Stendhal once wrote this. But he did not have a chance to formulate how love ends. If you continue his thought, love should end at the moment of getting used to, when people who have been together for a long time have nothing to surprise each other with. Mikhail Shvydkoy talks about the most poignant feeling.
It does not depend on the age of the beloved, or on their marital status, or even on how many years they spent together. Youthful breaks and partings are no less dramatic and even less explainable than those that occur in adulthood or old age.
Some serious researchers who are engaged in the psychophysiology of sexual relations believe that two people in love have only one and a half to two months of life together (as a rule, the initial period of their carnal love), when a real act of knowing each other takes place. The act of discovery and then the sex drive wanes.
My everyday experience, the experience of people close to me says the opposite. Revealing each other is a long and fascinating process that can last for years and decades. Of course, everything has its time. And there comes a moment when mutual penetration, tenderness, affection turn out to be “stronger than passion” and “more than love,” as Vadim Kozin sang. But certainly not less than love and passion.
Let’s not suffer because our intimacy takes on new, even if unusual for us, forms.
Of course, today doctors can offer many options for prolonging sexual activity – primarily pharmaceutical ones, but you need to seriously consider how necessary they are. And not only because they can cause unwanted side effects. It is important to understand what a woman close to us or a close man needs, with whom we are connected by decades of love, hopes, dramas experienced together, human development, and only after that make a decision.
After all, Pulcheria Ivanovna Tovstogub from Gogol’s “Old World Landowners” loved her Afanasy Ivanovich no less than Juliet – Romeo, only in a different way, understanding in her own way what is good and what is bad and what diet should be followed. But they were happy, as people are happy who love and respect each other, ready to listen and adapt to what the other wants.
There are no single recipes for happiness – neither in youth, nor in old age. Therefore, let us listen to ourselves and to those who surround us, to those with whom life connects us. Let’s not be tormented by the fact that our closeness takes on new, even if unusual for us, forms. After all, the most important desire of two is the desire to be together.