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

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Now is the time to look at what threatens the newly born love.

Periods of love according to Stendal

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 of 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. For those who are already confident in the techniques of resolving love conflicts, we offer the opportunity to test themselves on the example given in the diagram, taken from the story of Anton Chekhov’s “Wife.”

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.

But 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 (resentment, quarrel, jealousy) are perhaps universal, but there are many more pitfalls that are inherent in 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 fortunate people who have succeeded in showing the will to love and have not given up in the face of reality should nevertheless remember that their now hardened love is still a different reality. One can, of course, think the other way around, that reality is love and reality is something otherworldly. But in any case, one must be on guard.

Let us now move on to consider the next stage in the development of the love relationship, which in psychology is called “mature love”.

Ways and results of conflict resolution

Avoidance (postpone), domination (win), cooperation (win-win), accommodation (concede), compromise (solve in a different context).

Mature Love

Having passed the frantic stage of birth and the test of reality, love enters into its new stage – mature love. It can be called the balanced stage of love as well as the stage of “tested romanticism”, true stable love, perfect love. All components of love – passion, intimacy, will and awareness – are present in the life of lovers in a harmonious combination. This is what the logic of our thoughts about 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.