Abstract
This paper is dedicated to the review of the most important aspects in the psychology of relationships, in particular, the ones of liking and loving. It is important to consider the problem from different sides, as it has a wide scope of application and perceiving by different people. In particular, works of Gonzaga et al. (2006), Fletcher & Kerr (2010), Neff & Karney (2005), Mehrotra et al. (2011), Peck (2002), and Qi (2012) will be analyzed, all dealing with the problems of relationships, liking and loving. To fully research the questions, love will be defined from different perspectives with the background of the feeling in the society and how it is developing throughout person’s life. In particular, it is shown how a person can have the feeling developed based on the relations in the family and in which cases there can be problems with it. Further love is defined along with the problems that it can bring about in the society, the ways it influences our lives. To explain the concept better, there are also presented different theories on love, how it emerges, what stages it has and what influences this important feeling. The ways of conducting empirical research are also provided in the end of discussion to outline the ways, in which this topic can be effectively developed. In the conclusion, it is emphasized that in the result of the conducted research it was discovered that love should be nurtured from the very beginning of people’s life and that a lot of problems in the modern society are rooted in this feeling or its absence.
Introduction
Explanation of the phenomenon is the first step to mastering it. People for centuries have been trying to deal with the uncertainty of the world, remove harmony from the chaos, systematizing it. Owning an explanatory system, even without changing the situation in the external world, a person receives a change of his/her own status and attitude. Moreover, gaining access to knowledge, we can better navigate the surrounding reality and have the opportunity to influence, if not all of the events, then our own perception of these events and respond adequately. Therefore, research is conducted in the field of psychology of love, liking and relationships. This knowledge can make life easier for people. Especially because, according to many of the great thinkers of the past and present, love is the most important thing in life. Liking and other forms of relationships are also a kind of love indeed, but of some lesser or other extent. Therefore, the focus of the paper will be on love as the most multi-faceted and broad reality among all.
Love as the Main Feeling
Human society, despite millennia of its cultural development, has not learned how to ensure psychological well-being for each of its members. This prosperity depends on the psychological climate of the environment, in which it grows, lives and works (Gonzaga et al., 2006). A psychological climate in the family depends on the ability of the parents to give love and human warmth to each other and the children. The need to accept and support communication, touching, and other signs of love and attention may be unsatisfied and lead to suffering and destructive emotions.
Parental relationships greatly affect the ability to love. However, there are some unconscious mechanisms laid down in childhood, strongly influencing the perception of the world. Thus, a child whose parents did not show their love to him/her always considers self-unworthy of love, and it is difficult to understand that his/her parents may have defective ability to love. For a young child, the whole world of human relations is parents or people in their stead.
It is hard to argue with the fact that many ills of society are rooted in negative factors generated by marital conflict and the collapse of families. Without noticing it, we are learning to be a husband or wife from our parents, from early childhood adopting their behaviors, stereotypes of relations. In our adult life, we continue to live by these parental requirements, not realizing them and rarely noticing their manifestations. Of relations between the parents, we learn to relate to the person next to us. The best children are those who feel the warm attitude of their parents not only to them, but also in relation to each other.
The child adopts and perceives not what in a minute of training his/her parents are trying to instill in him/her, but their attitude to people, to themselves, to life, and the subconscious attitude. If then grown person thinks that because of his/her negative experience, love does not exist, it is not in that person's life (Neff & Karney, 2005). If he/she considers that it is impossible to be happy in this world, he/she will be unhappy until reconsidering his/her views.
Apparently, true love is not common, and the vast majority of people do not experience this kind of love and are satisfied only with the elements of love, rare glimpses. Nevertheless, these elements help us to reveal the mystery of love. Love has many faces and inexhaustible world, because everyone loves differently. Love is a personal experience that everyone can experience only themselves and for themselves. There is hardly anyone who did not have or do not have this experience at least to a small degree. These glimpses of love give us strength and expertise in the knowledge of the mysteries of love.
What Is Love?
Love is a condition, in which a person can feel and experience his/her absolute indispensability. In love, people can feel the meaning of their life for another person, and another reason for existence for themselves of the other people. Love helps people to reveal themselves, identifying, enhancing, and developing in them all that is good, positive, valuable. It is the supreme synthesis of meaning of human existence.
Inability of people to feel, the loss of understanding of each other leads to fear of intimacy, the fact that love seems incredible rarity, an illusion. The reality of our lives is alienation, indifference and loneliness of the person, the only way to overcome that is love. Only in love, a person becomes a person in the fullest sense of the word.
Love is a means of person’s socialization, his/her involvement in public relations. It is a higher sense, which manifests itself in a deep emotional attachment to another person or personalized object (Fletcher & Kerr, 2010). Therefore, the problems in this critical area lead to problems in all areas of human interaction with the world. Without love, a person is defective, devoid of real life and depth and can neither be efficient nor adequately understand others and themselves.
Desire of the interpersonal fusion is the most powerful pursuit in human. This most fundamental desire is the force that drives together members of the human race, family, society. Striving to find and implement a true love is inherent in the very essence of man. This need is peculiar to each person from early childhood. Average satisfaction of this need leads to the development of the capacity to love. Without love, we lose the will to live, our mental abilities and physical energy weaken, resistance falls, disappears a sense of what we do, why we live. All this greatly affects the state of our physical health.
Love is the relationship of people. Where there is such a connection, an individual's life grows beyond his/her own limited existence. Living among the people, a person learns to love, understanding not only a necessity, the inevitability of another person, but also deeply understanding this fact. Love, intimacy and sex are the components of the puzzle, which for centuries have tried to unravel writers, poets, philosophers and theologians. There is evidence that a sense of passionate love is familiar to all cultures.
Results of romantic love and sexual desire lead to the conclusion that, in recent years, there are three global transformations in the perception of a loving relationship. There is growing evidence that the various ethnic groups, as well as men and women, have equal rights. There is gradually destroyed the traditional system of double standards, and social circumstances are no longer perceived as a hindrance to love. Pursuit of happiness is now considered reasonable and decent employment, so relation to passionate love and sexual desire has become more positive. It is due to growing confidence in the fact that life can change for the better, largely thanks to love and sex. Love and sex give the first impulse of the intimate relations between people. However, loving relationships are always unique, original and have their own identity, which is influenced by partners.
Love and intimacy undoubtedly have transformative potential; feelings unite two people who subsequently have to overcome many obstacles on the path to life together. We live in a dynamic and fragmented culture and the principles of love and relationships in our volatile era depend on fleeting fashion. In many ways, love seems to be the ideal sought by many people, often encountering it with one or other internal conflicts. Entering into a relationship, people are no longer guided by external considerations and public opinion, and especially internal reactions and feelings that bind the two individuals.
The intensity and quality of love are explained and defined by the ability to love. Love is not explained by physical, physiological or psychological conditions of human existence. There are no laws of nature, by which we should love one another. Person loves as a metaphysical entity, when it rises above its natural element (Peck, 2002). Therefore, love is a human activity, and one can learn any activity and creatively improve in it, given the accumulation of one’s experiences, lessons learned by humanity, knowledge, research, trial and error, experimentation, daring.
Love and respect to oneself cannot just appear out of nowhere. Similarly, a child cannot speak, if he/she does not hear other people, does not learn to love - either oneself or others - if he/she is not loved, if in life he/she does not meet people who can give the human warmth (Qi, 2012). Only the condition of benign parental love can help a child to learn all the previous experience of living on the Earth while not stifling the creative possibilities of the new human.
Despite the differences in the initial conditions given at birth, upbringing and education, anyone has a good chance to exercise his/her human destiny. According to the studies, the attractiveness of men depends on the external signs of maturity, good health and, above all, influence. Features of feminine appeal are mainly associated with youth and the outward signs of the presence of a sufficient number of female sex hormones.
In today's culture, love is often associated with sex. In essence, the concept of romantic love has appeared not so long ago and in the last century was not associated with sexual feelings. Love was considered chaste feeling expressed in the idealization of a loved one. In this century, there was a connection between romantic love and sex, but this change in the mind-set was not without confusion. One of the problems is that a strong sense of love and sexual passion began to be considered as the enduring elements of such long-term relationships as marriage.
There is gradually defined concept of love, based on the research results. Some scientists believe that love is not so much innate tendency, but the reaction that occurs due tosocialization, while others believe that love is one of fundamental human emotions. Comparative analysis of ethnographic data showed that existing between different cultures ideas about love, sex and intimacy show how individual differences can influence the formation of the fundamental relationship of love for the attitudes and behavior of a particular person, much more significant impact than cultural environment. In the future, these assumptions were confirmed by the results of research in behavioral genetics (Mehrotra et al., 2011).
Most Common Theories of Love
In one of the most developed typologies of love, there are six attitudes towards love, which are denoted by Greek terms. Eros, or sensual love, is characterized by passion, devotion and physical attraction. Ludus, love as a game, means less responsible attitude to the partner, because love is seen as a game, in which partners can be arbitrarily many. Mania is a style of love, which is characterized by an obsession, passion and jealousy. Pragma is a very practical style of love, whose supporters are choosing a partner that meet certain criteria. Agape or sacrificial love is an altruistic approach to love, in which the needs of a loved one for the one who loves have a much greater value than his/her own. Storge is a style of love, based on a strong and lasting friendship.
Further studies using this model have found that sensual and sacrificial love in romantic relationships gives more satisfaction than a gaming approach to love, which is also often associated with short-term relationships. As expected, mania cannot contribute to a satisfactory relationship, and pragmatic approach ensures a lasting relationship. Installing a friendship with someone you love is not widespread among college-age youths. Perhaps this is because such a relationship is characterized by more mature people.
Robert Sternberg, a researcher at Yale University for several years studying the dynamics of love relationships, developed an interesting model, which includes three major elements of love. These elements can be likened to the three sides of the triangle, the area of which corresponds to the size and style of love.
Intimacy is the emotional element and implies closeness, mutual support and partnership. In the development of relations as partners closer together, intimacy usually increases gradually, starting from a certain level reached at the beginning of the relationship. In stable and harmonious relationship intimacy is not always the outward expression, but clearly in crises, which the couple overcomes together.
Passion is the element of motivation and love manifested in the form of desire to connect with loved ones, and this is due to sexual arousal and desire for sexual relations. At the first stage of relationships, the importance of this aspect of love is constantly increasing. Sternberg likens passion to drug, which attracts people and promises pleasure. If one partner suddenly interrupts relationship, the other partner may be suffering from depression and irritability, experiencing the heartache of leaving. Over time, in the process of long-term relationships, passion is stabilized as no longer able to provide appropriate stimulation and deliver the same pleasure as before. It does not mean that the passion loses its value or disappears. Passion is simply losing importance as a motivational element in relations.
Devotion is a cognitive aspect of love, both in the short-term and long-term relationship. At the first meetings with a potential partner, relationship of love does not imply devotion. However, along with convergence of partners, mutual devotion becomes more important. Like other elements of love, devotion is eventually stabilized or reduced if relations are unsuccessful.
According to the Sternberg study, it is possible to predict successfully folding relationship when a person sees in his/her partner the desired attitude to him/her. If one partner is sure the other loves him/her strong enough, between them may arise quarrels and conflicts. Love is not just an event, but a process that develops, improves and is based on the cultural imperatives and belief system of each. In addition, when people have a mutual love, they are usually willing to spend more time together, from their relationship gradually disappear usual social barriers, and they are more sensitive to each other. In addition, to love another person is to respect and appreciate him/her, regardless of individual differences and discrepancies. As a result, partners can learn to accept their differences as another source of pleasure, not a nuisance.
The sphere of relationships, liking and loving in fact provides a wide scope for the empirical research, as it is possible to see correlation of different factors in these feelings, their dependence on age, gender and other social aspects. Love and liking are so individual and broad in themselves, that for each research it is necessary to provide clear objectives and understand how it will be possible to see one or another dependency revealed.
Based on psychological research, we can conclude that the correct attitude to love is nurtured in early childhood, and if the baby is not getting enough love from the family, then in the future it will not be easy to build a healthy relationship with the opposite sex. Love is a means of socialization, involvement in public relations. Many of the problems of modern society are rooted in negative factors generated by marital conflict and the collapse of the family.
References
Fletcher, G. J., & Kerr, P. S. (2010). Through the eyes of love: reality and illusion in intimate relationships. Psychological bulletin, 136(4), 627.
Gonzaga, G. C., Turner, R. A., Keltner, D., Campos, B., & Altemus, M. (2006). Romantic love and sexual desire in close relationships. Emotion, 6(2), 163.
Mehrotra, Vikas, et al. (2011) Must love kill the family firm? Some exploratory evidence. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 35(6), 1121-1148.
Neff, L. A., & Karney, B. R. (2005). To know you is to love you: the implications of global adoration and specific accuracy for marital relationships. Journal of personality and social psychology, 88(3), 480.
Peck, M. S. (2002). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values, and spiritual growth. Simon and Schuster.
Qi, Z. (2012). The Educational Research on the College Students' View of Marriage and Love in Modern Times. Journal of Anshun University, 1, 022.
