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

R. Sternberg’s triangular theory of love

Components of the feeling of love: Intimacy, Passion, Duty. Degree of feelings: Warm, Hot, Cold. Mental processes: Emotional, Motivational, Cognitive.

Theory of Love as a Story

Understanding love as a story provides an answer to the question of how love triangles are formed in each of the partners entering into long-term close relationships. In this concept, the origin of love and its design are separated. It should be noted that the essence of the concept is related to the formation of an individual channel of love, therefore, one should not attach great importance to the simplified schemes of its origin mentioned here.

The shaping of love stories is as follows: the emergence of love occurs due to genetically transmitted instincts and impulses, and the image (matrix) of love is formed as a result of social learning and following role examples that are beginning to be associated with love. Love is organized mainly by a prototype. We learn about it from books, movies, mass media, parents, and friends, and we begin to accumulate our own experience according to typical schemes for realizing love. On the basis of typical schemes and personal experience, individual implicit stories of love are formed in the minds of each, and when two meet, each has its own plot of love.

The concept of love as a story has another practical meaning. It allows you to link social, historical, cultural, and ethnic contexts with individual experiences. According to Sternberg, the conditions prevailing by the beginning of the 21st century in the United States of America are characterized by the presence of 26 typical love stories. For example, love can resemble in every respect a close or long journey, or develop as a play according to a pre-written script with well-known role-playing tasks, or be like a humor joke, a cookbook, an investment business, gardening, etc.

“Love and, for example, collecting. How do you want to understand it?” – a reasonable question from a romantic-minded reader is heard. Perhaps, in the most impartial way: if you collect a lot of images of love sitting in the minds of American ordinary people, then you don’t need Sherlock Holmes’s deduction to take the dry residue from them and decompose it into piles, and attach an advertising label “Love Collectors” to one of them.

However, even Sternberg’s improved duplex theory of love leaves out of psychological models the key questions of love relationships about its driving force and ultimate goal. These questions became the focus of parallel studies on the psychology of love motivation, and their results were not slow to take shape in a separate theory of love.

R. Sternberg’s duplex theory of love

The formation of love triangles in partners as a result of social learning and perception of love prototypes, embodied in typical love stories.

Love as Self-Expansion

In the same 1986, along with the three-component theory of love by Sternberg, American psychologists Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron proposed the no less famous model of love as the self-expansion model (SEM). The idea arose at the junction of scientific research on the basic motives of human behavior in romantic relationships and classical ideas about love in Western (Plato) and Eastern philosophy (Upanishads), as the ultimate highest goal of human aspirations.

The SEM model was based on two psychological processes: the basic motivation of the individual to expand his own Self and the effect achieved in close relationships of including the other in the Self. Accordingly, in this model, love was defined as the desire to expand the Self by including the desired other in one’s own personality.

The motivation to expand the Self is associated with the universal need of a person to have great opportunities to achieve certain life goals (self-efficacy). The individual, according to the SEM concept, seeks to deepen his own understanding of himself through a new experience, expanding his worldview, acquiring new qualities, and thereby developing the Self as a given identity of the individual. Romantic relationships are formed under the influence of this motivation and, in the case of an ideal choice of a partner, they contribute to obtaining new resources (circle of acquaintances, social status, material resources, knowledge, etc.), ideas about the world, personality traits.

The SEM motivation should not be understood as a purposeful pursuit of benefits by establishing a close relationship with a specific person. The SEM model reflects the mechanism of involuntary mutual attraction of lovers at all stages of a romantic relationship. Moreover, it works both in the case of similarity of partners, and in the case of opposites. In the case of similarity, the lovers receive a positive assessment and support for their own self-image, which also includes the desire of the Self to new horizons. In the event of a difference in interests, the possibility of joining a radically new and expanding one’s own experience becomes a mutual attractive force.

The psychological effect of romantic relationships, consisting in the perception of the other as a part of one’s own Self, in the SEM model is the second basic principle, indicating the most accessible potential for expanding one’s own identity. Such a continuation of one’s own identity in another, however, can result in an almost complete replacement of one’s aspirations with the life guidelines of a loved one.

Anton Chekhov shrewdly told about this in the story Darling, touchingly describing the sincere love of the good-natured, compassionate young lady Olenka for her three men:

She repeated the thoughts of the vet and now had the same opinion of everything as he did. It was clear that she could not live without affection for one year and found her new happiness in her outbuilding <…> When guests came to him, his colleagues in the regiment, she, pouring tea or serving them supper, began to talk about the plague on cattle, about pearl disease, about city slaughter, but he was terribly embarrassed and when the guests left, grabbed her by the hand and hissed angrily:

– I asked you not to talk about what you do not understand! When we veterinarians talk among ourselves, please don’t interfere. It’s finally boring!

And she looked at him with amazement and anxiety and asked:

– Volodichka, what can I talk about?!

And she hugged him with tears in her eyes, begged him not to be angry, and both were happy.

Assessing the place of the SEM model in the psychology of love, the authors acknowledge its limitations and call for integration with other concepts of love relationships. It can also be noted that the reliance on the philosophical revelations of Plato and the Upanishads, claimed by the authors of the SEM model, remains only an effective declaration of intent. Academic psychology, forced to limit its constructions to measurable phenomena, is not yet able to describe the complex multifaceted processes of transformation of the Self in love.

Despite the criticism of the basic provisions of the model of love as an expansion of the Self, it offers original interpretations of some of the paradoxes of love. For example, high intensity of passion during the period of falling in love and its subsequent steady decline is associated not with the natural dynamics of emotions, but with the transition from a rapid expansion of the Self to a slowdown in the process due to the exhaustion of the potential for expansion in relations with a partner. From this, in particular, it follows that in order to maintain a more passionate relationship, couples should give preference to joint active, exciting, sparkling pastime over cozy relaxation and enjoyable activities.

For those who would like to determine to what extent the passion of his love or the love of his partner is associated with the motivation of expanding the Self, the Practices of Love appendix provides two questionnaires to measure the intensity of love and the degree of influence of the partner on the expansion of the Self.

Love in Positive Psychology

Sternberg’s theory of love leaves open a key question for many who think about love: if we now know what perfect love is, then why don’t psychologists explain to everyone how to achieve it? Alas, the answer to this question seems to be comparable to solving the mystery of the universe. But there is good news too.

At the beginning of this century, a new direction began to develop in psychology, which was named Positive Psychology. Scientists are seeking to expand our understanding of how people can achieve greater well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness-related relationships with others, including loving ones, by drawing on their inner strengths and developing positive qualities.

Having studied the influence of five main personality traits on the quality of relationships between partners (the level of intimacy and the degree of satisfaction with the relationship), psychologists have found that four of them: extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional resilience have a positive effect on the quality of close relationships. As for such a positive personality trait as openness to experience, synchronization seems to be a difficult task, and it can rather lead to conflicts in relationships.

In addition, the qualities already familiar to us were attributed to the number of the necessary strengths of the individual to achieve perfect love: a high level of self-esteem, emotional intelligence, stable self-identity.

Here, already on a new route, now led by a scientific navigator, we again climbed to the top of mature, conscious, perfect love. Since our ascent is purely theoretical, we, unlike Robinson Crusoe, are not destined to find human tracks here. Let’s look around. But what are these neatly stacked stones? It looks like an ancient temple. We read and, on an inspiration, translate the inscription: “Born in beauty.” Looks like a new riddle of love. And reflecting on this image worthy of great poets, we will set off along the road, which is almost two and a half thousand years long, leading to the repository of Plato’s manuscripts.

Platonic Love

Since we do not consider it appropriate to take our own notes in the margins of Plato’s works, to describe his views on love, we will resort to the opinion of famous thinkers.

Ortega y Gasset notes with admiration that Plato defines “the disease-causing nerve” of love: “Love is the eternal passion to generate oneself in beauty.” And he explains the essence of Plato’s idea: “Love certainly includes the desire of the lover to unite with another person whom he considers endowed with some kind of perfection. In other words, it is the attraction of our souls to something in a certain sense wonderful, excellent and higher.” It is no wonder that the inexplicable need to dissolve his personality in the personality of another person and, conversely, to absorb the personality of a loved one into his personality is symbolically reflected in the child: “A child is neither a father nor a mother, but their personified unity and boundless striving for perfection, which has become a physical and spiritual reality.”

The attraction of the soul in love to the superior and higher is one of the sides of the already known process of going beyond the limits of one’s Self. And children are undoubtedly part of this multifaceted process. Moreover, here again, we are faced with a double and contradictory play of nature. On the one hand, the beauty of the object of love is guessed (recollected) as genuine beauty, “a wonderful vision of the divine mystery.” On the “other hand, humans can approach it only in a harness of the soul of two different-colored winged horses. Let’s talk about this together with the Russian philosopher Alexei Losev.

According to Losev, Plato created an ingenious synthesis of two concepts: the cosmic Eros, which organizes the universe, creating people and gods, and the Eros of the lyrical individual attraction. The secret of love, which Plato discovered, is that this state “at least for a while gives communication with someone else’s soul and through that reunification with the lost total unity.”

When, in the struggle of a rational horse with a horse thirsty for pleasure, victory remains with the noblest kinds of soul, which dispose a person to good behavior and philosophy, lovers “blissfully spend life here in like-mindedness,” and after death, they become winged and light, and their perfect soul rises to true being. But if the evil horses win, then there is neither love nor philosophy, but what the rabble calls bliss.

“But wait, what about the boy?” – the caustic reader will ask. Well, first of all, not a boy, but rather a young man. Secondly, let us introduce after Losev the mental correction we need to understand love in the broad historical perspective of mankind: “There is no woman yet. ‘Beholding the beauty of the boy <…> the soul is carried away and receives warmth, feels relief from grief and rejoices.’ What Plato said about Eros in Phaedrus is such a fullness of feeling and aspiration of human nature that we can directly cross out this annoying boy and say with force: a woman.”

In the Symposium Plato reveals in the image of the god of love Eros his manifestations in people. What divine possibilities does love bestow on people and what are the requirements of Eros, which must meet high love? First, love endows people with valor and grants them bliss during life and after death (the return of souls from Hades). Secondly, of the two Eros, one must follow the Eros of heavenly Aphrodite, love the soul more than the body, love for high moral dignity, and both lovers take care of their moral perfection. Thirdly, Eros is spread throughout nature, and in order to achieve harmony in any business, you need to follow reasonable Eros. Fourth, in love, the integrity of a human being is achieved, possessing strength and power comparable to the gods. Fifth, Eros, and therefore a person in love, is always young, handsome, gentle, reasonable, fair, brave, wise, a master in arts and crafts. But these five sides of Eros, revealed in the speeches of the participants of the Symposium