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

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      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:

      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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ