Tell me a story! Part 2 - Love stories
Most recently, I have been talking to other storywriters and to people who have spent much time in writing journals about painful or difficult experiences on-line as blogs to share with others. I have also talked to people who kept journals, or simply used writing as a means to express difficulties or come to terms with trauma.
Before that I had been considering the work of Robert Sternberg, who wrote the book, “Love is a story”.
Sternberg’s work interested me particularly as it was a dramatic departure from normal psychology methods. Traditional psychologists have tended to frame their questions, and establish empirical research that they tested for statistical validity, and used subsequently to formulate the premises of their arguments.
There are all sorts of problems with empirical research, a lot of which have to do with the propensity of the respondents to answer questions in terms of what they feel the right answers to be in accordance with social, cultural, religious, family and other personal norms, pressures and expectations.
I believe that Sternberg used an empirical approach, but it was not his starting point.
We are not born with knowledge of what love is, what it means, how to love and how to sustain love successfully.
We learn about it. At a very early age, we learn about it unconsciously from our experience of our parents, people with whom we come into contact, physical and tactile experience, and basic physical and social interaction with others. A little later we start to absorb other images from books, films, television, kindergarten, school and every other source of emotional and social experience.
Sternberg argues, and I have some affinity with his views, that, based on these early experiences, we assemble our views about love as forms of narrative systems, as stories, which we enact in our later lives. Thus compatibility becomes a matter of finding someone with a story that might live comfortably alongside our own.
In Sternberg’s work, for example, we have “garden” stories, where the emphasis is on planting, nurturing and growing. That’s a tender narrative, although it may be a little low on excitement for some.
We have a travel story where life is a journey, a never-ending movement of discovery. The destination is less important since the person gets their emotional sustenance from the journey itself. In terms of the twenty-five or so stories, that Sternberg cites, I find this one, possibly, one of the more attractive (for me).
There’s the war story where partners remain permanently in conflict, but nevertheless, to the astonishment of observers, stay in the relationship. Perhaps the war relationship is portrayed well in the play, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Where I might differ from Sternberg is that he argues the case that only experts like himself might interpret the stories that people have within them of which they are largely unconscious.
I’m not sure whether I believe that these stories are so unconscious, nor if they need the intercession of an expert to understand them.
I had another idea with which I experimented that yielded some interesting results. I wrote about it earlier here:
“It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our emotions and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our feelings without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should write a story, a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks only a story; one that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We may be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!”
I did eventually get a few people to join in on that one. I also got a lot of resistance from people who said, “I can’t write stories”.
On the question of “can’t write”, I tried to assure people that it didn’t matter about literacy, grammar, and whether or not they had written before. I asked them to try and a couple more did.
With a select couple, I also asked them to write, a brief account of a past relationship that was most memorable to them in some way either through happiness or hurt.
What I noticed and observed:
1. I knew a couple in big difficulties. They didn’t communicate well. They both wrote love stories, ones that had the outcomes they were seeking, about love as they wanted to experience it. The process of writing a story liberated their communication. They were able to talk about what they liked, what they wanted, and what they hoped for. It was all there in the stories. I got greedy! I suggested that they then wrote another fictional story together. I didn’t care how, but one where they joined their plots together. The result almost brought tears to my eyes.
This was a very special experiment as what this pair had managed to do was, not only understand the stories they carried within them, but they had expressed how they would like to go on writing…living their lives together.
By doing something this simple, I had done more than I had ever managed to do in my brief time in marriage or relationship counselling!
2. People who are able to construct a narrative story over their life experiences seem to get more benefit than those who were only able to write past accounts in literal terms.
3. Almost everyone who wrote stories seemed to discover new aspects of, or re-experience, their emotional selves in some profound way. Their ability to communicate their feelings and understand what they were seeking in love changed in a positive way. Most felt that they were able to go on and “write their next chapter”.
4. The exercise of writing past accounts in literal terms yielded some, but less benefit in this context. (I have more to say about this.)
More soon….
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 5 - Love and sex
Sex and emotional health
I have talked a lot about healthy loving in adults where love is based on wants and desires rather than the dependency needs of childhood. I believe that sex is different in a way in that is far more of a basic human need, something we need to maintain our mental and emotional health.
Earlier this year, I wrote erotic fiction, not because of any voyeuristic tendencies but because my own sexuality had been shut down tight in a hurtful and destructive marriage. I pushed it down in a place so deep so that I could not be hurt or damaged further, so deep in fact, that it was hard for me to recover it. So writing this fiction was my own story-telling emotional and sexual therapy. I knew how to do that even if I was not fully conscious of what I was doing at the time. It was my way of recovering myself as a fully functioning being with all my bits working. I am glad to say that all those parts of me are back and alive and well. I published the work on an amateur writers’ website. Its popularity astonished me. To-date, the first five chapters of this long, sometimes humorous, tale have had more than 130,000 reads according to my web statistics and that is impressive, almost in the class of a best selling novel these days. But looking at what I wrote now, I am deeply dissatisfied with it. I feel it is shallow and lacks the loving sensitivity and passion that I am able to feel now. More of that later.
I’ll change the tone from my usual pedantry here and just let the two protagonists of my erotic story do the talking. They are new lovers, John and Rosie; ironically they are both qualified psychotherapists! The “I” in the tale is John speaking. Here is their discussion on sex and emotional health:
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “How healthy good sex makes us feel.
“I feel like I’m glowing with wellbeing this morning. I feel happy, healthy and complete. I haven’t had sex for years and last night I had the best sex of my entire life. It made me feel so good…like a whole person again.”
She paused for thought.
“You know, I’m sorry to sound like the shrink-wrap I am, but Freud had it absolutely right. Living in some void of sexual repression does us no good at all. It makes us sick. If it doesn’t drive us to do crazy things then it just makes us sick at heart. So what goes wrong?” she said.
“Rosie, I’m with you on that one. It’s what I believe too but all sorts of things go wrong,” I said.
“Either we live in aloneness like you, or else we get caught up in emotional double binds and twists and turns with our loved ones that just do us harm. We lose the plot, I suppose,” I added.
“Have you lost the plot?” she asked.
“Yes, me too,” I replied. “I’ve got caught up in that world where money and material stuff controls what I do both in and out of my marriage.
“And by the way, you weren’t the only one to have the best sex of their lives last night. I did too.”
I caught Rosie’s eye and returned her smile.
“Sex is a basic human need, as basic as food, drink and sleep,” I said. “Denying it makes people crazy. It not only causes social disease, but makes for a lot of perverted and crazy people out there too. Freud was right on the mark in my view.
“So you see we’re both a pair of shrink-wraps leading lives that are opposed to what we believe, and there lies the rub!” I added.
ENDS
That was a very light-hearted way of making the point, but denying and repressing our sexuality makes us sick, it makes for a sick world too. I have a lot of issues with Freud and Wilhelm Reich, his student, but I’m with them all the way here and a healthy loving sexuality makes for a healthy person and a healthy world. We do some repression necessarily to make civilisation possible, but we have taken it far too far in my view. Repression is a dangerous and damaging thing, it makes for perverts, rapists and murderers.
But I have something very much more important to say here now.
Sex and love
So that was all very sweet, or was it really? It’s mine, and I’ll own up to it here. My erotic fiction was pathetic. It had nothing or little to do with love. It had everything to do with a man (me) finding and facing his brokenness, of looking his big life’s mistakes, errors, pain and despair square in the face.
What the story is about is two people who try and use sex to mend that brokenness, to ease their pain. It does not work! After 140 pages of this stuff and about 55,000 words I stopped writing the story since I knew it had to end in tears and that my masturbating readers were just looking for more and more sexual titillation that I had given them in large measure already.
As the pain in the story increased chapter by chapter, so the readership decreased generally by decrements of fifty per cent. Had I gone on to tell the whole truth I may not have had a readership at all.
The love that Hollywood and our consumption-based society tries to sell us has little to do with love at all and everything to do with profit. Sorry, but this time I’m going to tell it how it really is, no holds barred, so if you’re looking for fantasy here, stop reading now. Some of you who carry on may find what I have written to be very difficult and painful. It is, I know, I have felt that pain too. If you feel that “Pretty Woman” is a great love story, then you had probably better stop here to avoid disillusionment, since as an account of love I find it about as satisfying as a gastronomic feast of warm blancmange and overcooked cabbage. It appeals to me that much!
Let’s look at sex and love then. First they are not synonymous. They are not one and the same thing and may have little to do with each other. I have every belief that sex within real love may be like heaven on earth. I do not know as I have not found it yet.
A friend once said to me recently and I’ll paraphrase her words, that sex only provides temporary relief from emotional pain, that people use it to escape their feelings and that sooner or later they would find emptiness.
I need to use another word here and that is perversion. The word pervert is not too popular in our culture today but it does mean “to misdirect” or “to lead astray”. Perversion in this context means an act of that leads a person away from a psychological goal or the pursuit of true fulfilment. To quote another eminent psychologist “we can say that a perversion leads you away from the true depths of your emotional pain - and from the psychological healing that could happen if you were to work therapeutically with that pain - by distracting you with something apparently pleasurable.”
As my friend perhaps knows, the connection between sex and perversions is often found in idealised romantic or erotic love. So I’ll talk more about love here to be clear about what I’m saying.
But let’s hear this lesson again:
- As long as you pursue sexuality out of a need to be loved – as a form of something you need or want – you will be disappointed. You will be led right behind illusions straight into perversion. You will find nothing but emptiness.
- I’ll say that again a different way. As long as you try to fill your inner, psychological and spiritual emptiness with another person through romantic, erotic love or sex – you will remain unconsciously broken and empty.
Back to the pain for a moment: Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this and I’ll say more about that too. But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don’t beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love. My friend already knows this wisdom, running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain.
I know someone is going to ask me sooner or later where my earlier piece on intimacy fits into all this. Perhaps it should have been a later piece as it talks about intimate behaviour within love but not love itself.
Now this gets worse, first I want to talk about what love is not, then I’ll go on to say what I feel it is.
I’ve already said that love is not an escape route from past pain, mistakes and despair. I cannot say that enough times so here it is again. It’s the stuff of the rebound and transitional relationship where people bounce from one person to the next acting out their fantasies and their toxic emotions. Sooner or later, this person will face drown in a sea of complete desperation and lifelessness when the burden of the past becomes too much to bear.
It’s not about finding some comforting sense of absolute belonging and acceptance; that’s what we give to babies. We all have to face feelings of mortality and human isolation sooner or later and there is no escape from them. As unpleasant as it may seem eroticism is based on infantile needs to be received, accepted and satisfied. When a person feels all of these needs have been met then he or she may feel that she is “in love”. But sooner or later this intensity will be broken when the need to deal with real world pressures and difficulties breaks into a relationship.
It’s not about material wealth and the sharing of objects. Material goods and structures have nothing to do with love.
It’s not about moulding yourself, your body, your dress or appearance to meet the expectations of another’s desire.
And it’s not about receiving anything, nothing at all.
Real love is an act of giving unconditionally. To offer true love, to will the good of another, is to accept one’s own vulnerability, weakness, insignificance and humility. Love is a responsible act of will and of choice. As I wrote in “the myth of falling in love” it is not something that one falls into! You might fall into the swimming pool, but not into love. You can fall into fatal attraction, and you can fall into desperate desire but you cannot fall into love. Love requires courage as in a way it’s a sacrifice of what our modern culture believes to be valuable. It means standing up for love, leaving the pack, not as a terrorist or subversive, but with something better than what others may see in their blindness.
Love is the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, belief in the other, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic or erotic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us do not give generously of our hearts at all nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we are addressing a covert desire to avoid being abandoned. This apparent generosity is not love at all; it is emotional bribery.
The hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It is about giving love rather than desperately searching to be loved. It’s the only attitude that can begin to carry you through the agony of human limitation and mortality. Love that is based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting. It is never fleeting and can never fly off into despair and hate.
It is a pity that true love is feared by most of us, and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults.
Acknowledgements: My grateful acknowledgements to the late French psychologist, Jacques Lacan, whose work and ideas inspired this piece.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 4 - The Myth of Falling in Love
There is something that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable about the "falling in love" metaphor. It's not the "in love" part since that is wonderful, but the idea that one "fell" into it; that somehow it was like an involuntary act of slipping on a banana skin. It highlights the idea that one did not have a choice in love; it just happened, that somehow one is a victim of one's feelings and that we love whomever our "emotions" want us to love.
I would like to believe that to love is a conscious act of the psyche that involves both freedom and responsibility, where one moves into love through choice. The idea of "falling in love" denies both freedom and choice since people use it to deny that they have choice in who they love. This metaphor might also deny personal responsibility since it allows people to believe that the matter was out of their hands and beyond their control. I may have said in an earlier piece that I felt love was an act of will. Notions of will, intellect and feelings working separately are unattractive (to me) since they suggest that areas of one's being might be compartmentalised and operate separately. I am certain that this is not helpful: It might be like "I work with my intellect", "I love my partner with my feelings" and "my acts of assertion, achievement or success are achieved by my will". How saddening this is, to break up one's self in a way that allows one to express only a part of oneself in given contexts. This compartmentalisation is perhaps the product of post-industrial man, a new machine culture, where work, loving and social being, and success operate in separate personal domains. It is for this reason that I prefer the notion of consciousness where all of our faculties might operate together.
An inversion of the Descartian principle of "Cogito ergo sum" ("Je pense, donc je suis", "I think, therefore I am") that informs all western phenomenological philosophy provides a clue. It follows that if one has no consciousness, then one does not exist. That's blindingly obvious in a way. My wild extrapolation, therefore, might be that if I am not conscious, should I not know, understand or be aware of my feelings, then I cannot love. I believe that idea.
I know I might be theorising here to evade the revelation of what I find most difficult. I shall evade a little longer by doing humour. If one was to land on earth as an alien with a copy of the 'Oxford English Dictionary', then one might believe that love was some savage practice of sadomasochism, in which humans are "set on fire', "burnt", "their hearts scorched", "their souls devoured" and all by love.
It is here that I might embrace the falling metaphor, falling is painful and love is a human risk that carries with it the most awful prospect of pain. I know how much that hurts. There's a thought that keeps moving through me that comes up again and again. I am sure it was a quotation from somewhere, although I would not guarantee that my feelings had not rewritten it. It goes something like "Eros's arrow strikes beyond love's deepest wound". I am also sure that my interpretation might not be the one intended by the writer of this quote. But there is a sense for me that love's arrow in order to find a place in one's heart and one's truth must go beyond all the pain that one has felt before, that one recognizes, knows and embraces that pain, and nurtures one's being beyond it, not denying it, but not ignoring or trampling on it either. That would hurt…but if only it was that.
True love brings with it the most terrifying risks. There's trust…I remember another quote but I cannot attribute it. It is "In all trust lies the seed of betrayal". I tried to find that quote on the internet, I believe it may have come from one of my life's inspirations, James Hillman, but I came up with 'star trek'. This is how the 'star trek' quote went:
Picard, "With all trust comes the possibility of betrayal."
Data, "Then perhaps it is better not to trust."
I have not watched star trek that much, but I believe that 'Data' is a sort of humanised super-android, a computer in human form and that says it all for me.
It's a funny thing about trust but it's something that I have had going on inside me for more than fifteen years now. It is this feeling that love transcends trust, that love is more reliable, more accepting and more generous than trust. Trust is also there in language to mean the relationship that one might have with one's banker or accountant that I do not feel means that much.
But back to those fears, love may also signify so many doubts, so many risks, so much fear and apprehension. There is the fear of betrayal, loss, desertion, distrust and suspicion, rejection and worse. There are also the difficulties in moving towards love; that one might make the journey and find emptiness, that one travels faster than another and they cannot meet and embrace their feelings as they wish to, or that they are scared by the intensity or awareness of the other in fear even though they are reaching out to them. These are not everyday fears; they are the stuff of the death of love. I feel I may have understated them here since they frighten me beyond belief.
There's the journey of low self-esteem that love may heal also. I have been critical of that in the past too in that I believe that someone who does not love himself cannot possibly love another. I believe that to be true, although I have met a number of women whose wonderful flowers and potential have been crushed so badly by insensitive men in unconscious and harmful relationships; such that merely allowing them to be themselves allows them to love again. I have learned much humility of late.
But the fears and apprehensions of love should not be underestimated. In my view, they are the worse fears and apprehensions known to! humankind.
Later I'll go on and write of the joys of mature love and desire. But for now I'll quote from the work of Barbara Kofford, a wonderful and inspirational colleague in psychotherapy who is involved in running the women's center in Jacksonville, Tennessee:
"Love extends ourselves beyond our fear of being vulnerable to seek the good we each desire within ourselves and in the other. To have our love endure, there is a need to develop the strength and resources to survive times of famine. To love another is to relinquish the hope that the other will be our idealized beloved; therefore, mature love rises like a Phoenix from the ashes of lost illusions.
Mature love began for Cupid when he resolved his ambivalence about leaving his childhood home. Legend also tells us that when Venus tired of Cupid's immaturity, released him from his only-child status through the birth of his brother, Anteros, the god of reciprocal love. Therefore, love that lasts requires an acknowledgement that adult relationships are independent of those we have with parents, children, and friends. Mature love does not grow from a posture of dependency and physical appearances; it builds upon the growing autonomy of each so that one will survive the death of the other. To love another is to relinquish the intention to change the beloved. Mature love arises from the death of belief in one's own god-like powers as it flies towards the future on autonomous wings.
What can the story of Cupid and Psyche tell us about how to live "happily ever after"? Their story demonstrates that romantic love begins with idealized passions and physical attraction. And yet, it is only through the commitment of each lover to a process of integrating the internal awareness of love and soul individually that a mature union can emerge between them. It is mature love that provides children with a model by which to develop future relationships. Therefore, it is mature love that lives happily ever after in the generations yet to come."
Thoughts on Love and intimacy - Part 3 - The Rebound Relationship
After a divorce or separation from a long-term relationship many individuals try to make up for their emotional losses by rushing right into another relationship. This is because divorce feels like such a personal failure.
Although you may have had no control over the situation, you might still blame yourself for the course of the events and long to prove to yourself that you will not repeat this pattern. If your partner left you for someone else, or if they were demeaning or critical you might also desire the approval of the opposite sex to the extent that you become "blind" to logic.
Rebound relationships can also be the result of trying to make up for "lost time" spent mourning the previous relationship or an attempt to compete with the ex- by finding a new partner before he or she does.
No matter what, when a marriage or long-term relationship ends, you are likely to go through the five stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, sadness, and acceptance. There is no underestimating the enormous impact of these reactions.
Rebound relationships, which never last long, seem to occur as the result of two people projecting an idealistic notion onto each other. A delusion occurs as one person creates an understanding of the future of the relationship that differs from the new partner. Usually these issues are about commitment. However, both parties feel a great sense of temporary relief from being with each other. They may also be getting companionship, emotional support and attention that they feel that they can't get elsewhere.
Usually, both participants in a rebound relationship are completely blind to obvious evidence that the two of them are actually incompatible. The glue that holds the two of them together is along the lines of the phrase "Anything is better than being alone."
Some people embark on rebound relationships, as they can't release the past until they are put through the process of trying to build a new intimacy with someone else. Blocked or repressed emotions that were not expressed towards the ex partner may now be "acted out" on the new partner.
The new partner offers them a comfort and an emotional security that makes it easy to act out anger and other toxic emotions that could not, for reasons of emotional inaccessibility, be acted out on the former partner.
Emotional issues and needs that were not brought out during the divorce or separation will often rise to the surface and affect the new rebound relationship. As one or the other or both partners in the rebound relationship work out these issues, usually a process of emotional transformation occurs that frees the grief-stricken individual from the past.
As the person is healed, they have no more need for their rebound relationship. The partner in the rebound relationship can't grow, as it was only there to provide temporary emotional support and allay grief and pain. Rebound relationships don't have long term potential simply because the needy person will have embarked on a process of emotional recovery.
Relationship counselors recommend that a widowed or divorced individual should wait about a year before they begin looking for another committed relationship. This gives you the time to work through the shock, anger and despair that probably accompanied your loss.
Before embarking on another relationship, it is important for you to do some soul-searching and make sure that you are actually ready for another commitment. If you were the perpetrator in the separation, some serious self-examination might reveal that your real goal is to work on some other area of your life such as your creative side or career.
It can also prevent you from initiating a long-term pattern of going from one chaotic emotional situation to another in the future. Many people have a series of bad relationships, not because they are a perpetual victim or have bad luck, but because they have not taken the time out that they need to heal. In some cases, an individual can rebound several times on ONE relationship simply because they are looking for a substitute for their previous partner as opposed to a relationship that will work. One sure sign that you are about to enter a rebound relationship is if the new partner seems somehow "familiar" to you.
Another indicator that the relationship is rebound in its nature is if you see your new partner as somehow rescuing you from the last situation. You might think this because the new partner might be encouraging you to see him or her in this light so that they can feel powerful. Helping others or being an emotional "rescuer" is one way that emotionally injured individuals can boost their self-esteem.
Rather than look at a separation or divorce as a loss, you are well advised to look at the glass as half-full. This is the time to take stock of your life as well as an honest accounting for your responsibility in the debacle (no matter how much you think your partner is to blame). This will help free you from the kind of desperation that leads so many into a rebound relationship that also ends in disaster.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 2 - What is intimacy?
Intimacy is many things and can exist on many levels: thoughts, knowledge, physical, emotional and sexual dimensions exist in intimacy. But here I am only concerned with close loving relationships between men and women.
In searching the internet, one might be tempted to believe that intimacy was exclusively about sexual intercourse. It is not although sex may be a fundamental (and wonderful) part of intimacy.
The work of creating intimacy is realising and expressing our inmost self in relationship with others, and supporting them in expressing their inmost self with us. Expressing our inmost self can mean revealing our feelings and needs, our dreams and hopes, our fears and joys and worries, our creative insights, our secrets and our pain . . . all the inner, personal aspects of ourselves. It does not matter at all, for the purpose of intimacy, whether we express "positive" aspects of ourselves such as joy, love, attraction and excitement, or "negative" experiences like fear, sadness, shame or anger. They all count. The important thing is that what we are expressing be personal and real. Dishonesty kills intimacy. Abstract, impersonal intellectual analysis (no matter how brilliant) kills intimacy, as does evasion, seeking to control another, judging and placating. Intimacy is the deep honest personal sharing between people.
Intimacy and honesty
I don't want to go overboard on honesty. There are forms of honesty that often simply reflect a personal preference like "I hate that sweater" or I don't like that dress" that are often best left unspoken. Opinions have little to do with the truth. There are types of honesty for some that are harsh, brutal, hurtful and inconsiderate. To be intimate requires a communicative sensitivity - a deep empathy with how the other feels and a desire to know and experience their world lovingly through their own frame of reference. It is to relish and cherish difference. It is not to enforce conformity to one's own tastes.
No judgments
Intimacy is a place without judgments. It is truly that place where acceptance without exception lives. It is a place of unconditional love. It is also a place where we have to know and love ourselves. Intimacy is not yielding ourselves up as a sacrifice, to engage the psychopath in acceptance, to cherish the abuser or wife-beater. There are other places where these people can get help. To love ourselves is a fundamental prerequisite to loving someone else. It is not about offering oneself up to another as a sacrifice or being a willing victim. There can be no judgments in intimacy as there are no right or wrong feelings.
Rejection, fear of desertion and the presentation of a false self
There are people, and I know I have been one of them, who resist intimacy for fear of being rejected or deserted. Many of us have been betrayed by someone we love or trust. Physical, mental, sexual and emotional abuse teaches us to build huge insurmountable walls of defence around ourselves. Sometimes the loss of another has simply been too painful to risk repeating the experience, to be that deeply hurt again. These are all hard lessons but, and it's a hell of a 'but', if we allow these experiences and feelings to block our capacity for intimacy, we exclude all of life's deep possibilities. We become isolated, non-functioning walled off and unfulfilled as people. We live in some stagnant backwater where it may be 'safe' (although I would question that as I believe we are more likely to signal our hurt and damage in some unconscious way and attract those people whom we wish to avoid.) but it is in a way a living death.
When we close out the pains of the past from our conscious minds, they inhabit our unconscious and influence our actions without our understanding why. Unlocking the unconscious to know and understand the cause of the difficulty is problematic. Perhaps therapy is the answer, perhaps it is not. I am inclined to believe that a lover or loving, understanding and patient friend or partner is more likely to provide the safe haven for the discovery and healing of past pain rather than the infrequent attentions of a therapist.
Fear of rejection and desertion are most often the bogeymen left behind from a difficult and painful childhood. More frequently than not the child will be conditioned to believe that their badness, abnormality or simply their individuality is the reason for their rejection. Only when the child has yielded or conformed for the sake of survival to the adult's view of them will they suffer the pain of rejection. Alice Miller, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote 'The child is always innocent'. But society invariably takes the side of the adult and blames the child for what has been done to him or her. In turn the child betrayed by society has no choice but to repress the trauma and idealise the perpetrator. This repression leads to neurosis, psychosis and delinquency. The perpetuation of new crimes can only be prevented by the victims, seeing and being aware of what was done to them. A welter of discomforting feelings of rage, anger and unbearable pain often accompanies the discovery of childhood trauma. It is not a comfortable place to be.
It is no surprise that the abused will often go on to be an abuser.
Confronting this trauma feels to me (having done it) to be the easy part. The question is 'what then?' Only time, love and self-understanding holds the key. The adult will often feel powerless but these are the feelings of the damaged child. The adult is not powerless and only they hold the key to change through awareness and building love for themselves in themselves. Believe me, this is easier said than done. The abused child will often have been told that the reason for their abuse is that they are not worthy of love or are bad, abnormal or evil. This is the abuser's excuse. But I know the key for transformation lies in self-awareness and love.
Is this a diversion? A small diversion perhaps since I believe that in this dark place, the discovery of love and intimacy is true liberation. Intimacy and acceptance can provide the life-force of love - its re-generation and rebirth and an escape from the trauma of abuse.
Intimacy also requires individuality. There is another misconception about intimate relationships that says that intimacy means doing everything together, never arguing or disagreeing, always saying yes to each other. This belief leads to a suffocating, false "closeness" that is not intimacy at all but rather an unhealthy mess where nobody has any freedom or personal identity, where we present a false self. We are each unique, different, unlike anybody else. Intimacy - which is expressing our true self in relationship with others -requires that we honour and respect our differences. Being true to ourselves includes saying no to things we do not like, getting angry at those we love, expressing opinions or ideas that others may disagree with, and living our lives differently from the way other people choose to live theirs.
What makes this hard is that many of us have been brainwashed to believe that it's "unpleasant" or "impolite" to disagree, to say no, to get angry, or to do things our own way instead of the way somebody else expects us to. For many people, it' is frightening to stand alone and be a separate person. Conformity is more comfortable. But burying feelings of hurt, anger or dissatisfaction, and avoiding disagreements makes relationships dead and boring. Conformity does not bring people closer together. Without individuality, real contact and intimacy are impossible.
It follows that to be intimate with others we have to be intimate with ourselves. This means learning to be aware of our deepest feelings and needs, knowing and accepting ourselves as we really are, not as we wish we were or think we are supposed to be. It means knowing and acknowledging the truth about us. It means accepting and becoming comfortable with our separateness and individuality, choosing to be different and unique.
Being ourselves, and not a member of the pack, may seem a lonely place, and it is alone but rarely is it lonely. One aspect of intimacy is being unafraid to be with just oneself…. to know oneself. It's a prerequisite to being intimate with someone. It is only through being ourselves that we can experience the other and find the starting point of growth in love.
I always have an uncomfortable feeling when writing about individualism. In the 1980's and beyond, the individual became a political doctrine. One that was more often associated with selfishness, greed, social isolation, wealth and power. This has nothing to do with an individualism that calls for self-knowledge and self-determination in a social and personal context of intimacy, nothing at all.
Intimacy and vulnerability
How many times have you heard or thought 'I would like to be intimate but I feel so vulnerable'?
There is a feeling that if I reveal my feelings or myself to another they may be critical and derogatory and I will be hurt since I care for them and wish them to care for me. People in close relationships invariably hurt each other in the process of becoming intimate but if they are seeking intimacy then the hurt will rarely go untended. Intimacy and vulnerability do go hand in hand but if a person feels threatened by the criticism of another, they can quickly shift back to their own frame of reference and self-belief for support. This is why self-knowledge, self-belief and self-love (that is different to onanism) are cornerstones of intimacy; the stuff that enables one to reach out fearlessly to another, knowing one can always let go. Intimacy is the affirmation of another. Intimacy is not derogatory.
Guilt and blame
The guilt and blame games are played on such a wide scale that it is hard not to be drawn into them. The notion of 'He did it me' is everywhere. We all know the feelings. They go 'we are in this bad place because of all these bad things you did to me. I hold you to blame for my difficulty.' Maybe this is defensiveness, maybe it is fear. But it is fear of responsibility that causes blame and true growth in intimacy can only thrive where there is an acceptance of responsibility for love's growth without blame.
Blame and assertiveness do not co-exist. Blame distorts, harms and even destroys. It is self-destructive as well as destructive of others.
So I hear the cynics say 'Blame is a natural human response to threat or injustice, to wrongdoing or loss.' I am sure that is true too. It is all too easy. But what I would ask the proponents of blame is 'When did you last solve a personal problem with blame?' 'When did blame last improve your life?' 'When I blamed what did it help me to understand about me or the other?' 'Where has blame helped you to achieve the outcome you wanted?
Thoughts on love and intimacy - Part 1 - Introduction
A time ago I wrote an article for publication entitled "What is intimacy?" Like most of these things, it was borne of what was happening in my life at the time. The other day I dug it out to read. It was not half bad, I thought. Then I found myself thinking about what is and what is not possible in love. The question that nagged at me was given that it is not possible for two people to develop, grow and change synchronously in a monogamous relationship then how is it possible not to grow apart, to wake up one day and say I don't really like that person anymore, they are not the same person I thought they were?
Earlier this year I almost bled to death. I shall spare you the gory details but my heart almost gave out when it could not get the oxygen-carrying haemoglobin it needed. I had the most wonderful medical care (Thank you, blood donors!) and now I'm healthier and fitter than I have been for about 15 years or more. That sort of experience does cause a massive "paradigm shift", an entire revolution in one's worldview and personal values. But how do you encompass such a dramatic change in values within an intimate, loving personal relationship?
I was curious what others may have thought about this so I put the words "sustaining intimacy" and "sustaining loving relationships" into 'Google' and it returned so much rubbish that I wanted to reach for the bottle marked "despair".
It caused me to reflect on another random thought that was triggered by an everyday event. I had received a bill for something I had bought at a store. At the bottom of the bill, there were the letters "E&OE" in small print that I learned subsequently meant 'Errors and Omissions Excepted'. What a wonderful idea, I thought! Perhaps I might stamp letters on my forehead to signify how I would wish to feel about loving relationships. Why not 'A w/o E' meaning 'acceptance without exception'? What a great notion!
It was an important clue to me. I suspect finally, at the ripe old age I am now, I may at last be getting close to the answer. Love is certainly not about the narcissistic reflection of some idealised image of the other, or a contra-sexual playback of one's self-image. Perhaps it's not a state of mind at all, but an act, an act or activity of the soul, the psyche.
I found myself earlier trying to remember what C. S. Lewis had written about love, four kinds of love. There was "storge, eros, caritas/ philia, agape, and Love as I remember; Love being spiritual love or, in his case, the love of God. Oops! That's five kinds of love! I must have added one in there somewhere. Who cares anyway? But that's familial, erotic, friendship, altruistic and spiritual love. I'm not really sure that any such academic categorisation of love helps us in understanding what love is or how to do it anyway!
So what of love then? I'll skip around for a while longer but I do believe that love follows a progression like Maslow's hierarchy of needs where human development progresses from its subsistence level and its need for survival at the base of the triangle to self-actualisation at its apex. Similarly, I believe that love progresses through needs, wants and desire where needs correspond with a state of infantile dependency and desire to the self-actualisation of love in emotional maturity. But I'll finish here with a poem, which for me summarises the feelings of the ordinary man in a state of desire. It's called "Feeling Fucked Up" by Etheridge Knight.
Feeling Fucked Up
Lord she's gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs--
Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcom fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing
Etheridge Knight
Love - Why bother?
So are love and love relationships, the new blue light case of the age? There is a welter of statistical data that suggests that love and commitment are in a state of terminal decline if one looks at love through a lens of marital outcomes. Divorce rates have soared. In the USA, more than 50% of marriages end in divorce. In the UK, the numbers are very similar. A Rutgers University survey reported that a mere 38 per cent of Americans who are married describe themselves as actually being happy in that state. If one includes married and unmarried people in relationships, the numbers do not improve by the inclusion of committed cohabiters, they get worse.
I read a book recently by a woman called Laura Kipnis called "Against Love: A Polemic". Ms. Kipnis is a professor in media studies at an American university. She systematically destroyed any notion of love and marriage in that book although I did not feel it was so revealing, nor so clever. A real concern I had was that she did not even see the pressures on love: the idea that it may be blown up as the universal answer for everything, that people entering marriage may believe that love is all and the cure to all ills, that our problems about love and marriage might be the result of all the romantic images our culture pushes at us minute-by-minute, day-after-day. She also moots that adulterers are quasi-utopian rebels who might liberate us all! Really?
Kipnis offers nothing in place of love other than debasement. One comes away with a feeling that all she feels about is sex and that the world might be free and happy as a copulating tribe of monkeys. I would hate to point out to Ms Kipnis that Gibbon monkeys are monogamous.
In all of the anti-love and marriage material I read before writing this, Kipnis's book was the worst. It looks and sounds radical and even alludes to Karl Marx. I have some respect for Marx whose work is often trotted out like some simplistic utopian nonsense but I do believe he was a very great philosopher too. There is something in the core of Marx like a belief that the value of people means little or nothing without the respect of other human beings and that this is needed in order for people to attain their full expression. In many ways, I have much time for Marx, but then, unusually, my education required that I read his books also. Very few people have.
To use the words of Betty Friedan, Kipnis makes marriage look like a concentration camp. But I don't just want to shoot her down in flames either as she makes some very valid points.
She does describe a notion of people living together in marriage becoming rule-bound, of becoming drowned in a sea of petty dictatorship and household tyranny. I have seen it. I suspect we all have. There are rules for loading the dishwasher, not dropping socks on the floor, leaving the bathroom door open; the meaningless domestic drudgery and dross of day-to-day existence becomes everything. We enter marriage feeling love, passion and "till death us do part". So why the problems and what changes?
Ms Kipnis should have an inkling; after all she is a widely published author and a professor of media studies. Love is not merely an emotion that exists inside us. How we love is an integral part of our belief systems, of our consciousness, and of our culture that forms part of consciousness. Our beliefs are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations as well as our experience. Some of these institutions may be failing us.
There are strong vested business interests in love, marital and sexual difficulties too, like the pornography trade, Viagra, therapy, alcohol and drugs industries. The pornography trade worldwide is massive! It is said to generate revenues of more than US $60 billion annually and makes up 12% of all internet content. How sad is that?
In the UK, the Office of National Statistics cites couples' high expectations as the reason for an upswing in divorce. But are high expectations really such a bad thing? Personally I would encourage them. I believe that we ought to expect more and better from many areas of our lives. In some ways, marriage might be used as a vehicle, a power-based strategy for enforcing compliance within a society riddled with infinite petty rules, meaningless and violent politics and the seemingly hateful piety of many religions. It might be these social and political dimensions of marriage that are stultifying, emotionally deadening and harmful.
I do believe there is hope for deep loving monogamous relationships. I have thought a lot about whether I really believe lasting, enduring, satisfying love relationships are possible. I have thought deeply about people I have known whom I know have emotionally successful relationships. I have read some academic research too about what factors tend to be present in relationships that endure and succeed. I have some of my own feelings and beliefs too that come mainly from experiencing past pain, difficulties and reflecting on my past relationships. I know I now have the capacity for what I believe to be a better sort of love. But I am flawed and fallible and very far from perfect but I have learned many lessons too.
Here I will talk about consciousness to mean the individual psyche. I do believe there is another dimension of consciousness of which we are all a part, a kind of collective psyche or social consciousness. I have touched on the notion of collective consciousness before and I believe it to be the ultimate expression of the connectedness of humankind and its relation to its world. In common with Marx, I believe that people both make, form part of and are influenced and made by this social dimension of consciousness.
Also I believe that individual consciousness is accessible to us all and that by bringing our individual consciousness into focus we might choose to change or enhance our lives. This self-understanding is not something that many practice; many people I meet are almost totally unconscious. Their world is one where things happen to them, they are not responsible, and life is "just like that". They have no control over their existence since they have done little or nothing to understand anything of what they feel, how they behave or how they perceive or understand.
But my real point here is that for us to feel satisfied in love we first have to understand the view of love we carry around in ourselves. We all have views, feelings and our own set of metaphors (implicit subjective stories) about love. Until we understand what they are, we are unable to be satisfied with love as we need to understand what we are seeking and what will make us happy. It's an obvious truism, but the surprise for me is always the number of people who are simply unable to articulate their beliefs about love.
To be aware and be able to be a fully functioning loving person requires that we face up to past pain. I have written this once before in my blog entitled "love and sex" but it's so important I am going to repeat it here: "Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this... But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don't beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love…Running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain."
Going on to another of the points I seem to have made inadvertently already by the inclusion of this quote: To have enduring, satisfying love, means one takes responsibility for oneself, for your loved one and in every other aspect of your life. Doing blame, passing the buck or evading the issue will not cut it. If you don't do responsibility, you cannot do love. It's as simple as that.
I just want to re-emphasise a point here too. It's the one about listening to your past pain with tenderness and compassion. This is so important. I have seen many people fail to face past difficulty and pain simply because their approach was to engage in emotional self-flagellation. If you beat yourself up, it hurts and sooner or later you will give up on looking at the truth of your pain, because it simply hurts too much.
I wanted to mention doing love relationship endings too. Hopefully most people know of the importance of doing loving endings. There is something about a loss in love that feels the same as any bereavement. As with any bereavement, it's important to do mourning. Mourning a loss is our way of coming to terms with it. It's fine to weep and cry. If one avoids that mourning it just adds to the baggage of past pain and that means that one will need to come back to that sadness later in order to love another. If one doesn't do the mourning, it will come back to bite us in our next relationship as unresolved feelings belonging to the past move from our unconscious into the present and cloud our feelings and affect our behaviour towards our new loved one. Anyone who has been on the end of the totally inexplicable behaviour of someone else in a close relationship will know what this feels like. Do not take it personally; it's probably not about you at all. Talk gently to your partner about it, then maybe he or she will be able to bring it back into consciousness and deal with their feelings about their past difficulty. Do not give up either, no matter how irrational the other person becomes (and people operating from unresolved feelings in the unconscious can be very irrational); be loving and support them in understanding their feelings.
One more thing, it is likely and possible that the person operating with unconscious unresolved difficulty will project those feelings on you and say that you are the cause of the difficulty. It may be hurtful too but if you have a good self-concept and good self-esteem you will recognise this projection when it happens. You will perceive easily that the problem does not belong to you but to someone else in your lover's past. It can be anyone, even a parent and need not be threatening if it is handled well. If the person has a lot of unresolved past difficulties and little consciousness of their feelings it may not bode well for the future of your relationship.
Another factor which I am sure affects the survival of love relationships is the longevity of physical and sexual relations. Touch and tactile senses are very important. I believe that hugs and cuddles are an essential part of healthy living too! It saddens me that we recognise a child's needs for physical affection, for hugs and cuddles then "grow up" and do not recognise that these needs remain in us as adults. So many people feel that hugging and cuddling belongs to the world of the child. It's not true, everyone loves a hug and a cuddle so get hugging and cuddling right now!
On sex, there are so many ways to keep its excitement alive. Sexual desire will wane if sex with another becomes the same old boring routine time after time. The passion of romance will not support sexual relations forever. But be inventive about times, places and methods…different ways of doing sexual arousal too, different types of foreplay. Now I'm getting really excited. Where's that cat?
Some lovely late friends of mine, two German Jewish people had the most amazing sex life for the whole of their lives as far as I knew. Certainly they were still going strong well into their seventies and they had first met in WW II. They were so funny; they had so many special qualities including a completely unabashed openness so I would often get to hear about their latest (sexual) adventures! They were both very successful in the media business, in film and television and used often to fly across the Atlantic to the USA. Apparently if it was a night flight and the cabin lights were dimmed, they would cover themselves with the blankets and touch each other's intimate parts. I don't think that's all they did as they loved the expenses paid trips in business class where they were be able to "be naughty, quietly and slowly, of course." I was feeling a little sad earlier today at my own lost love and these lovely people came to mind. They taught me so many lessons, many of which I write about here. They knew something about facing past pain too. They had tons of past pain. The Nazis had slaughtered many of their family and they both had fled to the UK before the outbreak of WW II. The dreadful irony was that they were both imprisoned as Germans in a British concentration camp on the Isle of Man. It was where they met. They felt no bitterness, no hate at all, but I do remember drinking champagne with them on more than one occasion to celebrate the odd accomplishment of Simon Wiesenthal in bringing Nazis to account.
This is getting very long again so I'm going to string a whole lot of qualities together that I believe are essential to have in a lasting loving relationship: Trust, caring, intimacy, companionate love, respect, humour and some healthy excitement from time-to-time!
I've never been sure about the trust word and have always felt that love assumes its meaning and much more, but trust is essential. Distrust is damaging and corrosive of love.
On caring, intimacy and companionate love, I've talked about all those before. Caring carries with it the more profound emotions of forbearance, forgiveness and understanding. They are wonderful to experience and all may grow in time unlike the shallowness of romantic illusions that fall away over time. Companionate love is the endearing quality of deep friendship that I find both attractive and desirable in my own love relationships.
Excitement is new and I have added humour to my list that I believe to be more important. Research has shown that excitement experienced jointly with one's loved one can enhance intimacy. I believe we all need some, fun, excitement and humour to keep our relationships alive. There is nothing as refreshing as the ability to laugh and in particular, laugh at oneself. I do it all the time!
There's another new word here and that is respect. Respect is one of the most necessary components in any healthy relationship, whether it is a friendship, love or marriage. Respect is not given; it's earned as is trust. To respect also means that we have to behave in a manner that is respectful. To do trust also means that we have to be trustworthy.
There is one very last point I want to make and that is crucial to be able to learn to resolve relationship conflicts constructively, Many people, especially men, do walking away from conflict and that does not work either. We need to learn about how not to escalate conflict and keep right away from hurling insults at partners too. Both are damaging and harmful. It is naïve to believe that crises, conflicts, differences and anger will not arise in love relationships from time-to-time. The important thing is to create a safe haven for the expression of those feelings and work quickly and constructively…lovingly to resolve differences and difficulties.
That's the end of what I see and believe to be important. Notice that physical or sexual attraction does not appear anywhere here. Obviously those forms of attraction might play a part in our choice of mate but it is not something I see as being of prototypical importance in love.
I am going to finish now, but first I want to say that these are my criteria for what I need in a loving, enduring, satisfying relationship. I also believe they may be generalisable and very healthy. But I recognise it may present others with something of a problem. It makes mate selection very difficult but at least I have said explicitly what my beliefs and wants in love are. I understand my own feelings in love completely. I wish my mate to feel that what is most important to me in love is also important to her.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Making Love Relationships Part 2 - Other types of love
Originally I had intended to include here, a discussion of "why do love anyway?" and I believe that there are some good reasons why love might add to and benefit our lives, although I do appreciate that there is an ever-growing mass of statistical data about the prevailing unhappiness within love relationships and marriage.
My motivation for going on this journey was about discovering how to do a better sort of love (mainly for my own benefit). I believe that I have been partly successful in identifying some of the characteristics that may be found in loving, healthy, enduring and satisfying relationships and some of the pitfalls as well. Eventually I want to go on to think (and experience) more of what I have described as Companionate Consummate Giving Love as this type of love I find more attractive than any other. For me, it combines what I believe to be the most complete and most satisfying types of love (See making love relationships – Part 1).
I had also wanted to look at love as attachment and to the feelings of some that are expressed as deep-felt compelling needs within love relationships.
But my blogs seem to be getting longer and longer, and more and more difficult to read and take in. My last blog on making love relationships ran to almost three and a half thousand words. For me it was difficult even to proof read and I ended up rewriting it too. So I'm going to omit the discussions mentioned above and acknowledge that there are many other different types of love.
There is now a whole body of published work, by psychologists who have specialised in their (normally academic) careers, on types of love and love relationships. There are several common groupings of love types and styles. I suspect that in truth there is infinite variation, but there seem also to be a number that are recurrent and common-place, that constitute most of the prototypical types of love or love styles in western society. I have already stated my own love preference, but for the sake of completeness, I have summarised some of the more common variant love types and styles described by psychologists here. These, of course, are in addition to and distinct from “companionate consummate giving love” about which I wrote in "Making love relationships – part 1".
Storge
The constructed type of storgic love is characterised by rapport, self-revelation, interdependency, and mutual need fulfilment.
Storgic lovers are essentially good friends who have grown in intimacy through close association, with an unquestioned assumption that their relationship will be permanent and that they will find a way to deal with their problems that causes them minimum pain. A storgic lover does not fantasise finding some other, perhaps unknown but ideal, lover in the future and abandoning the storgic partner. It never occurs to extreme storgic types that a romantic 'knight on a white horse" or "femme fatale" will appear at some future time to solve their problems. It is more likely that even if this should occur to the storgic lover, he/she would need the storgic partner around to discuss the romantic lover, to give advice, and to share the joys of discovery.
The storgic lover is not a person bored by routine home activity, but is more likely to find it comfortable and relaxing. Storgic lovers are not constantly on the search for new love experiences; rather they enjoy the security of being able to predict each other's responses to their behaviours.
If storgic lovers should break up, they would probably remain close and caring friends, perhaps continue corresponding with one another and actively caring about one another.
Physical intimacy, coitus, and the appreciation of their partners as sexual persons usually come relatively late in a storgic relationship, are accepted comfortably and joyously when they do appear on the scene, and are thus satisfying. Pure storgic types are extremely unlikely to "keep an eye out" for new or more romantic partners.
Temporary separations are not great problems to storgic lovers. Their mutual trust is such that separations are viewed as necessary inconveniences, needed diversions or opportunities for personal growth that will either improve or at least not damage their relationship.
The storgic lover does not "fall in love" in the way that other types of lovers do. The storgic type is more likely to recognise that he/she has been in love for some time without realising it earlier. As a result, anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine's day and the like occasions are not important to them and may even be forgotten or overshadowed by other matters.
In many ways storgic lovers resemble siblings in their understanding of the love relationship. If they fight and argue, it is not an indication that they do no love each other. They are likely to feel that when their love has matured it will be permanent and that they cannot replace their relationship with each other any more than they can replace those that they have with siblings or with parents.
Agape
An agapic lover is forgiving. This kind of love typically assumes that when the loved one causes pain to himself or herself or to someone else, that he or she is acting in ignorance, innocent error, or is the victim of forces not originating in the love -object's personality.
A male agapic lover might, for example, help his female love object arrange an abortion if she became pregnant by someone else during their love affair. Or he might easily love and accept a child conceived by some other man with deep concern for the anguish caused to his loved one and with tender affection for the child. An agapic lover would be more likely to help his or her love object to get medical attention for a venereal disease contracted from someone else during their love affair than to be angry or punitive towards the love object for having a sexual relationship with another.
Agapic persons never "fall in love." Their love for others is always available and they are simply given the opportunity by some of their love objects to show their love to a greater extent than they are by others. An agapic lover cares enough about his/her love object's happiness to understand and give up the loved one if that would seem to give him or her a greater chance for happiness elsewhere.
An agapic lover is patient with the behaviours of his or her love object to an extent that seems to border on masochism. The ideal agapic lover would wait indefinitely for a love object to be released from prison or from a mental hospital, would tolerate the behaviours of an alcoholic or drug-addicted spouse, and would be willing to live with a partner who was engaging in illegal or immoral activities, even though he/she personally disapproved of such behaviours. The agapic lover is always supportive of his/her partner.
Agapic love may be most stable when both partners are agapic. The problems that may arise might involve the obvious drawbacks of self-sacrifice and self-denial. It has the benefits of altruism and giving. A major issue for agapic lovers may also arise if the giving and receiving goes strongly out of balance that seems to be a strong possibility.
Mania
This type of love is obsessed, uncontrolled, dependent and intense in every respect.
The constructed ideal of this type of lover is obsessed with his or her love object. A manic lover may be unable to sleep, eat, or even think logically around the loved one. The manic lover has peaks of excitement, but also depths of depression, with very few periods without a high or low.
This type of lover is jealous to an extent that might be described as irrational. A manic lover cannot tolerate loss of contact with a love object, even for short periods of time, and is distressed by a lack of the lover's presence or anticipated interaction. A manic lover is typically crushed by real or fancied rejection, possibly to the point of suicidal ideation.
The manic lover often try to manipulate the behaviours or feelings of the loved one, but because he or she seems to be bereft of logic, often succeeds only in looking foolish in his or her own eyes. For example, a manic lover may tell their loved one that they should spend a few days apart to think objectively about their relationship, and then go into a state of panic because the partner cannot be located during that period. Manic lovers tend not to tolerate separation well. During periods of separation, the manic lover may experience high levels of anxiety that they may project back onto their loved one holding them responsible or to blame for the anxious discomfort they are feeling. Frequently this will push the relationship into crisis that in the manic lover's view will have been caused by the behaviour of the other rather than by their own anxiety.
The manic lover has a tendency to review his or her abortive love affairs and speculate about what when wrong that terminated them. They will commonly extend this practice to reviewing the past love affairs of their partners in the same way.
Manic lovers frequently have sexual problems as well as problems in handling other forms of intimate interaction. Because of their high level or anxiety, manic lovers might be expected to have problems related to anxiety, such as vaginismus, difficulties in attaining orgasm or premature ejaculation.
Mania is probably associated with low self-esteem and a poor self-concept. Because of this, manic persons are typically not attractive to persons who have good self-concepts and high self-esteem. They become burdensome to more self-sufficient others. If they are rejected by them, their anxieties intensify, making them even less attractive.
It is possible to confuse a manic lover with an erotic lover in the early stages of a relationship since the manic lover will be intensely sexual and romantic. What distinguishes the manic lover is one's experience of them; relationships are like a roller-coaster. They soar up then crash down again frequently within very short time cycles.
Mania is intense, frequently alternating between ecstasy and agony or joy and tragedy. Manic love, when strongly felt, invariably does not end well and is not likely to support the development or maintenance of any long-term stable relationship.
Pragma
The ideal constructed type identified as pragma is that of a person who is unable to invest love in "unworthy" love objects.
With this style, love is a shopping list of attributes. Pragma lovers are often more concerned with structural issues such as wealth, home and lifestyles rather than giving full consideration to their partner as a loving, feeling person.
The pragmatic lover is keenly aware of the comparison level for alternatives that he or she has. Pragmatic lovers are inclined to look realistically a their own assets, decide on their "market value" and set off to get the best possible "deal" in their partners. Once the "deal" is made, the pragmatic lover remains loyal and faithful and defines his or her status as "in love" because the loved one is a "good bargain." Should the assets of either partner change, the pragmatic lover may feel her or his contract has been violated, and may begin to search for another partner.
A pragmatic lover typically assists the loved one to fulfil his or her potentials; for example, such a lover might make sure the love object finishes school, asks for deserved promotions, gets the attention or that he or she "deserves" from physicians, stockbrokers, or employers.
Typically, a pragmatic lover maximises his or her own assets before "putting them on the market." A male pragma may decide not to become involved with any females until he has £500,000 in the bank, or has gone through psychoanalysis, or has a secure job, or has assured himself by reading enough or consulting experts to be sure he is sexually skilful, or the like. A sterile or impotent pragmatic lover may deliberately seek out a widow or widower with children if he or she wants a family.
Once a prospect is in sight, the prototypical pragmatic lover might check out future in-laws and friends systematically, find out if the couple's rhesus blood factors are compatible, and obtain assurance that there is a minimal probability of hereditary defects showing up in their mutual children and so forth.
Pragmatic persons break up or divorce or stay married for practical reasons. Divorce may actually be planned for some future date. For example, pragmatic partners may decide to finish school, to get a different job at another location, to put their youngest child through high school, or to reach some other such goal or state before they get divorced.
Pragma always looks at things in context and know his or her basic values, scaling everything by them. (e.g. if sex life is mediocre, pragma may consult a sex counsellor, but is more likely to assign sexual activity a low value in his or her value system and simply accept its mediocrity. "After all, he is a good provider, and being orgasmic isn't all that important." "She is a good mother, and I can get by on coitus once a week without getting too tense.")
While other types may have spontaneous orgasms or masturbate just from thoughts of the beloved, pragma probably learns to recognise sexual tension and relieve it when necessary for sleep or comfort (if sex is not devalued).
Pragma thinks ahead about family size (an probably even about what sex the children will be). If pragma is a schoolteacher, he or she may plan an October/November conception so the baby will arrive during vacation.
Ludus
The ideal constructed type of a ludic lover is that of a person who 'plays' love affairs as he or she plays games or puzzles — to win, to get the greatest rewards for the least cost.
A ludic lover hates dependency, either in himself/herself or in others. This type shies away from commitment of any sort (does not like lovers to take him or her for granted). The ludic lover enjoys strategies, and may keep two or three or even four lovers "on the string" at one time. A ludic lover may even create a fictional lover to discourage a real one's hopes for a permanent relationship. He or she avoids long range plans, is careful not to date the same person often enough to create the illusion of a stable relationship. A ludic lover would rather find a new sex partner than to work out sexual problems with an old one. And yet, he or she may suddenly show up for a replay, even years later, with birthday flowers, a bottle of a favourite wine, a sentimental Valentine, or a record of a favourite song, and vanish just as suddenly. A ludic lover usually enjoys love affairs, and hence rarely regrets them unless the threat of commitment or dependency becomes too great.
Dates with a ludic person are never dull, even though they may not happen with great regularity. He or she is never possessive or jealous. The ludic lover usually has good self-esteem and usually is assured of current success in love as well as most other areas. Unlike a pragmatic lover, a ludic lover never reveals all of himself or herself nor demands such revelation by partners.
Ludic lovers are not likely to be very sophisticated sexually. As a rule, they have only one sexual routine; if the sex partner is not pleased by the ludic lover's sexual pattern, then the ludic one simply finds another partner rather than attempting to improve an unsatisfying relationship. If she does not like his sexual behaviour, the ludic man moves on to someone who does; if he does not get an erection or bring her to orgasm on his own (with no help for her) the ludic woman looks for a man who will.
Sex is self-centred and may be exploitative rather than symbolic of a relationship. A ludic lover does not listen to (or take time for) "feedback" that suggests commitment, which is "scary." A ludic lover may not even want to be his or her partner's best sex partner because that might necessitate commitment or dependency that would be "awful." Physical appearance of the partner is less important than other qualities, such as self-sufficiency and lack of demanding behaviour, to ludic persons.
Ludic lovers within relationships may be intensely competitive. Everything is a game and winning the game is very important to them. Game-playing might extend to normal domestic activities such as competing over who takes the "best" telephone messages. With every winner there must be a loser and being a loser all the time is not sustaining emotionally. For this and other reasons, relationships with ludic persons, whilst they might be enjoyable and fun in the short term are unlikely to be enduring.
Acknowledgements
Universities of Yale, Illinois, Chicago and the College of Liberal Arts, CA, and Sternberg, Weis et al (2006) and Sternberg, Barnes et al (1988).
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Making Love Relationships Part 1
But I had some underlying concerns about what really happens when we do loving relationships. I was very happy with my feelings about real or true love being unconditional giving, I still am. I have some concerns about it still, although these are more about the world in which we live rather than those feelings themselves.
I was not really sure how to start talking about loving relationships, about the vocabulary to use so I've synthesised and combined bits from here, there and everywhere to give the words a broader and better fit to my own feelings, thoughts and beliefs.
I have drawn on a lot of material that can be demonstrated to be generalisable by and large, although there are many exceptions, but there are some patterns too that are helpful to understand.
One word of warning, if you are expecting a cookbook of "how to" ideas, better to buy a recipe book then read this as I don't believe that such books work.
I believe that there may be a set of characteristics, of “love components”, that are common to most relationships.
I'll talk about those here as well as some of the phases of early development stages in love relationships and the events that might be expected to take place within them.
I want to break away from most of what has been written before in that I want to allow for unending growth possibilities in love. Most empiricists and other psychologists would simply ascribe a sort of structural determinism that seeks to impose a form of limiting rationality on what is, in my view, entirely subjective, intuitive and unbounded in its reality and possibilities.
To join things up with other aspects of our social world about which I have written before I am moving to a world where I see intuition, emotions, feelings, consciousness and unconsciousness as being those phenomena that influence our worlds of love relationships rather than some pseudo-scientific rationality that might be imposed on it by experts.
This is very much a work-in-progress. In part, it draws on published material by Robert Sternberg (et al), at least for its outline framework. I do have a sense that Sternberg may be moving away from being the hero of empiricists to someone who might take a similar position to me. I do not know. I sense that where we might differ is that he still tends to see love as stories that might inhabit our unconscious minds which he and experts like him might interpret (A latent determinist who acknowledges that love is ultimately a subjective construct) whereas I believe that the only way to achieve an enduring love is to move to a place where love is synonymous with greater consciousness, accessible intuition, personal responsibility and freedom.
In his book "Love is a story" (OUP 1998), Sternberg breaks away from the traditionalists. He acknowledges that love functions at the intuitive rather than rational levels and that our experience plays a part in how we love too. He recognises that psychotherapists have failed to understand the underlying realities of our relationships. Psychotherapists have tended to focus mainly on the manifestation of difficulties (symptoms) in relationships, rather than the underlying reality of our relationships that may give rise to those difficulties.
The problem that I have with Sternberg's work thereafter is that he attempts to break down love into a set of narrative systems containing a series of presuppositions that people bring to relationships of which they are (largely) unconscious. After this he sets out his expert analysis of twenty-five different types of narrative with his view on their interpretation and their capability of adaptation.
I am not totally sure about how unconscious these stories are or for that matter, whether his work is a novel thought that has been enlarged to the proportions of a theory. I do agree with his thoughts about subjectivity and intuition, however, and that is a very important leap forward.
It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our hearts and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our hearts without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should just write a story, just a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks just a story; a story that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We might be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!
The components of loving relationships
These are the conventional groupings of love components originally identified by Robert Sternberg:
Erotic Passion – This is the stuff of physical attraction. It's the racing heartbeat, sexual desire, erotic excitation and a physiological activation that feels just great! It's like being on drugs. The best sort of drugs as masses of endorphins course around our bodies and make us feel high!
Romantic Passion - This is a dimension that differs between cultures but for us it is a process of what I might call positive idealised projection. Here we take the very best parts of ourselves, often of the idealised contrasexual image that we all hold inside us and project them on to the other person. We see perfection in the other; we see not who they really are, but who we hope they will be. We seek out the good traits of the other. We find what we feel we need in what we see and feel of them.
It's here we do our romantic identification of ourselves with romantic ideals (cultural myths), of our belief that there is something magical in our relationship, our belief in the omnipotence of love as something that will inexorably produce happiness.
Intimacy - Intimacy is truly wonderful. (See, I'm a love enthusiast really!) This is the place of our special bond in an affective love union: It's where affective support, understanding, communication, trust, self-revelations, security, comfort and ease with one's partner lives.
My next “component” is where I see the possibility of deep and lasting love residing (or not, as it's simply a conscious choice and may be thought too difficult by many):
Companionate Consummate Giving Love – In part, this is the place of the unconditional love that I wrote about in the "love and sex" blog. There I focused on one dimension only (Unconditional giving love) to distinguish love from sex. Here I would like to expand our possibilities of love to include all four dimensions of deep friendship, its passionate components (including the expression and satisfaction of sexual desire), unconditional giving love, intimacy, as well as the possibility of making our commitment to maintain this love.
This almost looks like a place of emotional utopia to me, but who would not wish for it? Perhaps by understanding our stories and allowing their past pain and despair to heal, of exposing our consciousness, and knowing what it is for which we strive, we might write this new love story for ourselves. I believe this is a conscious choice. There is nothing intrinsic, mystical, innate or god-given here; it's simply a choice. But don't get me wrong, it is not easy!
Love is not necessarily something that happens exclusively inside of us as individuals. It is that too, but our ideas about love come from our belief systems, our religions, our cultural myths and social norms, from politicians, corporations, from the media, from literature and from Hollywood. In fact, our notions about love come from all those beliefs and ideas that uphold our social world. They come from what I have collectively called our consciousness. It is consciousness that embraces and informs all of our ideas about love and that lives both within us and outside us too.
In a television interview after his engagement to Princess Diana was announced, Prince Charles was asked if the couple was in love. Diana responded for him quickly and enthusiastically. "Of course," she said with a warm smile. Charles added, under his breath, "Whatever 'in love' means". Charles's uncertainty is not that surprising since love means many different things to different people. Ultimately love is whatever we choose it to be. We do have that freedom. But make no mistake, it takes real courage to stand up for the love we want, for the love that is most satisfying, healthy and enduring, since it may mean flying in the face of all that our culture holds to be valuable.
Otherwise there are no given truths about love, no deeper meaning that is accessible only to psychologists or anyone else. There is biology. There are the biological drives to mate, reproduce and parent but what I am looking for here is an emotional state that might promote our health and wellbeing that includes our loved ones and our families; A healthy loving positive environment is also conducive to the development and growth of secure, confident people.
My own interest is in exploring and discovering the emotions and behaviours that might produce the healthiest, enduring and most satisfying ways of being. There is no deep truth to uncover; our truth is what we make it. We have freedom of choice and the ability to take responsibility for ourselves (albeit that many find that difficult), to determine our own lives in ways that they may serve us and others around us best.
Of course, I should add that I would not consider all forms of love to be necessarily healthy and I have not addressed the question here of "why love anyway?" I will look at that question and unhealthy forms of love in a later blog. I will also look at ideas about "needing" love, and attachment theory where our experiences of infancy are seen as shaping our adult romantic lives and much more besides.
Originally I had written about companionate agape love, but agape was problematic to me. Agape has been cited by many others to correspond with altruistic, sacrificial love and I felt uncomfortable about it as it smacked of the "sack-cloth and ashes" denial of the sort often associated with Christian fundamentalism. I do not find the ideas espoused by that sort of Christian to be either that loving or attractive, so I have decided to distance myself from it and revisit agape later.
Going back to the piece on love and sex, here is what I wrote about real / true love there:
"Real love is an act of giving unconditionally. To offer true love, to will the good of another, is to accept one's own vulnerability, weakness, insignificance and humility. Love is a responsible act of will and of choice.
As I wrote in "the myth of falling in love" it is not something that one falls into! You might fall into the swimming pool, but not into love. You can fall into fatal attraction, and you can fall into desperate desire but you cannot fall into love. Love requires courage as in a way it's a sacrifice of what our modern culture believes to be valuable. It means standing up for love, leaving the pack, not as a terrorist or subversive, but with something better than what others may see in their blindness.
Love is the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, belief in the other, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic or erotic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us do not give generously of our hearts at all nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we are addressing a covert desire to avoid being abandoned. This apparent generosity is not love at all; it is emotional bribery.
The hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It is about giving love rather than desperately searching to be loved. It's the only attitude that can begin to carry you through the agony of human limitation and mortality. Love that is based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting. It is never fleeting and can never fly off into despair and hate.
It is a pity that true love is feared by most of us, and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults."
That was part of the story, but I do wish to allow for the expression and satisfaction of sexual desire, of growing our affectionate bonds of understanding and intimacy and building deep friendship here too. My main aim of the love and sex piece was to show that love and sex are different and to talk about how we might build a solid emotional foundation where real love might develop.
All relationships need some aspect of friendship to survive, although some unhealthy relationships may exhibit marginal friendship only (or none at all). But this is