present in interrelationships, a discussion of how need fulfillment is a driving force to bind people together is essential.
Let's start with the obvious, so we're of one mind in this. A married woman is unable to engage in sexual activity--for one reason or another. Her husband has certain choices to make to enable him to attain sexual release and sexual gratification: masturbation, go to a prostitute, find a congenial partner at work, in his neighborhood, even at church! A "partner" is identified as someone who is willing to help the individual meet his personal need for the purpose of achieving the latter's psychological gratification. Usually, the partner shares the same value system as the requestor, i.e., the person in need (sometimes called the "protagonist"), such that the former is sympathetic and understanding of what the latter is experiencing in his state of need.
If the requestor for help from a partner has anti-social needs driving him, society may be inclined to incarcerate the requestor for the sake of a greater good. Accordingly, persons who have anti-social needs and plan to act upon them should be referred to a psychotherapist or medical doctor for treatment, e.g., as in cases of desiring to rape, to take drugs, even to kill; before they pursue the ends they have in mind.
The importance of the approach here is in my belief that social love occurs between an individual and his partner in each's participation in an event which is to achieve the end, ever in view of each, viz., the requestor's specific need satisfaction. My approach circumvents discussion of some moralists who question the experiential means the requestor asks his potential partner engage in. For example, some Catholics don't want their priests asking anyone to participate in a sexual act for the purpose of his own gratification. To me, the matter of how the requestor thinks he will reach need fulfillment is his okay choice, providing both the need and the way to achieve it are socially acceptable, quite independent of some moralist's dicta.
One may wonder, what the potential partner expects to get out of his participation in an experience aimed at meeting the requestor's needs. Who knows? Obviously, the requestor is concerned about his own need-fulfillment, even should the partner he chooses is to receive no benefit other than the acknowledgement as participant in a drama with ends-in-view, as if being included in the cast of characters of a play.
Importantly, the partner can "opt out" of the (intended) need-fulfillment experience simply by declaring lack of interest in the requestor's personal goals and objectives or even in the particular role that he assented to play. Contrast the ease of "opting out" with dissolving a contract. In divorcing her husband for instance, a woman cannot simply give as a reason that she no longer needs her husband and expect the divorce to be granted. She should refer to the benefits and obligations that govern the contract.
Some "means" the requestor poses may appear shocking to society. A married businessman who chooses an young, attractive escort to accompany him to business functions rather than his secretary or his wife will get his employees' tongues wagging, to be sure, but maybe not those of the businessmen he is desirous to impress!
The Psychological Theory of Basic Needs
A person's behavioral goals, i.e., the ends toward which he is directed are to be distinguished from the means he selects to reach them.
Psychologists talk of basic needs in behavioral terms as the motivators of action. I've raised the notion of needs--the basic needs (also termed "drives")--with respect to the sex drive. However, the general theory of basic needs, postulated as early as by Aristotle (who used the means-ends distinction), maintains that mankind is driven, i.e., motivated, to meet his very basic needs, using what means he thinks will work. Importantly for the current discussion, the means frequently involve the cooperation of others solicited as partners by a requestor-in-need.
In a recent book (Who Am I? 2000) Steven Reiss identifies, by means of empirical research, some 16 basic needs of mankind, he terms "basic desires"--one being, the desire for romance. According to him the ways an individual meets his needs successfully on a regular basis defines his personality and answers the question of self-identity, i.e., who he is. Reiss traces his typology of needs to Abraham Maslow, who had coined the term "self-actualization," the being who reaches the pinnacle of developing his potential. Maslow amplies his position: when an individual develops his being to the point that he has integrated all his needs and found appropriate means for their fulfillment he achieves the Buddhist state of 'Nirvana,' a continuing feeling of happiness grounded in a knowledge of self-worth. Truly, he knows what he wants and has established through the years his own particular ways of meeting them. He's come to "have it his way," so to speak--as in the song recorded by Frank Sinatra, "I had it my way."
Meta-Elements of the Social Love Partnership
An individual, to be sure, need not select a partner by which he intends to meet his basic needs. If he's hungry, he can turn to his microwave to achieve his purpose. As such the microwave becomes a "love-object" even as a lonely child may carry around a bunny for comfort. Notoriously, dogs have served as love objects to be petted and stroked and taken out for walks!
Nevertheless, let's look at the meta-elements of social love among adults, when one person seeks out the help of another to satisfy some need of his.
1. Reaching out behavior of the requestor, i.e., the individual who has identified his personal needs. He singles out another in his environment who he believes can assist him, i.e., a potential partner and engages this other.
2. The potential partner favorably responds: Yes, I'm willing to help you.
3. The dance begins! Enjoined with common purpose, each assumes the role he is to have throughout the experience, focusing on each's part he is to play to bring about need satisfaction on behalf of the requestor.
4. As the recognized participant, each responds accordingly to what the other does in acting out his role.
Particularly important to the experience is the moment of denouement, in which the participants recognize they have indeed performed to reach the crescendo in which the requestor's need is fulfilled.
5, If the experience has indeed reached its peak, each participant should anticipate further instances in which he will perform even as he has in the present binding experience of social love.
The Social Impact of Social Love
I have argued that what adult social love does in a cultural setting is bring about personal need satisfaction, particularly of the basic desires. From a doctor, an individual seeks healing to satisfy his desire for physical well-being. From a chef of a restaurant, a person seeks need satiation for drink and food. Put generally, one's needs are frequently met by interacting with other societal members, who assume a particular stance toward him, enabling particular need fulfillment. By contacting potential partners through the 'yellow pages,' as it were, the individual determines a course of action to achieve his own need satisfaction involving others.
In his book entitled Vital Friends (2006) Tom Rath regards friendship as the fundamental social relationship for one's need fulfillment. He argues, an individual is part of his social milieu and must rely on that milieu to meet his own personal (basic) desires. He notes that given the opportunity, he will choose as his helpers those friends with whom he shares the same dispositions of likes and dislikes, i.e., a value system.
Thus, the impact of social love is that once the individual finds himself in need, he is prompted to search others to cope with it. An experience of social love can happen in which synergistic energy is released. This synergy the requestor undergoes at the moment of need gratification and permeates other aspects of his life, as Maslow seems to recognize. For instance, it is commonplace that in an office setting, two members of a team, working many after-hours, will engage in intimate relationship, the upshot of which is focused dedication upon the project above and beyond what any manager could demand of them!
Similarly, an individual whose health 'miraculously' returns with the aid of a diligent doctor, will vigorously attend to his affairs with renewed interest and enthusiasm.
In sum, there is psychical and physical energy as a well-spring boiling over when the individual achieves basic need fulfillment, such that he becomes energized to work longer and more diligently in what he undertakes and such that untold benefits accrue to his society.
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