Today it is generally accepted that only love justifies the existence of a couple. Or maybe, in order for our unions to live longer, it is worth changing your view of this feeling? This is exactly what the psychoanalysts Andrey Rossokhin and Alain Valtier propose.
Psychologies: Is love a necessary condition for a couple to form?
Andrey Rossokhin: This feeling is absolutely necessary for the emergence of a love couple. Although often we are united not by love, but by needs of a completely different kind, for example, to increase our significance, to discharge our own aggressive impulses, or even a masochistic need to be humiliated. In the love relationship of two, in certain doses, there is also aggression and a desire to assert oneself, but it is love that is the force that allows the couple to develop and get out of the dead ends of life together.
Alain Waltier: The notion that love is a prerequisite for the emergence of a couple is characteristic of Western culture and was especially entrenched in the 60s of the last century. Although in other eras it was not, and today it is often not the case: in many countries, marriages are made according to the choice of families. And while most of these couples live no worse than ours. This proves that love and other good feelings are often born between partners who did not choose each other, and can be the result of their life together, and not the initial condition.
How do the first impulses of falling in love differ from a feeling that lasts in time?
A. R .: In the very first impulses of falling in love, there is more passion than love. A person says “I love you”, but it rather means “I want to possess you”, “I want to absorb you, become one with you”. In such a passionate outburst, both the lover himself and the object of his feelings lose their individuality. In fact, a passionately in love needs another not in order to recognize him, to interact with him, but in order to feel: my life is meaningful.
Passion can gradually develop into a deeper, loving relationship, when the other person becomes not an object, but a subject, a separate person, when he acquires value for us in itself, and not to satisfy conscious or unconscious needs.
A.V.: If, even before meeting, the duration of the relationship is not perceived by partners as a value, then it will be difficult for their first impulses to develop into a lasting feeling. The duration of relationships is not determined by love, does not follow from it: in order for them to develop, efforts must be made.
Love is a building that needs to be built, which takes time and joint efforts.
For those who see and appreciate in love only the strength and richness of the first days, the only way out is to live in a series of successive novels. But will it be love? I don’t have an answer to this question. What is certain is that in a couple that wants to keep themselves for a long time, love must be transformed. The very essence of love is movement.
What is love?
A.V.: The mutual attraction of two is always a mystery, it always contains a share of the irrational, beyond the control of logic. But for love to last, will is needed: you need to constantly remind yourself why we chose this particular person, what qualities of him so excited us, why we wanted to be with him.
This, by the way, often happens in marriages arranged by the parents of future spouses: a very strong feeling can arise between two people living together, based on the recognition of each other’s merits. Because love is a building that needs to be built, which takes time and joint efforts.
A. R .: Love is an irrational need inherent in every person to go beyond the limits of one’s own «I» towards another. This is the ability to notice the difference of another, the desire to know him, understand, feel, and not absorb him. By and large, love is the desire to meet each other halfway, discovering differences and finding similarities in communication and sex. The inner freedom acquired in such love becomes the basis for a creative attitude towards oneself and towards another person.
But besides what we are aware of, there are many unconscious motives in love?
A. R .: Love, like the attraction to life, is a fundamentally unconscious feeling. Attempts to realize it, to answer the question «Why do you love me?» lead to its rationalization and mortification. After all, we always bring into adult love relationships both the earliest infantile desires for omnipotence and total possession of the mother, and the unresolved remnants of later conflicts associated with the development of childhood sexuality and the inevitable ambivalence of attitudes towards significant male and female figures.
A.V.: The meeting of two unconscious is one of the definitions of love. This feeling is woven from the variety of impulses that live in the soul, and it is for this reason that in any novel, hatred always coexists with love. And it also happens that mutual hatred even adds strength to the couple! But when aggression arises in a relationship between two, how can you fight it if its roots lie in the area of the unconscious?
To give yourself a chance at lasting love, you must learn to be aware of all the good and all the bad that coexists in the unconscious, and accept in advance the inability to meet all the expectations of a partner. This is the work that the therapist proposes to do: to learn to decipher your reactions and emotions in order to relieve love for another from the burden of many things that have nothing to do with this feeling.
So love is impossible without hate?
A. R .: Along with love, we inevitably acquire hate, one does not exist without the other. A mother who loves a child may be angry with him for disturbing her sleep, acting up, being naughty, but it is love that helps her cope with irritation. This is what happens in a couple. If we are talking about a love relationship between two emotional and imperfect people, then there will always be a place in them not only for love, but also for irritation, anger and even hatred. And it is important that love through sex and communication helps the couple get out of all conflicts.
Love allows you to give up the desire to return to the «lost paradise» of merging with your mother, to find peace with those who complete to the whole
Is loving oneself a necessary condition for loving another?
A. R .: Rather, the opposite is true: through love for another, we come to know ourselves, we begin to love ourselves. It is love that helps to realize that in the world there is someone close, but at the same time different, not like us.
Love allows you to give up the desire to return to the “lost paradise” of complete merging with your mother, to find peace with someone who will complete to the whole. Two halves of one apple is the most vivid expression of this infantile dream. To realize oneself as a person capable of loving another, to treat oneself not as a half of something whole, but as a separate person — this is self-love.
A.V.: I prefer to talk not about “self-love” – it’s so easy to reduce everything to narcissism, when in a relationship a person seeks to receive more than to give – but about “knowledge of oneself”. Thus, it is important to realize that in relation to the beloved we can also experience hatred, that it is impossible to adore each other all the time. Only by understanding this, it will be possible to give preference to love. And it will be a conscious choice.
Parents in childhood give us a certain idea of love. What role does it play in adult life when we create a couple ourselves?
A. R .: In early childhood, we perceive love as a mystery that exists in the relationship of parents and is associated with their sexuality. How parents managed to intrigue this secret, arouse curiosity about their relationship with each other, slightly open the world of sexuality and help express all these experiences in words — it all depends on how we build our own love relationships. But this is just the baggage with which we begin our journey.
A.V.: A lot depends on those feelings, sensations, memories that an adult has from what he experienced in childhood. If a child has seen how his parents constantly swear, if he felt that they hate each other, he will be less prepared for those trials that inevitably fall to the lot of any couple.
Love is an inheritance that each of us manages in our own way. So the couple can become a kind of laboratory in which everyone gets the opportunity to develop and transform the heritage that they inherited from their parents. And this daily work allows you to make a discovery: to live with true love is much easier than to live without love.