11 Comments

Also, imprecision may be more desirable in love than in food. A precise description of how you feel about someone could give zer a precise knowledge of how much ze could get away with.

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So you're counting anyone who creates an account on a dating site as a 'specialist,' and chefs as 'most people,' then?

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The issue is the number of distinctions that most people know and use, not the number of distinctions that can or have been made by specialists.

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Once again, I am wondering whether you put even the slightest effort into researching this subject before posting. As just one example, f-list.net cross-references a technical vocabulary of hundreds of types of sex and/or love with four degrees of preference, and a further mechanism for specifying new terms.

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Could it be that most people experience a large variety of foods, but very few people experience more than a handful of loves?

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As with money, I did distinguish the distinctions ordinary people make from those of experts. I don't see how you're expertise comment distinguishes food from love/sex. We have limited experience with both of them.

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"Also, a precise vocabulary used clearly could make it seem like what you wanted from love/sex was fungible - "makes me think of these things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

May be off topic and missing the point, though...

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I doubt that 1) is true. I expect that if you look at love from the perspective of a relationship researcher/counsellor, you would find lots of dimensions. There are probably 40 subtly different flavors of co-dependency, and my partner and I have a blend of flavors 11 and 24, with the occasional 9. But we don't talk about our relationship that way.

For ordinary lovers, there is not much utility to precise, clinical and subtle distinctions, because we wouldn't use them even if we knew them. We'd say the stuff that we're supposed to, not the stuff that's maximally informative. That's your 2), and I think it's sufficient on its own to explain the phenomenon.

If I were to suggest a 3), it's that precise vocabulary usually accompanies some kind of expertise, and becoming love/sex experts is inherently difficult. (Sample sizes that give statistical significance would be tiring!) Expertise might involve a retreat from the involved perspective into an "objective" point of view. This is certainly possible regarding love and sex, but the way we care about love/sex is from the involved perspective, so the vocabulary of the experts would seem ill-suited to our experience, even if we were to learn it.

Notice also that friendship is important and multidimensional, but our vocabulary for describing it is also hopelessly blunt. A part of that might be that we just don't become friendship experts, but your 2) is again an important factor.

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3) is a reason why clear talk looks bad but it is different from the way I interpreted 2): 2) seems more intrinsically human, while 3) is just a cultural quirk that actually goes against human nature and is more dramatic than 2).

On 4), well, it's so much more than the raw experience, isn't it? It's more like talking about diets than about how your food tastes, but even a diet doesn't compare because it has less emotional components and you can actually objectively measure food allergies, body weight, etc... Still, with food we do accept people have very different diets, tastes and habits, the reason that we don't do that with love and sex seems to me to be 3). As we become more like foragers again I expect 3) to wither away and our attitudes towards love and sex to become much more liberal (some countries in Europe are significantly ahead of the US in this regard).

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3) sounds like a reason that clear talk looks bad. On 4), why would love/sex experiences be more context dependent than food experiences?

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I agree about 1) and 2), here are two more.

3) Western culture is still knee-deep into old farmer attitudes about sex and love (Victorian attitude basically), so there never was much opportunity for more expressions to evolve and even in 2014 you still don't know if a random person can appreciate a more liberal form of discussion about these things.

4) Love and sex are such subjective experiences that there isn't always a point to a very detailed discussion: very often some form of advice is useless unless the other person has a personality and experience very similar to your own.

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