Attraction, blindness, illusions. The spiritual and physical ecstasy that we fall into when falling in love leads to a tragic denouement… Or is it not always?
Romeo and Juliet, Jose and Carmen, Vronsky and Karenina… The list can be long. Passionate love is one of the main themes of world literature. But why is it so difficult to find in her treasuries at least one work in which passion would lead to a happy union? It seems that the word itself sounds like a sentence. “Passion” is a relative of “suffering” both in Russian and in many European languages: passion goes back to the Greek pathos (suffering). Of course, this coincidence is not accidental.
Perfect object
“Love is blind and deprives us of eyes. I don’t see what I see clearly…” – psychoanalyst Vitaly Zimin continues literary associations, quoting Shakespeare’s sonnet 1371. And he explains that blinding is a very accurate metaphor. We are really unable to see the object of our passion. We see a completely different person. Not even a person, but an embodied combination of all possible advantages with a complete absence of shortcomings.
“Passion arises as a result of the projection onto the partner of the Ego-Ideal or the Ideal “I”, says Vitaly Zimin. It is clear that it is impossible to take your eyes off such perfection. But something else is also clear. For the time being, we simply do not notice the flaws. And when we do notice, even the smallest flaw can lead to the saddest consequences. The veil of illusion falls, and we discover that the object of our passion is not at all the person we were crazy about.
We are frustrated when there is nothing but idealization behind passion.
“We are always disappointed when there is nothing but idealization behind passion,” says psychoanalyst Christiane Alberti.
Oleg is 37 years old, unmarried, disappointed in life and full of skepticism. His ex-girlfriend pulled the rug out from under him. “She was younger than me, but she always had the last word,” Oleg recalls. – I could not do anything, it was like an obsession. Three years, while we were together, I felt like on a “roller coaster”. When she became pregnant, I was delighted, I hoped that everything would change. I begged her to keep the baby, but she had an abortion and left. I still don’t understand how I managed to survive it.”
Laws of attraction
Sexuality plays an extremely important role in passion. If we find something unattractive in a partner, attraction weakens, and passion passes after it. And an attraction that remains unsatisfied for a long time switches to another object – usually, but not always.
“There is a so-called pathological love syndrome,” notes Vitaly Zimin. “In such a situation, rejection by the object of love and its inaccessibility, paradoxically, lead only to an increase in passion.” This is one of those options when passion can last for years, but hardly anyone would dream of such a relationship.
46-year-old Sergei was passionately in love with the young wife of his supervisor for many years. Which perfectly knew about it and did not encourage the admirer, but did not lower the “Iron Curtain” either. “I suffered, and it probably seemed to her that she just had to be nice and secular,” says Sergey. – I left Russia for a long time, but every time fate brought us together, as if on purpose. Once we just collided at the airport for a transfer! She gave me a friendly kiss on the cheek. And so it goes on and on. And these relations continued for almost ten years, although there were no relations at all.
The path of knowledge
But to feel passion means not only to suffer, not only to desire another, but also to strive to know him. It is not enough for us to possess the body of our beloved, we want to penetrate into their thoughts and feelings, to take possession of their hearts. “Mutual passionate love can give a feeling of strength and real happiness,” Vitaly Zimin is sure. – And how long it will be depends on the willingness of the couple to build close relationships, on how much they can afford to themselves and the other to know each other.
Jacques Lacan is credited with the following aphorism: “To love is to give what you don’t have to someone you don’t know.” This is the universal conflict between love and knowledge.
Having known the other, we often remain disappointed, and then love can turn into hatred: passion changes sign. Yet some manage to avoid disappointment.
How long the passion will last depends on the willingness of the couple to build a close relationship.
“When we don’t expect the other to be the perfect version of our partner (or ourselves), the couple gains a chance to survive, – Christian Alberti is sure. “Relationships between the sexes are not programmed so that a man and a woman complement each other, but there is a desire between them to be understood.”
There is a paradox hidden in passion: by striving for another, we find ourselves. “He who surrenders to passion unconsciously does so in order to know nothing about who he really is. He turns to the other so that he does not have to discover himself as a stranger, writes psychoanalyst Roland Gori. “But by devoting himself entirely to the object of his passion, the lover sometimes reconnects with his own repressed desires, which until now could not manifest themselves.”2.
Return to yourself
In the one who arouses our passion, we often meet the secret hopes of a child, “which still lives in us, but which we had to give up,” writes Roland Gori. Love passion at first stuns the lover, causing him to lose all orientation, but in this way she opens his own “blind zone” to him. Passion shows us that not only the other will forever remain an outsider for us, but we ourselves are not what we imagined ourselves to be, which means that we have the right not to be content with our fate, take risks and reconnect with the “strangled” part of ourselves.
There is a paradox hidden in passion: by striving for another, we find ourselves
Irina, 43, rejected Ivan’s proposals for several years, although she liked him. She was married, he was married. She knew that Ivan had always loved women and was in an open relationship. “I was very afraid of what might happen,” she admits, “anyone, but not me, not with me. And many years later we met by chance again, both lonely and unhappy. I had no more excuses to refuse him. Since then, we have not parted.
At first it was terrible. I missed him all the time even when he was around. And it wasn’t easy for him either. I received SMS from him, which, probably, teenagers only write. He said that I was his “disease”, that he did not understand what was happening to him … And now everything has become so easy and natural. I don’t understand how and why Ivan influenced me. But he’s truly free, and that’s passed on to me. He made me feel strong and confident. I also suddenly started drawing, although I abandoned art school as a child. And you know, I’m good at it!”
1 W. Shakespeare “Sonnets” (translated by S. Marshak, Eksmo, 2012).
2 R. Gori “Logic of passions” (Flammarion, Champsessais, 2010).