| |
 |
|
|
Science Forum Index » Psychology Forum » Romantic love
Page 1 of 1
|
| Author |
Message |
| NiJof |
 Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2003 11:45 am |
|
|
|
Guest
|
This paragraph from The Road Less Traveled was quoted on alt.romance
recently:
"To serve as effectively as it does to trap us into marriage, the
experience of falling in love probably must have as one of its
characteristics the illusion that the experience will last forever.
This illusion is fostered in our culture by the commonly held
myth of romantic love, which has as its origins in our favourite
childhood fairy tales, wherein the prince and princess, once
united, live happily forever after, The myth of romantic love
tells us, in effect, that for every young man in the wordl there
is a young woman who was 'meant for him' and vice versa. Moreover,
the myth implies that there is only one man meant for a woman and
only one woman for a man and this has been predetermined 'in the
stars'. When we meet the person for whom we are intended,
recognition comes through the fact that we fall in love. We have
met the person for whom all the heavens intended us, and since
the match is perfect, we will then be able to satisfy all of each
other's needs forever and ever, and therefore live happily forever
after in perfect union and harmony. Should it come to pass, however,
that we do not satisfy or meet all of each other's needs and friction
arises and we fall out of love, then it is clear that a dreadful mistake
was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and
only perfect match,what we thought was love was not real or 'true'
love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live
unhappily ever after or get divorced."
My response.
It is possible to say that romantic love is a myth. Or one can do real
investigation, one not merely objective but rather integrative, experiencing it
from within even as one studies it from without. As a thinking man who has
experienced romantic love, I feel quite equipped to do just that.
The concepts of love in modern thought are, unfortunately, utterly
toxic. There is the Freudian psychology that sees romantic love as
cathexis, or projection, of childhood emotions onto another person;
there is the attachment theory that sees us as relating to others in
styles based on our early childhood attachments; and the self-expansion
theory that states that we love those in whom we see opportunity for
expanding ourselves.
Freud is easiest to refute. If we were in fact cathecting then it would
not be possible to be in love with people who were fundamentally different
from our parents. Thus, there could be no intercultural falling in love;
there could be no interfaith falling in love; there could be no falling in
love with a person of different profession than one's parents; there could
be no men with brown-haired mothers falling in love with blondes. And yet
my generation, with its propensity for interracial and intercultural mixing,
proves quite clearly that this is not the case. We fall in love with all
kinds of people, many of whom are in no way similar to our parents. Thus
Freud, on this issue as well as on many others, was wrong.
The attachment theory arrives at a similar conclusion from a different
angle. Attachment theory says that the way we experience emotion is
shaped by our childhood patterns. While this may give insight into how
people have the relationships that they do when they are not conscious
of the dynamics, this says nothing whatsoever about whom we fall in love
with or why we stay in love.
The self-expansion theory's premise is that the basic human motivation is
to expand the self. I have no idea how Aron and Aron came to that
conclusion, but the probable explanation is that they related the goals
of an expansionist empire as it is embodied within the consciousness of
some of its members to the totality of human beingness. Self-expansion is
a cultural goal that exists in some parts of the west, and records of
love exist in cultures other than the western, including in cultures
such as the Polynesian that did not have anywhere to expand. I therefore
see that theory as a reification of one cultural patterns among many
others and, like Freud's projection of his mother fixation onto his
theories, saying more about the authors than they do about love.
The problem with these ideas is that they were developed without personal
experience as a data point. The people did not understand love from
experience, hence in describing it they were blind men groping an elephant.
None of them - none of them - understand the true nature of love; as
a matter of emotional sharing, a matter of sharing the beauty contained
in each other's souls.
Sociological thought, developed without similar experience, on this issue
is equally as toxic. A sociology professor named James Hunter said that
romantic love entered Western literature as product of pedophilic relations
between Greek men and young boys. This is clearly not the case, as even
before Athens existed, in Greek literature itself, the Odyssey and the Iliad
which were written long before Symposium, there was portrayal of love between
Odysseus and Penelope, Paris and Helen, Priam and Hecuba; and in Athens
themselves there were plays such as Tristan and Isolde that portray love
between woman and man. Descriptions of romantic love exist in literature as
far-ranging as Hindu and Polynesian; in Chinese literature, in Islamic
literature and in the Song of Songs. All these existed independently of
the Athenians, and in many cases existed in cultures that were forbidding of
man and woman falling in love with each other; which means that love is a
human sentiment that not even religious oppression can completely destroy.
Another belief held in sociology is that the "idea" of love entered the West
from the Muslims and then was used by the troubadours to develop the
unconsummated courtly love between noblemen and noblewomen as distraction
from boredom of their marriages. This may be true about trubadours, but
as poetry of the Romans, as well as Song of Songs, shows, there were other
accounts of love in the Western consciousness even before Moor invasion.
Rumi produced beautiful romantic poetry; he however was far from the only or
the first one to have done so. Still more to develop my point that the feeling
does not follow the literature; the literature follows and seeks to explain the
universal human feeling.
Finally there is the feminist belief that romance is a myth designed by
men to have power over women. When one's basic goal is women's power at
the expense of men, one would portray men in the most negative of all
possible lights, and one would see it as an impossibility for any form
of genuine emotional sharing to exist between man and woman. This brand
of feminists seeks power at the expense of all that is good and will portray
everything to justify this goal. As such it is to be safely ignored as
intellectual or moral authority.
What is the basis of literary thought, then, in defense of love? There
is the Renaissance thought, the romantic thought and the existential
thought. A Renaissance figure named Facino said that romantic love was
seeing the eternal in human form; in other words, romantic love is a
religious experience, a matter of seeing the divine in the other person
and through that experience coming close to God. This is echoed in the
book of John, "Whoever is in love is in God and God is in him."
This is echoed in romantic literature as well, with the concept of
boundless love between man and woman. And in existential thought, love
is reaching out to the other person for the purpose of one's spiritual
development.
Facino's argument is most interesting, as indeed when one thinks of
romantic poetry the word "eternal" comes to mind the most often. What
is eternal? Precisely, why is the experience of the eternal? Why not
"till the end of my earthly existence" - why "eternity"?
My belief is that the eternity that is expressed in love is viewed not
in terms of time at all, but rather in terms of experience. To
experience the eternal, is to experience what is beyond human measure
and computation - it is the immeasurable; the absolute. Love brings to
us thoughts of eternity, because it awakens us to the noumenal as it
is contained in another person. As such, it is a spiritual path - but
not only a spiritual path. It is also, legitimately, a passion - for
the other person, uniquely, and for everything contained in her soul.
The existentialist notion, reified in New Age movement, is that we are
all one, and that in love one discovers an aspect of oneself contained
in another. The belief is that this leads to spiritual growth. Thus,
Scott Peck defines love as extending oneself for the purpose of one's
own and the other person's spiritual development. While extending
oneself spiritually most certainly takes place in all genuine
relationships, there is also the part that is simply emotional - that
is a fascination with the person; an openness to the person; a focus on
that person uniquely and on the beauty contained in that person. There's
a part in love that has nothing to do with oneself - one doesn't think of
oneself or one's spiritual growth when one is in love, one thinks of
the other person. And not all people who fall in love or continue to
love practice Scott Peck spirituality.
I don't define love as extending oneself, nor do I define falling in love
as cathexis. I define falling in love as fascination with and openness to
another person based on the inner beauty that they embody. I define love as
a sharing of inner beauty - passionately cherishing and adoring another;
caring about them, giving them passion and warmth, and valuing them more
than anyone else on earth.
The people we love are not merely accessories to our spiritual growth;
they are the people whose beauty we see and cherish and adore; by whom
we are excited, who move us. We don't love to complete ourselves, to
grow, to own; we love because we adore the other person - not for the
sake of what they can offer us but for what they are in and of
themselves. Love is not meditation; love is relation. Love is passion.
Love is emotional sharing.
It is possible to believe, as do many New Agers, that spirituality is
to be experienced in lone path, with other people as teachers and
students. Or it is possible to believe that spirituality exists to be
shared - to be expressed, that is, in our relationships with ones we
love. That spirituality is not all about ourselves, but rather about
other people whose lives we touch. That spirituality exists not only
to help us along, but rather to enliven, enrich and beautify the world
we inhabit - for other people as well as ourselves.
To keep the experience of love lasting, one therefore needs to keep
developing the beauty within one's soul and share it with the other
person. If people who fell in love with another stop loving each other,
it is because either they have stopped cultivating this inner beauty or
else do not have the ability to see it. Because the social and spiritual
ideologies of 1980s and 1990s sought to deny the poetic, the latter
situation is very common, which makes life miserable for those who
spend energy developing inner beauty. This is a problem, not with
romantic love, but with 1980s and 1990s - a problem that is to be
overcome through redefining the spiritual systems to be conducive to
rather than hindering of passion.
To overcome this illth of the times, one needs to rearrange and
redintegrate the psychic existents reified within its consciousness.
One needs to say that whatever the world is, one can improve upon it
using one's will. One needs to apply one's will and intelligence in
conjunction with love to achieve the best possible outcome; the
outcome guided and directed by love. The outcome that is the sharing
of the soul with the beloved and making the world habitable therefor.
http://www.geocities.com/ilya_shambat/poems.htm |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| |
|
Page 1 of 1
All times are GMT - 5 Hours
The time now is Fri Dec 05, 2008 6:02 am
|
|