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

Those lucky ones who managed not to give up before encountering reality, nevertheless, should remember that their now hardened love is still a different reality. You can, of course, consider the opposite, that love is reality, and reality is something otherworldly. But in any case, you need to be on the lookout.

The ways and results of conflict resolution: avoidance (postpone), domination (win), cooperation (win-win), adaptation (to give way), compromise (decision in a different context).

Mature Love

After going through a frantic stage and trials by reality, love enters its new stage – mature love. It can be called the balanced stage of love. All the components of love: passion, intimacy, and awareness are present in the life of lovers in a harmonious combination. That is how the logic of our reflections on the laws of love suggests.

But here it is more difficult for us to illustrate rational considerations with poetic revelations or to appeal to convincing statistics of happy couples. “No wonder,” the thoughtful reader will say, “It all looks like an overly idealized model of love.” The way it is. In reality, all three components of love are too complex, internally contradictory, and paradoxical. This is what we will have to understand in the future. But now that we have an ideal model, we firmly know that we must pay attention to each of them and, if possible, strive for their balance.

For example, talking about awareness of love, we understand that we can only try to get closer to it – and then if we are diligent. There is no lack of skepticism here. Thus, Ortega y Gasset believes that “reason and freedom are only a thin shell of our being, which in itself is not rational and not free. Even ideas we get ready-made and formed in the dark, bottomless depths of the subconscious.”

Meanwhile, being in love and mature love differ markedly in the degree of arbitrariness in the expression of feelings and actions in relation to a partner. Of course, it cannot be said that in mature love there is only a rational choice of certain manifestations of feelings. The act of will here is not the result of a cold mind’s decision. Rather, it is synchronization of various internal energies, as a result of which we seem to say to ourselves: “I welcome this feeling to be with me.” And the main feature of such a decision of our consciousness is its absolute freedom. Mature love is a new attractive state into which we enter and which no longer contradicts any aspect of the Self being in the ascending stream of life.

Being in love and mature love can be harmoniously connected, and nevertheless, the difference between these states is manifested in many shades of feelings and experiences. Innokenty Annensky says about this in the poem Two Love:

There is love like smoke;
If it’s cramped – it intoxicated,
Give it free rein – and it will disappear…
To be like smoke – but forever young.

There is love like a shadow:
Lies at your feet during the day – hears you,
At night it hugs so quietly…
To be like a shadow, but night and day together…

Having talked about love with poets of different eras and styles, summarizing the discoveries of thinkers close to us in spirit and armed with the model of ideal love, we will try to return and again ascend this peak in a different way – along the paths laid according to all the rules of scientific thought.

PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE

Psyche And Her Two Sisters. Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1797

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

    W.H. Auden. The More Loving One

When love comes, we try to understand this persistent, irresistible feeling and, in confusion, realize that no one taught us what to do about it. Love is always a forced self-education. Our consciousness is trying to collect scattered impressions from parental relationships, from the stories of friends, literary images, and give us an answer to constantly arising tormenting questions.

It is logical to assume that psychologists who are experts in the suffering of human souls can also advise on the human joys associated with love. That it would be quite reasonable to get acquainted with the most significant achievements of modern psychology in the field of love relationships.

Liking or Love

For a long time, specialization in the study of individual mental processes (emotions, feelings, thinking, behavior, etc.) that took shape in psychology did not allow approaching the study of love – this elusive feeling seemed too ephemeral and multifaceted. Zick Rubin of Harvard University was the first to dare to conceptually define the relationship of love and measure its parameters. In his 1970 article Measurement of Romantic Love, he proceeded from the premise that love is a special kind of interpersonal attraction that one person is aware of, feels and expresses in relation to another, in a similar way to already well-studied types of attraction, such as sympathy, admiration, respect.

On the one hand, Rubin tried to get away from too narrow definitions of love, such as emotion, need, a set of behavioral characteristics. On the other hand, he believed that one should not delve into the side of personal experiences or the experience of personal transcending since love is always directed to a specific object. What Rubin measured as romantic love, he defined as a relationship between peers of the opposite sex of the sort which could possibly lead to marriage.

The scales of love and of liking were developed to assess the quality of relationships. The basket of love includes such attributes of relationships as physical attractiveness, idealization, a predisposition to always be at the services of a partner, a desire to share emotions and experiences, a feeling of a partner’s exclusiveness and absorption by him, the need for unbreakable contact and a feeling of dependence, inconsistency (confusion) of feelings, the unimportance of generally accepted norms of relations. If the relationship did not reach the level of love but was based on mutual sympathy, then they were expressed in the desire to cooperate on certain issues, the perception of the partner as similar to himself, feelings of trust and respect, highlighting a number of partner’s advantages, the presence of an unspoken code of justice and responsibility in the relationship.

As a result, psychologists have learned to surgically separate love from the relationships that are connected only with sympathy. In addition, the following patterns were found: women more sharply separate feelings of love and sympathy than men; if there is love on women’s part, then it is usually mutual; in a relationship, women are more enthusiastic than men. To test the predictive power of the love scale, an experiment was carried out, which confirmed that lovers can be recognized by how often and for a long time they exchange glances.

Based on the research of Rubin, one can also assume with a high degree of probability that sympathy in terms of mathematical logic is a necessary condition for love. In our opinion, the key attributes of love that lie in the area of sympathy are trust and respect. In the frantic stage of love, they are present by default. They constitute, as it were, the natural background of relationships. In the stage of mature love, the loss of one of these feelings leads to the rapid extinction of love itself. As for the sufficient conditions for love, we can take as a basis what Rubin called the three main components of love: the need for unbreakable contact and a feeling of dependence (affiliative and dependent need), a predisposition to always be at the services of a partner (predisposition to help), a feeling of exclusivity and absorption of the partner (exclusiveness and absorption). He believed that these components embodied the conceptual conclusions about the nature of love of such respected scientists as Sigmund Freud (sublimation of sexuality), Harry Harlow (affection), Erich Fromm (caring, responsibility, respect, and understanding), Philip Slater (intimacy).

You can try to answer the questions on the scales of love and liking of Rubin by asking someone to put them to you in no particular order, and, for example, compare the total score.

Three-Component Love Theory

The triangular theory of love, proposed in 1986 by Robert J. Sternberg, is one of the most authoritative and popular. It takes into account and to some extent generalizes a wide range of different approaches: a rather one-sided experience of describing love within the clinical concept of D-love (deficiency love – love as the satisfaction of an internal need), its alternative concept B-love (being love – the love of a mature personality based on understanding and acceptance of oneself and a partner) Abraham Maslow, the theory of six styles of love by John Alan Lee, the results of studies of love as different types of attachment, comparative characteristics of love and friendship, implicit theories of love, etc.

According to Sternberg, love can be imagined as a mental structure arising from three components. Metaphorically, it is close to the image of a triangle figure, where these components, independently located in their corners, interact in the area of intersection of the sectors of their rays-energies. The first component of love is intimacy (feelings of closeness). Recall that intimacy includes such emotional experiences as closeness, connectedness, bondedness, in other words, the feeling of a common inner space filled with warmth. It embodies trust, care, honesty, support, understanding, openness. Intimacy is achieved through opening yourself up to your partner.

The second component of love – passion – contains various energies of attraction, excitement, and striving in a wide range: from romantic dreams to erotic fantasies and sexual manifestations. It personifies such motivational elements as physical attractiveness, admiration (excitement), sexual interest, arousal, a strong desire (longing) for a partner.

Sternberg uses two terms decision and commitment to refer to the third component of love. The third component includes two concerted actions of love: the choice of this particular person as a beloved from now and forever and the associated inner determination about its irreversibility, no matter how difficult the external circumstances of love may be. This component of love embodies a cognitive decision to link your fate with your partner and remain faithful to him. In this case, however, the possibility of separation of one aspect of this component of love from another is also allowed. If we interpret these cognitive-volitional actions from the standpoint of the feelings accompanying them, then we can talk about a sense of duty, which is based on the noble qualities of a person.

The three components of love, according to Sternberg, are separate, rather independent centers of it that interact with each other. So, for example, greater intimacy causes a greater intensity of passion and responsibility in the relationship of partners.

Various combinations of these components of love make it possible to classify love into seven types. In the case of only one component, we have either sympathy, or blind passionate love, or formal (empty) love. The presence of the two ingredients creates romantic, companionate, or fatuous love. Perfect (consummate or complete), in other words, high love is characterized by the presence of all three components.

Such a model of love clearly enough reflects how balanced love is and allows you to measure the amount (intensity) of really flowing love. For this, Sternberg developed questionnaires to assess the degree of each of the three components of love: intimacy, passion and devotion. If you want to measure the temperature of your love, then try to honestly answer the questions given in the Practices of Love appendix.

Using this concept, a number of questions can be explored, the answers to which explain certain problems arising in a love relationship. For example, how do real and ideal love triangles coincide? What are the combinations of the components of love that each partner brings to love? Who would be the perfect match for someone with the ability to experience love based on a specific set of ingredients? In some crisis situations, it is also useful to compare the patterns of love that we feel, and which are manifested in real actions towards our partner.

Having defined what perfect love is, Sternberg immediately notes that it is much easier to achieve it than to keep it. If so, then surprisingly the instability of perfect love is similar to the fleetingness of the period of falling in love, in other words, high love is somewhat akin to little love. Therefore, it is possible that to hold mature love means periodically to plunge into the magical source of being in love.

It should also be noted that a person’s ability to consciously control and regulate drives and motivational processes (a component of passion) is considered practically unrealizable, in contrast to the feelings associated with intimacy and duty towards a partner. The great William Shakespeare seems to have written about this:

My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please:
My reason the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest,
My thoughts and my discourse as mad men’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed.
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Sternberg’s three-component theory of love is perhaps the main achievement of psychology in the dissection of love. However, in order to connect it with the multifaceted practice of relations between a man and a woman, Sternberg had to supplement it with the concept of love as a story.