This book is dedicated to love, love between people, multifaceted and ambiguous in content and unique in form. From the point of view of psychology, love is a very serious phenomenon. Love permeates the whole life of a person, determining his development, attitude, and sometimes the whole meaning of life. It would be strange not to know this most important side of life. This is necessary, first of all, so that love gives happiness to a person, and does not lead to disappointments and even more so to tragedies.
Love is a mysterious phenomenon in many ways. And like any incomprehensible and mysterious phenomenon, love has overgrown with myths.
- True love is love at first sight
This opinion reflects the beautiful myth of the halves who are looking for each other around the world, and when they find, true love flares up between them. “Love is given to us from above, marriages are made in heaven!” – proclaim the supporters of this legend.
“Lawless Heart! As soon as I saw him, I immediately realized that he was the love of my life! How can I refuse the one who is destined for me? ” – this is the typical rationale for this myth.
But if he and she are halves attracted to each other, then the feelings should be mutual. Where then does unrequited love come from? If you go beyond the legend and turn to life, it turns out that they fall in love at first sight, and from the second, and from the third. And love at the n- th glance is no less passionate than love at first sight. Not once or twice there is a situation when a person thinks that “this is the real half”, but only until he meets the next one.
- Is the object of love the one and only?
“Here I live in a small town. I fell in love with a guy, I’m getting married. And if I lived in Moscow, I would love another, and I would not even suspect the existence of the first. So where is my “one”? ” – one woman writes on the Internet. A very sensible reasoning, showing that the search for the one and only object of love is a myth or the deepest delusion, characteristic only of the inflamed brain of a lover. But the first youthful love seems to be the only one until the second comes. If we turn to the prose of life, then one single love (falling in love) is extremely rare and usually because a person with all the strength of his soul believed in the myth that there is only one true love, or because the object of love was inaccessible to him.
If all young people reasoned in the same way as the woman whose letter I have quoted, how many tragedies would have been avoided because of unrequited love! In the United States, for example, 25% of suicides are committed by spouses, lovers, or rivals fighting for the favor of the same person. Only those who are completely satisfied with the partner throughout life can become the “only” objects of love. Otherwise, a new search for the “one and only” may begin. And although it is difficult for a lover to believe it, it is quite possible that a new love is already waiting for him, and often much stronger and happier.
Conversations about the exclusivity of the chosen one, about the impossibility of living without him are purely hormonal matters. If Romeo and Juliet were united in marriage, Juliet would probably very soon turn into an ordinary, not very smart, grumpy wife, overeat sweets, harass the servants with nagging, gossip with neighbors.
And Romeo could decide that he mistakenly took a hobby for love, that he and Juliet did not get along in characters, he would start to disappear at feasts, on a hunt, and in the evenings hang out under other people’s balconies. Or maybe I would go to the pharmacist for poison. There were no divorces. Anyone want to argue? And how can you argue when such metamorphoses constantly occur before our eyes.
This means that “the union of two souls”, “marriages are made in heaven” and other unearthly things are nothing more than a peacock’s tail, a bright plumage, in which a simple sexual desire is dressed. Here are the calculations of French scientists, which show how unconvincing theories about “the only”, “narrowed by the sky”, “two halves”, wandering around the world in search of each other are.
If the “only one” is lost among 50 million French people (not to mention other nations), the probability of accidentally meeting him is, roughly speaking, one chance in 25 million. Nevertheless, few French women and French are deprived of love. To find your mate, it turns out, it is not at all necessary to sort out one and a half billion of the opposite sex. Love is able to make a person, chosen from a narrow circle of acquaintances, “the only one”, “betrothed” and “given by God.”
An analysis of 1,700 families showed, in particular, that 6 out of 10 couples lived in the same house before they met, 7 out of 10 – in one block, 8 out of 10 – in the same county and 9 out of 10 – in one department. This means that each of us chooses “his soul mate” from a very small, limited number of people who make up our immediate environment. It is estimated that, on average, each person is surrounded by no more than 20–40 persons of the opposite sex and the age appropriate for marriage.
It turns out that if I change my place of residence, study, work, then I will be surrounded by another 20-40 people. There can be at least a million options, and the choice will almost always be made. This means that any choice, even the most successful, is nothing more than a lottery.
Samygin S. Love through the eyes of a man // Based on materials from the Internet
- Is there everlasting love?
The idea that erotic love for one and the same person can last until old age was reflected in the poem of the ancient poet Pavel Silentsiariy “An aging friend” (free translation by K. N. Batyushkov):
More beautiful, Philip, your wrinkles,
Than the blossoming freshness of girlish faces.
And they awaken desire in me more strongly, Drawing
hands to themselves,
Perseus hanging apples,
Not young virgins standing upright breasts.
For sweeter than another spring,
Until now, your autumn.
Winter is yours.
Summer is much warmer for me.
This myth is supported in our time by E. Pushkarev: “Love lasts until the end of the century and over the years it becomes stronger and more beneficial.”
Eternal love is familiar only to lovers.
V. Grzeszik, Polish satirist
In 2009, scientists at the Stony Brook Institute (New York, USA) tried to put a scientific basis for the existence of eternal love: they came to the conclusion that the level of dopamine (the hormone of pleasure in life) is the same in both old-timers of love and those who have just fallen in love. However, they did not take into account the level of oxytocin, which is responsible for attachment, and its level changes over time. So if a person wants to know whether he has fallen in love for all his life, he will have to wait all his life.
We studied the peculiarities of manifestation in students of one of the most common family myths – the myth of eternal love, which in traditional psychology is understood as the following statement: “A partner must always love me, even if I behave stupidly or disgustingly.”
The hypothesis of this study assumed that the interpretation of the category of love, presented in the form of the myth of eternal love, is associated with family experience in the parental family, namely with the composition of the parental family: people who are brought up in an incomplete family will have a myth of eternal love, and people who grew up in a complete family, this myth will be absent.
We also suggested that the interpretation of the category of love, presented in the form of the myth of eternal love, correlates with an affiliation need. We assumed that people with a predominance of the power of striving for people would have the myth of eternal love, while people with a predominance of fear of being rejected would lack this myth.
On the basis of the respondents’ answers, the following variants of the interpretation of love were identified: love-necessity (0.18); love-attachment (0.18); love – attraction, attraction (0.24); love is a value (0.24); love – trust and respect (0.53); love-fidelity (0.12); love-understanding (0.41); love-passion (0.18).
Correlation analysis showed that there is no connection between the peculiarities of the interpretation of the concept of love and an affiliated need. Correlation analysis confirmed the inverse relationship between the presence of the myth of eternal love and the composition of the parental family in the subjects, i.e., we can most likely assume that people from single-parent families have a myth of eternal love, while people from complete families will have this myth. absent.
Perhaps this is due to the presence of naive family ideas among people who are brought up in single-parent families due to the absence of an example of marital interaction in the parental family. However, the problem of the concept of love is multifaceted.
The group of subjects was divided according to the presence / absence of the myth of eternal love. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data was carried out, which showed that differences in understanding of love between the groups did not appear. In both groups, love was most often interpreted as respect, trust and understanding of the other person.
Ilyina E. G. 2008. pp. 143–145
There are many cases when a person falls in love several times, because previous attempts to find his ideal were unsuccessful. As sexologists joke, “Do not grieve if Love has left you. Hope will replace her. If Hope leaves, Vera will come. And if Vera leaves, Zulfiya will come. ”
But this can also lead to the ending described in the poem by A. Delvig:
In love, having learned only suffering,
She lost her desires
And again she does not ask to love …
- Out of sight – out of mind?
To what extent is this popular saying true? Of course, a long separation can lead to a break in the relationship between lovers. So, the vows of a girl’s loyalty when her boyfriend enters the army are not always respected. And one wife told her husband, a sports trainer who was at the training camp for most of the year, that she was divorcing him because she needed a husband, not a coach. Much depends on the strength of feelings, moral principles. However, with a deep feeling, love survives in separation. This can be confirmed by the happy marriage of the genius cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the outstanding singer Galina Vishnevskaya, who said: “Friendship is more precious than love. He turned my head in four days, and since 1955 we have been together. For many years we did not give up each of our creative lives. We often met in the hallway when I left on tour, and he was returning from his own. We had overlapping meetings at the airports. We both have always had a rich creative life, and this did not prevent us from raising good children. We are both happy in our marriage … ”
Here is another example – Gennady Khazanov and Zlata Elbaum have been married for over thirty years. “Distance means nothing to us, we have a connection with Zlata at the level of souls, and this is stronger than a connection at the level of bodies,” says G. Khazanov.
- True love is amazing sex
This myth comes in handy when you need to convince yourself that, despite the unrequitedness and melancholy, sexual relations is love, and not just love, but real love, given from above. “When I’m with him, I forget about everything, I don’t need anything else. I am drawn to him like a magnet. I have never had such sex as with him in my life. Without him, my life is empty! If this is not love, then what is love? ”
This image of love has been reproduced in millions of copies in books, films, magazines.
Here is what M.O. Menshikov wrote about this as early as 1899: “Sexual love for centuries has been almost the only content of fiction. Novelists of all times and peoples, starting from ancient times, describe love in the infinitely varied conditions of time, place, environment, age, mind, beauty, health, social status of lovers; piles of novels appear with the regularity of the vegetable kingdom; countless printed sheets are replaced by others, withering with the speed of autumn leaves.
Only great novels last long, but they are extremely rare. They describe the passion itself, while the small ones mostly describe its setting. It is in this environment of sexual love that lies the deception that graceful literature introduces into the general consciousness. Thousands of bad poets “glorify” sexual love in an extremely exaggerated way – as a divine feeling, as unearthly bliss, as a radiant transformation of life, which puts it above reason, above conscience and any sacred things of the soul. Sexual charm is described as one unspeakable sweetness, one unspeakable delight.
Minor poets strain all their mediocrity to portray love in its most captivating forms; secret voluptuous, they paint seductive, incredible pictures with which they manage to irritate both their imagination and those readers who are not free from sexual lust and who are completely free from it. Only people with great taste or with a great conscience turn away from this subtle pornography; the mass of readers rushes to her with greed. Acting for centuries on the unstable brains of average people, the love affair corrupts the sexual feeling more than any other influence. “It is not a woman who teaches us love, but the first dirty novel …” – said Pushkin …
The most talented poets, not excluding Pushkin and Lermontov, glorified drunkenness and debauchery – however, refined drunkenness, refined, anacreontic debauchery, which was then considered a sign of good form to indulge in. In secret high society circles, in which Pushkin participated, such “living pictures” as the death of Sodom were played out, and our greatest poet almost died from these orgies. There is no doubt that at a later, sober age, both Pushkin and Lermontov would have abandoned their erotic writings, they would have been ashamed of them, but bad poets – like Barkov – glorified voluptuousness even at a later age. And modern poets like Baudelaire and Verlaine sang not only debauchery in general, but all its crazy, unnatural forms. ”
Due to the fact that sexual desire in the understanding of most people is connected with the idea of love, they easily fall into the delusion that they love each other, while they are physically attracted to each other.
These illusions are greatly aided by the deceptive nature of sexual desire. It requires fusion, but it can be inspired not only by love, but also by anxiety and loneliness, a thirst to conquer or be subdued, vanity and even the need to hurt and humiliate. Sexual attraction without love only for a short moment creates the illusion of unity, leaving strangers as strangers as they were before.
This is just one of the images of romantic love, and sex is one of its facets, but love itself is much richer and more multifaceted in content and emotions. Often love is just a quiet joy when it is nice to see a loved one, to talk with him about something, when he can be trusted in everything, when lovers understand each other perfectly. And love-suffering is also love.
Numerous clinical facts, writes S. Samygin, show that a man or woman who devotes their lives to unlimited sexual satisfaction do not achieve happiness and very often suffer from acute neurotic conflicts. Consequently, sexual satisfaction in itself not only does not provide a basis for happiness, but does not even guarantee mental health, and even more so love. Freedom of love, understood as a game without rules, turns into chaos of personal relationships.
- Love is inherent only in man
There is an opinion that love is a purely human feeling. For example, Stendhal wrote that love is the creation of civilization. But is it? Are we primitivizing the emotional life of animals? Let’s see what the zoopsychologists have to say about this.
Storks have a stable couple, and from the outside it may seem that the storks are loyal and gentle spouses. However, in reality, their marriage is based on attachment to the same nest. Studies have shown that storks do not recognize their partner by sight. For example, if one stork is exchanged for another, then the spouse will not suspect anything. And if in the spring a foreign stork flies to the nest before the legal spouse, then the male will not notice it either.
Unlike storks, gray geese, about which K. Lorenz wrote a lot, know what love is. They recognize their partners by their appearance and voice and have an exceptional memory for the image of the “beloved”. Even after a long separation – migrations geese prefer old love, they spend a lot of time together even outside the breeding season.
Therefore, only where personal recognition and personal individual attachment arise, love arises. But to describe the feelings of animals and birds, the term protolove is used .
Love and sex exist separately in a goose’s life. When combined, they reliably bind a pair, but quite often they are observed independently of each other. Under normal circumstances, the gander leads active courtship. The goose only accepts courtship, and therefore at the disposal of the goose in love there is no system of behavior in order to gain the attention of its beloved. She does not have the techniques that, as we have seen, the gander resorts to. A goose can only seem to accidentally keep somewhere close to its chosen one and closely follow him with his eyes (“playing with his eyes”, apparently, occupies an important place in the life of gray geese, as well as in the life of other birds).
If the goose responds to his courtship, they together perform a ritual marriage ceremony, the so-called shouting ceremony. Then, if nothing unexpected happens, the couple remains faithful to each other for the rest of their lives. However, sometimes something unexpected happens – again, just like with people. The bonds between members of a goose pair are strengthened by a shared affection for the chicks, who, in turn, are equally loyal to their parents.
Lorenz K. 1984
Vole mice show signs of prototype. After courtship, lasting a whole day, they enter into an alliance with their chosen one for life. Vole spouses prefer to spend time together, clean each other for hours and live in the same burrow. And after the birth of the young, the spouses become gentle and caring parents. Voles avoid contact with other potential partners. The male becomes an aggressive guardian of the female if a lone competitor becomes active.
But a close relative of the steppe vole, the mountain vole, does not show interest in long-term relationships with a partner, i.e. they are polygamous animals. Scientists studying the life of voles have hypothesized that the monogamy of some and the polygamy of others is to a certain extent related to the amount of synthesis of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, in which these related mice differ significantly.
The zoopsychologist Pfaus, who studies rats, also came to the conclusion that they are characterized by prototype. If young males are ready to mate with any females, then mature males are determined with preferences. As they gain life experience, they have beloved females, to whom they pay special attention, ignoring others. Several forms of manifestations of complex empathies have already been discovered in these rodents.
Protolove manifestations are observed in dogs, cats, horses and other animals.
It is interesting that not every cat will like a cat: basically all cats for some reason are attracted to “blondes”. I had different cats. For example, the cats did not really like the gray ones, but the “blondes”, as they see, are already trembling. And not every cat will suit a cat either. I had Strelka, she never let a single cat approach her in her entire life, and she died of uterine cancer. The one she liked was a eunuch, his “ladies” were not interested at all. All my life I lived quietly, and Arrow did not want to surrender to anyone. Others, on the contrary, are ready with everyone. Everything is like people have …
From an interview with trainer Y. Kuklachev
In primates there is also a polygamous (“harem”) prototype, as, for example, in gorillas. Females compete with each other, they dislike each other, but everyone is sensually attached to the male and everyone is with this male of their own free will. The male, on the other hand, has the right to choose his “beloved wife,” giving her and her cubs more emotional, sexual and material attention, but at the same time he is obliged to mate with everyone. If misfortune happens to the male, the females grieve and fall into outright depression.
Studies by the American psychologist G. Harlow (Harlow, 1976) have shown that already in monkeys, selective emotional attachment is manifested in different types of love: maternal love; childlike love for mother; love of peers, children and adolescents for each other; heterosexual love; paternal love for children. None of these types of love can be reduced to the other.
Harlow showed that a mother’s love for her cub, contact caresses and attention affect the development of communicative qualities and emotional attachments, and the cubs, deprived of maternal love and affection in childhood, grew up mentally and socially disabled, unable to reproduce offspring.
Protolove is not devoid of jealousy in many species of animals, because there is competition among representatives of the same sex for their partner. And there is a scientific explanation for this within the framework of the concept of sexual selection and the choice of sexual strategies: you need to choose a partner who is valuable to others, so it is more reliable.
But the existing myth about the loving fidelity of swans, that a partner is smashed to death from a height, if another dies, is an invention of the poets.
- Self-denial is the ultimate expression of love.
There is a myth that love and self-sacrifice are inseparable. This view has been repeatedly voiced by many prominent people. The true essence of love is to abandon the consciousness of oneself, to forget oneself in another I, and, however, in this disappearance and oblivion to find oneself and to possess oneself, Hegel believed. Love is finding one’s own happiness in the happiness of another, Leibniz echoes him. And in our time, this point of view is repeated by many. For example, a well-known teacher in Soviet times V. A. Sukhomlinsky wrote: “The meaning of happy love is to give.”
Of course, altruism is inherent in love and there are many cases when a loving person goes to a feat in the name of love and is happy to give the last to his beloved being. But it is one thing to sacrifice oneself for the sake of something important (for example, to save a loved one, to help out in difficult times), another thing is to sacrifice oneself constantly for the whim of the object of love or indulging his bad habits. Here it is very appropriate to recall the saying: “Many believe that they have a good heart, although they have only weak nerves.” Mothers very often “put children on their necks” just because the child knows how to cry pitifully or sweetly ask. It always does only harm to both mother and child and their relationship. Wives also use tears to get an expensive purchase from their husbands. No wonder one writer, obviously well-versed in female psychology, said in her novel,one
And read the above statements of the philosophers. Don’t you think that when they talk about the altruism of love, they mean something else: altruism manifests itself for its own sake (one’s own happiness, finding oneself). To follow Leo Tolstoy’s view of love: “To love is to live the life of the one you love” is to lose yourself. Love should contribute to the spiritual, and sometimes professional growth of a person, and not destroy him as a person.
Unhappy lovers often use this myth because it elevates them in their own eyes. It is much more pleasant to proudly say: “I sacrifice myself for the sake of love” than to admit: “I am afraid of losing it, so I agree to everything.” However, the more a person “sacrifices”, the deeper he gets bogged down in unhappy love.
1 Koptyaeva A. Ivan Ivanovich. M., 1949.
- “True” love is mutual
Many psychotherapists and humanistic psychologists, following the prevailing opinion in the mass consciousness, 2 believe that only love that is mutual is “real”. If there is no reciprocal feeling on the part of the object of love, then this is attachment, dependence, and not love. The statement is highly dubious. After all, love is also based on attachment. How, then, can one separate a love affection from that which is not worthy of the name love? In addition, love dependence is sometimes mutual, when both are dependent on each other. Finally, if you follow this logic (obligatory reciprocity), then it turns out that whether I love or not depends not on the feeling I feel, but on the reciprocity of the object of my love: if he does not reciprocate, then my love for him is not love.
It is believed 3 that true love is a bright, joyful, positive feeling, and although negative emotions in connection with a loved one may appear, they are short-lived. A statement, again unsupported. If, for example, a jealous person is constantly jealous of his half (while experiencing at the same time not happy emotions), then he does not love her? Why is he jealous then?
2 For example: “Unrequited love is just as different from mutual love as delusion is from truth” (J. Sand) or: “Love acquires meaning only when it is mutual” (Leonardo Felice Buscaglia).
3 The statements given as examples belong to the psychologist M. Morozova, but they are typical for other authors as well. Here is the opinion of the clinical psychologist M. Kamelev: “Love is always mutual. She is never unrequited. If there is no response, then this is already an addiction. Love does not paralyze a person’s life, it is joy. Love develops the personalities of lovers, which also has a positive effect on career, study and relationships with others. Whether there is a loved one nearby or he flew to Antarctica for two years – he exists in the world, and this is already great. Love does not interfere with making a career and enjoying life. When a person loves, he becomes prettier, slimmer, younger, curly hair, eyes shine. He, of course, longs to see his beloved next to him. But he never stops wanting anything else in life. ”
Well, what are the following statements about “true” love: “If I rejoice in you and your joys, and you rejoice in me and my joys, if we are happy and comfortable together, then we love each other.” When I was a student when I rejoiced at the success in the exams of my fellow students, I had no idea that, it turns out, it was an expression of my love for them, and not companionship. Or: “Love is an active interest in life and the free development of the object of love. I love you, but each of us is free (in our opinions, in making decisions). The main criterion of love: we feel good together and we feel good separately. If you feel better without me, I will understand and let you go with wishes of happiness. With true love, the presence of a loved one does not matter, you do not suffer without him, even if he left or left forever”(!? – EI And what about the requirement of reciprocity for true love?). one
1 Note that these statements come into clear contradiction with the understanding of true love as mutual.
“Of course, this is sad, – continues M. Morozova, – but you do not immerse yourself in prolonged suffering, because you do not feel the need for him, you wish him happiness.” What an idyll: they fell in love with each other a little and parted like ships at sea, just like during the “resort romance”. Well, if one does not want to disperse, then, according to the psychotherapist, he has a love addiction, pathological love. However, if you follow this logic, then everyone who is in a state of love is addicted, because it seems to them that they cannot live without each other. By the way, according to M. Morozova, falling in love (in which “blows the roof”) refers to the first stage of drug addiction love.
It is obvious that love addiction can be different and in some subjects is pathological in nature, becomes addiction. And for the most part, this dependence manifests itself in unrequited love , carrying a lot of negative emotions: most of the time the addict is overwhelmed with anxiety, anxiety, fears, insecurity, doubts, jealousy, envy, anger, irritation towards the “loved one.” But all this is a consequence of real, albeit unrequited, love, and not its surrogate.
- Other myths
Love must be earned and suffered. The myth that love must be earned is based on a very strange logic, according to which one must pay for everything and must suffer: “There is no love without suffering.” However, this is the logic of unhappy lovers. There is something of Christianity here, where the martyrs will certainly go to heaven.
In life, everything happens the other way around: the more a person suffers, the more you want to get rid of him. Who is pleased to see how a person suffers?
To forget about unhappy love, one must fall in love with another person. This is one of the often recommended methods imposed in Brazilian dramas, and it usually does more harm than good.
For someone who has fallen in love unrequitedly, it is impossible to immediately fall in love with another person. In the best case, the new “love” is a substitute, a means of distracting from heavy worries. At worst, it’s yet another difficult concern.
Of course, a person who has been rejected for a long time, as nobody needs warmth and care, and he gladly accepts them, but usually he cannot reciprocate, because his heart is already taken. As a result, a love triangle arises, in which an innocent person is involved in anything, and guilt is also mixed with the torment of unrequited love due to the need to lie or hide one’s attachment to another.
There is no cure for unhappy love. Of course, there is a great deal of truth in this. Pharmacology is still powerless against unhappy love, and the best medicine, like thousands of years ago, is time. But this does not mean at all that the unhappy lover cannot be helped.
The first thing a person who finds himself in a situation of unrequited love needs is support and emotional warmth. It is very important for a person to believe in himself again, to find hope, to feel that he is needed and important to someone, that he is worthy of respect.
The second thing you can help him with is to listen to and understand him. The opportunity to speak out, to talk about his love brings great relief, a person, as it were, sheds a huge burden from his soul. But since this is a very intimate topic, it is far from always that a person has someone nearby whom you can trust.
Third: as a rule, the meaning of a lover’s life focuses on the one he loves. In the event of a break in relations with a loved one, all desires, all aspirations are lost. Therefore, he needs help in finding a new meaning in life, a new horizon. And the one who himself experienced unrequited love can help the best in this. If a lover comes to the idea that he has something or someone to live for, then half the job is done.
They die of love only in novels. Unhappy love is serious. This is a very painful condition, which for some is extremely difficult and often leads to suicide. Scold or shame: “How can you become so limp because of some person ?! Pull yourself together! ” – this is the same as advising a patient with pneumonia: “Pull yourself together and stop coughing!” A person is sick, he needs help, and the more qualified she is, the better. Therefore, you should consult a psychotherapist. A lot depends on the person himself, but this is not the case when everything can be solved by an effort of will.
Love is salvation from loneliness. One of the most famous modern psychoanalysts, G.S. Sullivan, writes about this myth. This understanding of love and marriage emphasizes their value as a refuge from loneliness. A union of two against the world is created, and this egoism together is mistaken for love and intimacy. This creates a type of relationship that Sullivan calls collaboration. This is a clearly formed adaptation of the behavior of one person to the expressed needs of another person for the sake of more and more complete mutual satisfaction, as well as to maintain the increasing security of their position in both. This closeness of people actually reflects the market relations of individuals. Both individuals experience loneliness, danger and anxiety, and their union is “loneliness together”, united by common interests and joint confrontation between hostile and alien.
