Cоurse
Dаte
Love
Speaking about love, people usually mean love between a man and a woman. However, there are a lot of other, not less important, situations of love: love of children or parents, love for one’s job or one’s country. But the love between a man and a woman can be very different as well: amorousness and mature love, love-passion and love-habit, consumer’s kinds of love or a giving love.
In psychology, love usually is described as a feeling that can grow. Appeal to someone can lead to amorousness; the latter one can lead to love and love grows into attachment. According to Snyder and Lopez, we find a definition that love is a mix of intimacy, passion, and commitment. (449)
There are different kinds of love and love relies heavily on its foundation: physiology or social stereotypes, feelings or the mind, the soul, etc. Love of each of us is a reflection of our personality, and our common attitude to people and life, our development of perception largely determines the type and nature of our love. Love can be a right one and a crooked one. In the right kind of love, people care about the one they love, in the crooked one they care primarily about themselves, consuming a loved one (their time, money, mood). Love also has two sides: desire (attraction) and giving (selfless) attitude.
Love can be a gift, and it can be the deal between two. In the society, we can see that there are more deals, but they are usually represented as a free donation. It is a delusion or a hoax. Greek philosophy distinguished the following main types of love: Eros, Ludus, Mania, Storge, Pragma, Agape. (Beere 38)
Eros is a passionate love, a commitment to a full physical possession of the beloved. Ludus is a love game, played for fun. In such a loving, feelings are quite superficial, which means that it is allowed to cheat for both of the sides. Storge - love as friendship, founded on a gentle, warm and reliable relationship.
These are three basic styles of love. But there may be other options. In the relationships, you might find elements of two different styles. For instance, pragma is a combination of Ludus and Storge. In this kind of love, feelings are not that deep, but the are elements of warmth and reliability present. This love is usually called the love of convenience. Not a marriage of convenience (in this marriage there may not even be love), but the love of convenience. This love is readily amenable to rational control. As the name implies, love is pragmatic with elements of benefit (not necessarily material). Perhaps, for the partners it is just convenient to have a chat with that person, or they like their personal qualities, or they are satisfied sexually, and so on. It may even be the love in exchange for love from the one you love. This is also a calculation and can be regarded as a love of convenience.
Agape is the combination of Eros and Storge. This love is selfless. Agape is a sacrificial love, which includes a selfless dedication, dissolution in the loving care of a loved. In this kind of love, you can find everything – passion, tenderness, reliability, and selfless devotion. This style does not occur very often. But if both partners love equally, we can only envy them. However, there is the other problem. If people who love in this way lose their object of love, the meaning of life for them could be lost.
Mania is the combination of Eros and Ludus. It is an irrational love, which is often called an obsession. And it is always accompanied by the uncertainty and dependence on the object of love. There are a lot of young people who rush into their feelings. This is a love that breaks people's lives, destroys families. But sometimes by the Mania, families are founded, and people become happy. But still this kind of love is a destructive one and mania must sooner or later develop into a different kind. Either the love disappears (may be because of the hatred or indifference) or it kills those who love so much.
The instinctive craving for the purpose of procreation, which can be called love, is able temporarily to destroy personal immunity. And then someone else's new, until recently, identity will be perceived as the closest and dearest creature (if you think about it, it seems quite phenomenal) closer than even the blood relatives. Love arises spontaneously, and in rare cases from the first sight. And when feelings erupt simultaneously in both, we call that a mutual love, and if only one has feelings, then it is an unrequited love. However, despite the common manifestations of these feelings in all people, the power of their manifestation depends on the nature of a particular person, their upbringing, and emotional ties with blood relatives, friends, and other nuances. The main conclusion is that the basis of all these types of love is the instinct of procreation. And it is not supposed to offend anyone, especially the Romantics.
Of course, we might think that it is a socially built construct that people fall in love because of money, social standards, fear of living and dying alone. However, everything is intertwined with our upbringing, views on life, etc. We also depend on other people and the love can arise naturally, but it can be an interrelated process.
Love is a reflection of one's personality. Familiar to us love is not what we do, but it is something that happens to us, what we become. Speaking of science, love is a reactive attitude; it is an involuntary behavioral and emotional response of one human body aimed in the direction of the other body that is affecting the first one.
However, people are not only organisms, but they also have a mind and will, and then they can be responsible for their choices and their feelings. In this case, there is a possibility of other love, a rare love. Love as a choice, a decision of behavior. It is the choice that person makes, and one can decide to love. This becomes a pattern, a behavior that leads to becoming an integral part of human demeanor.
The reasons for the love of a choice may be different, including emotional enthusiasm, but if a person makes a choice and makes a commitment to love, it becomes his responsibility.
Love is an action, activity. There are a lot of other serious misunderstandings about love, which should be carefully considered. Love is not a feeling. Many people are experiencing the feeling of love and even acting under the dictation of the senses, in fact, commit the acts of non-love and destruction. On the other hand, a genuinely loving person often uses love as a possibility to make and construct a relationship towards a person to whom he is clearly not attracted.
Genuine love, on the other hand, means the obligation and actionable wisdom. If we are interested in someone's spiritual development, we understand that the lack of commitment is likely to be perceived painfully by this person and that commitment to them is necessary first of all to ourselves, to manifest our interest more effectively. For this reason, commitment is the cornerstone of love.
That is the reason why love has been changed through the last couple of years. People tend to forget that there is a possibility to love in the real world. We use technology, which is not the worst thing, but it often becomes the distraction and stands between the two people. There are more and more dating apps that try to promote the healthy relationship. But more usually than not, people fall in love basing their feelings and actions not on whether they liked or not the profile photo on the dating site or social media service, but on the general perception of the person that they get in real life. People tend to show only their good sides on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, but everything becomes apparent when you meet them in real life.
Love is a special way of interpersonal communication and acts as a fundamental category of philosophy and psychology, reflecting the semantic side of human life. It spiritualizes the activity of the individual, his ideals, etc. Love can be thought of only as the beginning of the thin sphere of the purely human communication. It has a subjective-objective basis. This means that subjective feelings of love are always objectively justified. Love is a subjective attitude of man to the world of being, which presupposes the pursuit of happiness. Thanks to the love, the humankind exists and always strives for self-improvement. In this sense a fundamental need (desire) reveals, and each person becomes better. Only in love one can overcome interpersonal alienation, a spiritual union can be achieved, and people no longer feel the bitterness of loneliness, the sense of emptiness.
Works Cited
Beere, Carole A. Sex And Gender Issues. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Print.
Snyder, C. R and Shane J Lopez. Oxford Handbook Of Positive Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
