Euphoric bond – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

A euphoric conduit that is strong and somewhat permanent.

Expanded explanation

A euphoric conduit carries anima between two sources, and a bond is that conduit once it has become strong and durable. Marsh defines love in exactly these terms rather than in emotional ones. Love is a desire to create or maintain euphoric bonds, and hate is the opposite operation, the creation of endosocial membranes, which makes the two contraries in a mechanical sense rather than in a poetic one. Her argument against the Hegelian account of the meeting of two selves follows from this. For an exoself there is no battle to the death and no erasure of self, only the establishment of a euphoric bond with each self remaining intact, and she reads the struggle Hegel and Fichte describe as emblematic of an abusive relationship rather than as the structure of recognition. Bonds are built through shared euphoric experience, and laughter is one of the ordinary mechanisms. Laughter is a method of sharing euphoria and establishing euphoric bonds, and Marsh separates the exosocial version, which shares euphoria outward, from the endosocial version, which strengthens the membranes containing a group's euphoria. Both look and sound the same. The distinction between a euphoric bond and an empathic bond is worth keeping, since the first carries energy and the second carries understanding, and a relationship can have either without the other.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh defines love and hate as two mechanical operations rather than as feelings.

“Love is a desire to create or maintain euphoric bonds”
The Creation of Me, Them and Us

Examples

Love and hate as operations: One creates conduits and the other creates membranes, which makes them opposites in a structural sense rather than an emotional one.
Against the struggle for recognition: Two exoselves meeting establish a bond with both selves intact, which Marsh sets against the Hegelian battle to the death.
Two kinds of laughter: Sharing euphoria outward and reinforcing a group's membrane sound identical and do opposite things.

How others use it

Attachment theory is the dominant framework for durable bonds and measures them by response to separation and reunion. Neuroscience of pair bonding studies oxytocin and vasopressin in prairie voles and humans, and the psychology of love has typologies from Sternberg's triangular theory to Lee's love styles. Philosophy since Aristotle on friendship has asked what makes a bond good rather than what constitutes one. Marsh's definition is thinner than all of these and consequently more general, since a euphoric bond can hold between a person and a place, an object or an idea as readily as between two people, and nothing in the definition requires either party to be aware of the other.