LITMIR.BIZ

      Stages of the origin and crystallization of love

      Invasion of Reality

      What the lyric hero of Vladimir Nabokov tragically foresees at the peak of being in love, sooner or later happens. Reality invades love. It, uninvited, unwelcomed, comes in a sad mask of resentment, evil robes of a quarrel, and the iron armor of jealousy. In addition, the gloomy gravitation of everyday problems constantly encroaches on the high feeling of love of the majority of citizens. For those who thought these trials were not enough, there is something in store ahead: life with a loved one will more than once remind you of the “cherished line” that cannot be crossed with “love and passion.”

      Let’s get to know these enemies of love better. First, let’s throw off the mask from the resentment.

      Sooner or later, the lover will inevitably have a feeling of resentment for one reason or another towards his partner. The fact is that resentment grows on the gap between our expectations of certain actions on the part of a partner and his real actions. The feeling of resentment is insidious, it ignores all objective criteria of the significance or insignificance of an act and can arise from a trifle. You can look at trifles with humor, saying to yourself: “Before marriage, I did not even suspect that it is possible to put milk in the refrigerator incorrectly.”

      But you can make a gross mistake and mutter: “But what’s the difference.” At best, it can end up with a quick showdown, and at worst… Resentment, regardless of your love, will seep for reinforcement to completely uncontrollable levels of the psyche and suddenly burst out with a surge of irritation, anger, and rage. Some lovers quickly learn from their mistakes and try not to hide the resentment so that it does not grow stronger to explosive proportions, and more advanced ones begin to avoid it altogether, seriously taking up raising the level of their emotional intelligence.

      Resentment signals, in particular, that your understanding of your partner (the element of intimacy) is insufficient. You have to admit that the first impression was superficial, and you are happy to find a lot of interesting and creative work to get to know your partner deeper.

      The reason for the quarrel is usually more fundamental than that of the resentment. The quarrel may not have violent outbursts of anger, and it can drag on for a long time. This unpleasant reality of love relationships is well known to psychologists and studied within the framework of such a discipline as conflict management. A family conflict is a small war. And the battlefield is a clash of oppositely directed goals, interests, positions. We will take a closer look at conflicts in the chapter Curbing Conflicts, but for now we suggest that you independently reflect on five possible ways to resolve a love conflict: avoidance, domination, cooperation, adaptation, compromise, taking for example some real case in which one of your friends ended up. It should be remembered that any conflict has a positive solution, moreover, it mobilizes the resources of creativity for the development of relationships and revives passion.

      The prevention of quarrels is connected, on the one hand, with mastering the skills of conflict resolution, and on the other, with the deepening of intimacy in such components as trust, respect, and awareness of common values.

      Jealousy flares up due to an imbalance of trust and a sense of belonging: one is too small, and the other is overflowing. As a rule, the erroneous substitution of the feeling of closeness with the passion of having a partner is associated with the characteristics of the character of this person. This, as psychologists say, is a difficult case, since the character is a rather tough and firmly seated shell. A sense of trust can and should be developed.

      Since it is universal, you can expand its scope in different directions, for example, entrust your partner with cooking dinner or negotiating with neighbors, and little by little you will feel calmer even when he is going on a long business trip.

      These three enemies of love are apparently universal, but there are still many pitfalls that are laid down by certain individual characteristics and circumstances.

      For example, striving to get closer to the object of love, you adapt too much to it, refuse to satisfy your own needs, sacrifice a lot. In fact, simultaneously with the development of your Self in love, it contracts. There is a chance that this innerspring will release gently, but it will most likely trigger big relationship problems.

      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:

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