Finding “that very” person and living soul to soul with him until the end of his life — is this not our main goal? At least that’s what many people say: movie characters, songwriters, writers, friends, relatives. What is the nature of this belief in true love? And why does it do more harm than good? The psychotherapist talks.
As a rule, belief in a great and only love is a state of platonic love. It characterizes the teenage perception of intersexual relations, when you want to have all the best in this world and you conjecture what you don’t have. You exaggerate, exaggerate your feelings and everything connected with them.
I would like to make some footnote that love in a person goes through several stages of its development.
The first time a person encounters a feeling of love in deep childhood, when he plays with his beloved dog or interacts with his mother, grandmother. Or when he is engaged in some kind of hobby, thanks to which he is certainly happy. Such love is characterized by the presence of attachment, the absence of an inter-gender component and the absence of the so-called merging of situations — when in this situation you feel good, but as soon as your mother calls out to you or picks up a toy, because it’s time to sleep, frustration immediately sets in, tears appear.
But just at the next stage, when the child becomes a teenager, he has a platonic feeling. In most cases, the first platonic love is different in that the teenager is overwhelmed with a sharp feeling. He is completely and completely immersed in these sensations, and it is they that prompt him to fantasize about the future, that what is happening is for life.
At the same time, the object of love, that guy or girl that a teenager is in love with, becomes the best person for him. Its positive qualities are exaggerated many times, there are simply no negative features. And such idealistic love is called platonic.
Almost all world literature is built on this love: on conjecture, on living emotions, for the sake of which a person is ready for anything.
There is no actual relationship and no future, but a person actively fantasizes about them. And we have such novels two or three times in our lives.
The next love that can open up for a person is sexual. She encourages him to overcome the distance that, due to timidity, he did not overcome before. Then a person begins to communicate with the object of sympathy, enters into sexual contact … And this is the next, necessary stage of love, which forms self-worth.
I must say that both in boys and girls, in terms of the characteristics of the stage and age, it develops in different ways. If in young men after 15-16 years the stage of hypersexuality begins and it lasts somewhere up to 20-22 years, then in girls it reaches its peak much later than 30-35 years. For example, if a girl marries at 20 and there is no normal sexual relationship in marriage, then this does not bother her so much. But at 30-35 years old, this is already a reason for divorce.
This feeling of love does not stop in development. The next stage is unconditional love. When you start accepting a person for who they are, you become the source of that feeling. It stimulates you to personal development, internal changes, improvement of relationships.
So why is faith in the great and only love dangerous?
If a person is already 40-50 years old, and he still believes in it, then, unfortunately, he becomes like a teenager who does not control his behavior. He is inadequate at the moment of falling in love, and very often his illusion about the object of love is soon destroyed.
This feeling lends itself to people who experience the feeling of falling in love for the first time — in particular, those who did not have a stormy romance in their teens, but at the age of 40 it happened. It is about such people that they say: “Gray hair in the head, demon in the ribs.” So, a man literally loses his common sense and control when he “madly” falls in love with some woman. It seems to him that this is true love, the final choice of a partner. What is the main mistake.