The boy told his mother that he loved her completely. She corrected: not «quite», but «very». He stubbornly: no, not at all. I love the horse and the car very much, and you absolutely. And my mother understood — he loves her with everything. With everything she has. And this can be considered the main sign of love.
Love is a feeling so integral that breaking it into signs seems like blasphemy. After all, the calling of love is to unite two into one. But that is why it is so important to understand what love consists of, so as not to mistake for it only one of its parts. Five basic components of love: desire, inspiration, pain, tenderness and pity.
Desire
Desire is the most understandable, physiological side of love. However, love desire differs from all others in that it cannot be completely quenched; it longs for itself, for its continuation and growth. Desire is cultural, it cultivates itself, cherishes, and the whole human civilization comes, perhaps, from this initial “cunning” of desire, which sets up obstacles for itself in order to overcome them and grow with them. It is not only about cultural sublimation, when it is translated into poems and novels, into paintings and symphonies. The suppression of desire leads to its own explosive growth. If physiology passes into culture, then culture, in turn, affects physiology.
Another feature of love desire is dialogue. Erotica is a continuous dialogue of one’s own desire with strangers. Desire differs from lust in that it cannot be satisfied only bodily — it needs the will of another person, interacts with his desires or unwillingnesses. I desire someone else’s desire that desires me. This is the golden rule of eroticism, which excludes violence and corresponds to the golden rule in the ethics of different peoples (“as you want people to do to you, so you do to them”).
- god of my childhood
Inspiration
If in desire we experience joyful and painful dependence on another person, then inspiration is mutual freedom from ourselves.
the former, the freedom to become what we have never been. The “new life” revealed by Dante in his love for Beatrice is the beginning of all love, the shortest path to eternity. At the same time, every little thing becomes a metaphor, figuratively pointing to a loved one, to another opportunity to get closer to him.
For many, if not most, love is the only experience of inspiration. Even if the loving “worm of the earth”, and not the “son of heaven”, no one will take away this flight from him. And no poet and artist, remaining only a priest of his art, can keep up with the lover in this flight. Love is creativity of a higher order: the transformation of not just words, sounds, colors, but the whole personality. That is why it cannot be done alone, it requires the participation of another person as a source of inspiration — and an object of transformation.
- How to experience inspiration?
Pain
Desire is inseparable from suffering, which sometimes acts as a synonym for love: “he suffers for it,” that is, he is painfully without it. Why does love, even happy love, always bring a feeling or foreboding of pain? And why the pain caused by another person can mean the awakening of love for him? “…Explain — do I love because it hurts, or does it hurt because I love?” (A. Bashlachev)
The lover becomes dependent on the beloved — and becomes vulnerable. Imagine that a person’s heart was not inside him, but outside. Such an organism — with a heart hanging on a thin thread of blood vessels — would not be very viable. But the lover is just like that: his heart beats outside of him. Sometimes love meekly trudges after its pain, unable to lag behind it. Someone holds your heart in their hands and drags you along, pulling on the blood vessels more and more painfully. It’s not love anymore, it’s love. In such a relationship, pain is primary, love learns about itself by the wounds that are inflicted on it.
- Mikhail Epstein: “Sometimes we are as different from ourselves as from everyone else”
Tenderness
Of all the properties of love, this is the most difficult to describe. Tenderness is self-giving: everything acquired by desire and inspiration, she now gives to her beloved, guarding his every step. The beloved suddenly appears in all its defenselessness, as a continuous vulnerability, as if the skin had been torn off. Tenderness is care that closes the beloved from all the cracks and drafts of the purge space.
Tenderness is almost angelic and at the same time corporeal. This is a heavenly sensuality that does not know the storms of desire, lovers can finally stay in the Eden where their love story has led, and quietly cling to each other. They have earned the right to almost immobility, almost peace.
- What are we smarter about?
Pity
The object of pity is the weakness of the beloved, his pain, suffering, ignorance, inability … mortality. It is dangerous to mistake pity for love, but it is even more dangerous to exclude the feeling of pity from love. Love without pity can be passionate, inspirational, tender, romantic, but it lacks insight into the weakness of the beloved, into which one can put this strength.
Sometimes you can hear that the weak are loved more than the strong, that the weak are more strongly attached, because the main need of love is to give, to share everything that the lover has. But the point is not that love is caused by weakness, but that love is able to find weakness even in the strongest.
Having fallen in love with a handsome, smart, lucky person, we begin to feel that vulnerability in him, which may even be unknown to him — or he hides it from himself. If caresses do not contain this restrained crying, even about the mortality of the beloved, about the inevitable separation from him, it means that love is still not bitter enough, it has not been saturated with that bitterness and fear that mortal beings clinging to each other cannot but share.
So, five components of love. It is impossible to say which one is more important. It is impossible to predict with which of them love will begin. Probably, in men it often begins with desire, and in women with pity. Perhaps inspiration prevails in introverts in love, and tenderness prevails in extroverts. But no matter where love begins, it can become love only by combining desire, inspiration, pain, tenderness and pity.
- Do extroverts value communication or achievement?
I tritely and arithmetically define my life credo: everything that contributes to an increase in love is good, everything that leads to its decrease is bad.
With age, there is less and less time for something that is not love. To quarrels, reproaches, proofs, showdowns… Just have time to love, hug you, spread warmth around you… And rush, desperately rush with this love, until its source and the ability to embody it have faded in you. Because hell, as Dostoevsky said, is the realization of the impossibility of love.