Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love

Perhaps the case of Erast can be declared a common noun for all those cases when the impulses of a soul in love are noble, but the mind and will of love for the transformation of the personality are too weak. Observing the cases of Erast, one can only lament after Nikolai Karamzin: “Reckless young man! Do you know your heart? Can you always be responsible for your movements? Is reason always the king of your feelings?”

The question of understanding oneself and the ability of self-interpretation is more acute than ever in a state of love, and perhaps here either a big step is being taken towards the ancient call “Know thyself”, or our Self becomes even more fragmented and settles in the dark corners of consciousness.

Not long before Karamzin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe asked the question of “what is the human heart” in his famous novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Perfectly aware of the devilish power of fantasies that “people would suffer much less if they did not develop the power of imagination in themselves so diligently,” Werther nevertheless becomes a victim of his own irresistible passion. He is forced to admit: “A man will always remain a man, and that grain of reason, which he, perhaps, possesses, almost or does not matter at all when passion rages and he becomes cramped within the framework of human nature.” Goethe paints a heartfelt picture of a pure passion, as Napoleon put it, “great passion”, which almost entirely grows only from the hero’s romantic fantasies, but this does not become less suicidal. It is no coincidence that Werther feels a kindred spirit in children and is touched by their “innocent persistence of desires.”

What could be the reason for such an exceptional destructive passion? If we assume, as Werther’s beloved does, that the reason for this is the very fact of her inaccessibility, then the whole point is in the manic obsession of desire. However, Werther’s incurable suffering is different. He finds himself in a double trap: passion deprives him of reason and thus of human nature, but the belittling of passion will mean the loss of his own unique human appearance. Werther’s sensitive heart knows that high passion subjugates the soul, and when “nature cannot find a way out of the tangled labyrinth of contradictory forces”, man dies.

Another extreme manifestation of passion is its overwhelming preoccupation with sexual arousal. However, as exciting as the sexual experience is, something tells lovers that the sexual component of passion is less connected with a specific object of love than romantic. Perhaps Konstantin Balmont and Alexander Blok guessed about this in their poems:

The one who heard the song of the primordial wave,
Always full of boundless dreams.
We are from the deep bottom, and at that depth
Many virgins, many tender shells.

I do not like slavery. With free gaze
I look into the eyes of a beautiful woman
And I say: “Today is the night. But tomorrow —
A shining and new day. Come.
Take me, solemn passion.
And tomorrow I’ll leave and start singing”

Summarizing our reasoning about passion as the motivational energy of falling in love, we note the mutual influence of its two components – sexual desire and romantic attraction. Moreover, the sexual drive is largely determined and transformed by our imagination, which, in turn, is abundantly nourished by romantic fantasies. But this transformation of sexual passion is only a possibility, the realization of which depends on individual dramatic improvisations. In everyday life, everything is much more prosaic. And as if David Samoilov is trying to warn people against the flat, ordinary intoxication with passion in his verses:

Passion is not at all a type of adultery.
In her, blindness coexists with insight,
With immensity – an exquisite measure:
Merging of God with his creation.
There is no lust in it. And it doesn’t smell like flesh.
There is a spiritual passion. Everything else is a lie.

Passion ingredients: 1) imagination, fantasies, archetypal images; 2) erotic arousal, irresistible desire, the cycle of sexual response.

Intimacy

In a state of love, intimate relationships also develop, which include such emotional experiences as closeness, connectedness, bondedness. We can say that feelings of intimacy are formed from the sensation of a common inner space. In this area of experience, feelings permeated with warmth are born and poured out on loved ones. In a narrow sense, intimacy boils down to a frank relationship and understanding of each other. If we take into account the tacitly implied conditions of intimacy, then it should include acceptance, trust, respect, honesty, support, care.

In the transformation of the personality of lovers, intimate relationships play an important role. In particular, the determining factor for the expansion of the Self is the process of deepening openness to each other. Partners share with each other their innermost thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Also, such personality traits and qualities are revealed that have not yet settled down, are, as it were, in the project. Exposing the innermost has two sides. It allows you to gain determination and confidence in the embodiment of your aspirations according to the principle: “He called himself a load – climb into the back” but also puts lovers in a vulnerable position – the gap between word and deed can greatly devalue your image in the eyes of your partner, and misunderstanding or indifference on his part can clip the wings of your castles in the air.

To a certain extent, intimacy includes all three components of empathy – conscious or unconscious feeling of understanding that can arise in relation to any person. In a state of love, the ability to empathy, in other words, sensitivity to each other’s inner world, is involuntarily activated and becomes an important but fragile tool for deepening intimacy. Experiencing empathy, the lover understands what his partner is feeling, he begins to mirror and feel similar feelings and anticipates what the partner’s actions might be in such an emotional state.

It’s easy to see that intimacy fuels passion. In extreme cases, for people living with impulses of heart, like Goethe’s Werther, the awareness of their high sensitivity to the requests of their beloved and the ability to respond to them with all their heart decisively convinces them that only they are capable of making happiness for the beloved. It is only one step from here to the desire for complete and undivided possession of a partner, which only ignites the already raging passion.

In enjoying intimacy, it is important to be aware of the fact that this component of love has its limits. Despite the vivid feelings and attractive epithets about unity as one whole, about dissolution in each other, one should remember, no matter how sad it may seem, about the inevitability of a certain distance between lovers.

Moreover, it is this distance that allows us to keep and maintain feelings of attraction and romantic fantasies, that is, what we mean by passion. The content of this experience is expertly presented in the brilliant poem by Anna Akhmatova:

There is a cherished line in the proximity of people,
It cannot be crossed by love and passion, —
Let the lips merge in eerie silence,
And the heart is torn apart from love.

And friendship is powerless here, and years of
High and fiery happiness,
When the soul is free and foreign to
The slow languor of lust.

Those who seek it are mad, and
Those who have reached it are smitten by melancholy…
Now you understand why
My heart does not beat under your hand.

Now, having formed an idea of the content of love and its main components, we can, together with Stendhal, look at the laws of the dynamics of love, its glimpses, the birth, formation, and triumph of love.

Formula of intimacy: Shared interior space = [openness + comprehension] ± [trust + respect + honesty + support + care]

Periods of Love

Stendhal is often noted as one of the classifiers of various types of love. In fact, his main discovery is the identification of seven stages or periods in the dynamics of the development of love. Regarding the four types of Stendhal’s love (love-passion, love-attraction, love-lust, love-vanity) he himself says that “it is quite possible to admit eight or ten varieties of it. <…> But differences in the nomenclature do not change anything in further reasoning.” Nevertheless, it should be noted that in this discordant classification there are two vivid opposites: love-passion as a manifestation of spontaneous love, irresistibly involving in its irrepressible cycle of passions, and love-attraction as an expression of formal reasonable love.

Love-attraction, where the formats of a love connection are set by the norms and rules prevailing in a certain social stratum, and its inevitable entourage is known in advance to both parties of the relationship, where there is nothing unforeseen for a “person of good origin,” may be “more elegant than true love.” However, it has one fatal flaw – this is “poor love.”

Stendhal clearly gives preference to love-passion and, despite its unforeseen and mysterious nature, as a result of a purposeful search for “some general law to establish various stages of love,” he discovers the regular phases of its ascent, and reveals the deep processes taking place at these stages.

One of the practical consequences of his undertaken “detailed and careful description of all the feelings that make up the passion called love” Stendhal considered the possibility of healing from love.

Let’s take a closer look at the seven periods of true love according to Stendhal.

1. Admiration.

Fixation of attention occurs. It focuses on an attractive object, and it is not just an attractive object, but a perfect image. There is an attractive opportunity to get closer to the object of admiration.

2. Imagination.

A person thinks: “What a pleasure to kiss her, to receive a kiss from her!” etc. Fantasies of rapprochement flourish. The imagination paints colorful pictures of a new passionately desired state – intimacy with the object of love.

3. Hope.

Fantasy ignites emotions and permeates the body. Signs of passion can no longer be hidden. Naked – they are defenseless, and nevertheless, there is no point in suppressing or hiding them, but one has only to hope that they will be noticed and reciprocated. At this stage, one of the fatal forks of love arises.

Stendhal is convinced: “In order to get the greatest possible physical pleasure, a woman should give herself at this very moment.” But the flip side of this medal of pleasure is that if a woman surrenders too quickly, then long-term love is unlikely, since the “second crystallization” does not occur. This pattern of Stendhal coincides with the popular wisdom, which recommends that a girl not jump too quickly into bed, but wait until love matures in a man. In turn, two hundred years later, neuroscientists also found, to their surprise, confirmation of this maxim as a result of studies on the concentration of attachment hormones produced in the brain of a man in love.

4. Love germinates.

If the hope was not in vain and met a reciprocal feeling, then it becomes love. It cannot be confused with anything – it is an insatiable pleasure from the closeness of a loved one, felt by all senses.

5. The first crystallization begins.