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Intimacy

In the state of falling in love, the shells of individual self-sufficiency miraculously dissolve and intimate relationships develop.

Lovers begin to experience such emotional experiences as closeness, connectedness, bondedness. We can say that these feelings are united by a sense of shared inner space. In this new realm of experience, warm feelings are born and poured out on loved ones.

In a narrow sense, intimacy comes down to frank relationships and understanding of each other. If we take into account the implicit conditions of intimacy, then it should include acceptance, trust, respect, honesty, support and care.

Intimate relationships play an important role in the transformation of the personality of lovers. They set one of the main vectors guiding the transformation of the Self. It is the process of deepening openness to each other.

Partners share with each other their innermost thoughts, feelings and experiences. Intimacy also reveals such personality traits and qualities that have not yet settled down, are, as it were, in the project. Exposure of the innermost has two sides: it allows you to acquire determination and confidence in the realization of your aspirations according to the principle “called yourself a load – climb into the back”, but it also puts lovers in a vulnerable position – the gap between word and deed can greatly devalue your image in the eyes of the partner, and misunderstanding or indifference on his part can clip the wings of your castles in the air.

Formula of intimacy: shared inner space = [openness + comprehension] * [trust + respect + honesty + support + care]

Intimacy overlaps to some extent with empathy, a deep compassion that can arise in relation to another person. In the state of being in love, the capacity for empathy, in other words, sensitivity to each other’s inner world, involuntarily activates and becomes an important, albeit fragile, tool for deepening intimacy. Experiencing empathy, the lover understands what his partner feels, he begins to mirror and feel similar feelings and foresees what the partner’s actions may be in a particular emotional state.

It’s easy to see that intimacy fuels passion. In extreme cases, for people who live by impulses of the heart, like Goethe’s Werther, the awareness of their high sensitivity to the demands of their beloved’s heart and the ability to “respond to them with all their heart” decisively convinces them that only they understand and therefore only they can constitute happiness for the beloved. From here, there is only one step to the desire for complete merger and undivided possession of a partner, which only inflames an already raging passion.

In enjoying intimacy, it is important to be aware that this energy of love has its limits.

Despite the vivid feelings and the tempting epithets that reflect them about unity as one whole, about being dissolved in each other, one should remember, no matter how sad it may seem, about the inevitability of a certain distance between lovers. Moreover, it is this distance that allows you to preserve and maintain a sense of attraction and romantic fantasies, that is, what is meant by passion. The content of this experience is expertly presented in a brilliant poem by Anna Akhmatova:

There is a cherished line in human intimacy,
It cannot be crossed by love and passion, —
Let the lips merge in eerie silence,
And the heart is torn apart from love.

And friendship is powerless here, and years of
High and fiery happiness,
When the soul is free and alien to
The slow languor of voluptuousness.

Those who seek it are mad, and
Those who have reached it are stricken with longing…
Now you understand why
My heart beats not beneath your hand.

Let us sum up the intermediate result of our study of the deep foundations of love. We have identified the internal processes of the transformation of the Self in the direction of a new point of assemblage of the personality as the main content of love. The primary power sources of the transformation of the Self are the two poles of the energy of passion: sexual attraction and romantic imagination, as well as emotional waves of intimacy that originate in the common inner space of lovers.

Now, having formed an idea of the content of love and its main components, we can, together with Stendhal, take a closer look at the patterns of love dynamics – its glimpses, origin, formation and the triumph of love.

The deep foundations of love

Periods of Love

Let’s start by reflecting on the question that about two hundred years ago in the drawing rooms of Milan began to torment Stendhal, overwhelmed with impressions from the salon discussions of all new crazy love stories (thirty-seven-year-old veteran of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, an aspiring writer):

Is there any general law establishing the different stages of love? —thought Stendhal.

Stendhal is often noted as one of the classifiers of various types of love. In fact, his main discovery is the identification of seven regular periods in the dynamics of love. Regarding the four types of Stendhal’s love (love-passion, love-attraction, love-lust, love-vanity) he himself says that “it is quite possible to admit eight or ten varieties of it. <…> But differences in the nomenclature do not change anything in further reasoning.” Nevertheless, it should be noted that in this discordant classification there are two bright opposites: love-passion as a manifestation of the sacrificial spontaneous love of tender and passionate souls (for example, Eloise and Abelard) and love-attraction as an expression of formal love, furnished with rules and adapting to interests (for example, Karenin and Anna).

Stendhal, considering love-passion to be true love, begins a purposeful search for “some general law to establish the various stages of love,” despite its suddenness, extravagance and mystery. To his surprise, in the variety of love stories he observes, he discovers a chain of stages in the maturation of tender feelings, determined by the same laws.

The other kinds of love do not conceal anything deep and mysterious. Thus, when love-attraction takes place, the formats of a love affair are set by the norms and rules that have developed in a certain social stratum, and its inevitable entourage is known in advance to both participants in the relationship. There is nothing in it that is unforeseen for a “man of good origin.” Although love-attraction may be “smarter than real love,” it has one fatal flaw – it is “poor love.”

One of the practical consequences of his “detailed and careful description of all the feelings that make up the passion called love,” Stendhal considered the possibility of healing from love. Apparently, the whole study was undertaken for self-healing from a hopeless great love (grand amour) for the Italian – the revived beauty from the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci.

Let’s take a closer look at the seven periods of true love according to Stendhal.

1. Admiration.

A fixation of attention occurs. It focuses on an attractive object, and it is not just an attractive object, but a perfect image. There is an appealing opportunity to get closer to the object of admiration.

2. Imagination.

A person thinks: “What a pleasure to kiss her, to receive a kiss from her!” etc. Fantasies of rapprochement flourish. The imagination paints colorful pictures of a new passionately desired state – intimacy with the object of love.

3. Hope.

Fantasy ignites emotions and permeates the body. Signs of passion can no longer be hidden. Naked – they are defenseless, and nevertheless, there is no point in suppressing or hiding them, but one has only to hope that they will be noticed and reciprocated.

At this stage, one of the fatal forks of love arises. Stendhal is convinced: “In order to get the greatest possible physical pleasure, a woman should give herself at this very moment.” But the flip side of this medal of pleasure is that if a woman surrenders too quickly, then long-term love is unlikely, since the “second crystallization” does not occur. This pattern of Stendhal coincides with the popular wisdom, which recommends that a girl not jump too quickly into bed, but wait until love matures in a man. In turn, two hundred years later, neuroscientists also found, to their surprise, confirmation of this maxim as a result of studies on the concentration of attachment hormones produced in the brain of a man in love.

4. Love germinates.

If the hope was not in vain and met a reciprocal feeling, then it becomes love. It cannot be confused with anything – it is an insatiable pleasure from the closeness of a loved one, felt by all senses.

5. The first crystallization begins.

Crystallization is Stendhal’s chosen metaphorical term for the “special activity of the mind” that connects all the pleasures experienced by lovers, as well as the beauty and perfection of the world, with the virtues of the love object (regardless of whether they are real or imagined). As Stendhal says: “Everything beautiful and high in the world comes into the beauty of a loved one.”

The very nature of pleasure works for crystallization. If we ask how it is possible to experience and retain pleasure from an object of love that is already available, then we must assume, like Stendhal, that it is necessary to discover more and more new virtues in the object of your love or to associate new “beauty of the world” with it.

And this is where fantasies and love dreams come to the rescue, which are essentially limitless.

It should be noted that the main meaning of the metaphor of crystallization is not in the densification and hardening of certain amorphous entities, but in the transformation of things to such an extent that they are “impossible to recognize.” Moreover, it can be the transformation of quite ordinary-looking things into beautiful ones: “In the Salzburg salt mines, a branch of a tree that has been exposed during the winter is thrown into the deserted depths of these mines; two or three months later it is removed from there, covered with shiny crystals; even the smallest twigs, no larger than the foot of a titmouse, are adorned with countless mobile and dazzling diamonds; the old branch is impossible to recognize.” Similarly, in the imagination of a lover, even an ordinary woman becomes an exceptional being.

6. Doubt is born.

The happiness experienced in love is so incredible that a worm of doubt penetrates into consciousness: is the reciprocal feeling genuine, how solid the foundations of this happiness are, and the fear of losing it arises.

7. Second crystallization.

The search for and subsequent self-convincing resolutions of doubts, among which the main question is “But does she love me?”, constitute the second crystallization.

The second crystallization is distinguished by a high intensity of feelings and thoughts, and the stakes are prohibitively high: sometimes life itself is at stake. Here it is necessary to discard, or rather, to painfully experience the doubts that love is mutual, since all nature cries out that the object of love is irreplaceable, that “she alone in the whole world” will give the “pleasure” so necessary to the lover (behind this hedonic word, of course, deeper meanings are crowded).

At this the lover’s mind does not immediately calm down. He continues to meticulously inspect the newly acquired beliefs (“greatest evidence”) that have developed as a result of discovering the perfections of the beloved, the signs of a reciprocal feeling and the foundations of mutual love. And woe to the one who finds a mistake or “wrong conclusion” – clusters of crystals are destroyed, love is questioned.

Stendhal’s thoughts about love, the identification of its patterns, can, without a doubt, be attributed to the great discoveries of the 19th century, ahead of their time. However, both before and after Stendhal, love was perceived and will be perceived mainly by its external signs only as an obsession, mania, clouding of reason, accompanied by more or less “tickling feelings.” Compare, for example, these love verses separated by two and a half thousand years:

I’m drenched in sweat, the shivering
Seized all my limbs, greener
I’m getting than grass, and it’s like I’m about to
Say goodbye to life.

Sappho (half a century BC)

The soul is full of shame and fear
Dragged in dust and blood.
Cleanse my soul from dust
Deliver me, oh God, from love!

Dmitry Merezhkovsky (early 20th century)

Stendhal saw in love a complex interaction of the delight of passion, confusion of feelings and torment of the mind, and also revealed the patterns of their crystallization into love. He was convinced that "every love that happens to be observed on earth is born, lives and dies, or rises to immortality, following the same laws."

How far Stendhal’s reflections on the laws of love, as he hoped they would, can help in the healing of mental suffering, you may now see for yourself on occasion.

From our walk through the periods of love with Stendhal, we will take for reflection the riddle of the need for a second crystallization. At the same time, the question of the seemingly redundant stages of the birth of love should not be simplified so as not to fall into the trap of the provocative casuistry of Mephistopheles. Remember?

You almost like a Frenchman prate;
Yet, pray, don’t take it as annoyance!
Why, all at once, exhaust the joyance?
Your bliss is by no means so great
As if you’d use, to get control,
All sorts of tender rigmarole,
And knead and shape her to you thought,
As in Italian tales ‘t is taught.

And, not realizing that behind the pause of an affair, there may be a preparation of the soul for love, like Faust, do not blurt out: “Without that, I have appetite.”

Doubts and the need for a second crystallization can suddenly arise out of nothingness repeatedly throughout the life lovers.

On the very day of the wedding, “a strange feeling came over Levin. Fear and doubt found him, doubt in everything.” He rushes to his bride in order to get a first-hand answer to his terrible doubts: “I think that you cannot love me. What can you love me for?” Levin is hardly considered a naive person, but, having received Kitty’s answer that “she loves him because she entirely understands him, because she knows that he must love and that everything he loves is all right,” he calms down – “and it seemed to him quite clear.”

It is also quite clear that as Levin goes about his life discovering new horizons and gaining new meanings, he may again have questions: is he loved now and for what? Will he question his wife again, or will he read the answers himself in her eyes and gestures? Will Kitty be able to give him explicit or implicit assurances under different circumstances that “she understands him all,” or will this happy family become “unhappy in its own way,” as Leo Tolstoy so astutely defined this possibility in his novel Anna Karenina?

Concluding the review of Stendhal’s discoveries, it should be noted that although he does not have a direct description of the processes of transformation of the lover himself, it can be assumed that they are in one form or another implicit and tacitly present at all stages of love. It is unlikely that the process of crystallization that takes place in love can be carried out in the mind of the unchanging Self of the lover, staying in his shell both before and after meeting with the object of love.

The first five periods of love according to Stendhal can be easily guessed in an elegant poem by Valery Bryusov:

I met her by chance,
And timidly I dreamed of her,
But long-cherished secret
Lurked in my sorrow.

But once in a golden moment
I spoke my secret;
I saw a blush of confusion
I heard in response, “I love you.”

And the eyes flashed with trepidation,
And the lips merged into one.
Here is an old fairy tale that
To be young is always destined.

One can also notice how precisely the young twenty-seven-year-old Ivan Turgenev pointed out the fork in the face of love at the stage of its second crystallization in the following verse from the poem Andrew:

Love is born in an instant —
It takes a long time to unfold.
It struggles with the evil of doubt;
It grows and strengthens, but with difficulty…
And only then, the last meaning
That we shall finally grasp at last,
When we mercilessly destroy our
Stubborn selfishness … or fall out of love.

The metaphor of crystallization as an affirmation of true love allows us to intimately imagine all the difficulties and risks that await this beautiful but fragile thing in its difficult life path.

Now is the time to look at what threatens the newly born love.

Periods of love according to Stendal

Invasion of Reality

What the lyric hero of Vladimir Nabokov tragically foresees at the peak of being in love, sooner or later happens. Reality invades love. It, uninvited, unwelcomed, comes in a sad mask of resentment, evil robes of a quarrel, and the iron armor of jealousy. In addition, the gloomy gravitation of everyday problems constantly encroaches on the high feeling of love of the majority of citizens. For those who thought these trials were not enough, there is something in store ahead: life with a loved one will more than once remind you of the “cherished line” that cannot be crossed with “love and passion.”

Let’s get to know these enemies of love better. First, let’s throw off the mask of resentment.

Sooner or later, the lover will inevitably have a feeling of resentment for one reason or another towards his partner. The fact is that resentment grows on the gap between our expectations of certain actions on the part of a partner and his real actions. The feeling of resentment is insidious, it ignores all objective criteria of the significance or insignificance of an act, and can arise from a trifle. You can look at trifles with humor, saying to yourself: “Before marriage, I did not even suspect that it is possible to put milk in the refrigerator incorrectly.”

But you can make a gross mistake and mutter: “But what’s the difference.” At best, it can end up with a quick showdown, and at worst… Resentment, regardless of your love, will seep for reinforcement to completely uncontrollable levels of the psyche and suddenly burst out with a surge of irritation, anger, and rage. Some lovers quickly learn from their mistakes and try not to hide the resentment so that it does not grow stronger to explosive proportions, and more advanced ones begin to avoid it altogether, seriously taking up raising the level of their emotional intelligence.

Resentment signals, in particular, that your understanding of your partner (the element of intimacy) is insufficient. You have to admit that the first impression was superficial, and you are happy to find a lot of interesting and creative work to get to know your partner deeper.

The reason for the quarrel is usually more fundamental than that of the resentment. The quarrel may not have violent outbursts of anger, and it can drag on for a long time. This unpleasant reality of love relationships is well known to psychologists and studied within the framework of such a discipline as conflict management. A family conflict is a small war. And the battlefield is a clash of oppositely directed goals, interests, positions. We will take a closer look at conflicts in the chapter Curbing Conflicts, but for now we suggest that you independently reflect on five possible ways to resolve a love conflict: avoidance, domination, cooperation, adaptation, compromise, taking for example some real case in which one of your friends ended up. It should be remembered that any conflict has a positive solution, moreover, it mobilizes the resources of creativity for the development of relationships and revives passion.

The prevention of quarrels is connected, on the one hand, with mastering the skills of conflict resolution, and on the other, with the deepening of intimacy in such components as trust, respect, and awareness of common values. For those who are already confident in the techniques of resolving love conflicts, we offer the opportunity to test themselves on the example given in the diagram, taken from the story of Anton Chekhov’s “Wife.”

Jealousy flares up due to an imbalance of trust and a sense of belonging: one is too small, and the other is overflowing. As a rule, the erroneous substitution of the feeling of closeness with the passion of having a partner is associated with the characteristics of the character of this person. This, as psychologists say, is a difficult case, since the character is a rather tough and firmly seated shell.

But a sense of trust can and should be developed. Since it is universal, you can expand its scope in different directions, for example, entrust your partner with cooking dinner or negotiating with neighbors, and little by little you will feel calmer even when he is going on a long business trip.

These three enemies of love (resentment, quarrel, jealousy) are perhaps universal, but there are many more pitfalls that are inherent in certain individual characteristics and circumstances. For example, striving to get closer to the object of love, you adapt too much to it, refuse to satisfy your own needs, sacrifice a lot. In fact, simultaneously with the development of your Self in love, it contracts. There is a chance that this innerspring will release gently, but it will most likely trigger big relationship problems.

Those fortunate people who have succeeded in showing the will to love and have not given up in the face of reality should nevertheless remember that their now hardened love is still a different reality. One can, of course, think the other way around, that reality is love and reality is something otherworldly. But in any case, one must be on guard.

Let us now move on to consider the next stage in the development of the love relationship, which in psychology is called “mature love”.