Loving Is Not Easy… Whatever Your Maturity Level

Loving is not easy… Whatever your maturity level

The purpose of the book is to demonstrate that art of loving is not easy, whatever your level of maturity, the author’s goal is to imply that attempts to achieve love, most of the time they are destined for failure.

In most people the problem of love is to be loved, and not to love, so the problem is based on how to get them love. To achieve that goal, people take two different paths. One of the roads is particularly used by men who is successful, being powerful and rich in order to have women’s attention. Another is used especially by women and the way is with the care of their bodies, clothes, etc. This to get the attention of men.

In the Victorian era, love was generally not a spontaneous personal experience that could reach marriage, but was an agreement between the respective families and was based on social considerations. At present, romantic love has become almost universal, most people seek to find a romantic love that leads him to have a personal experience that then leads him to marriage.

The happiness of man in the contemporary era is based on emotion when stopping in front of a store and buying everything that can. The same happens with love, an attractive woman or man are the awards to get. The characteristics that make a person attractive depend on the fashion of the time, both physically and mentally. In any case, the feeling of falling in love only develops with respect to merchandise.

Another error that is known about love is that, if two person are unknown, they cease to be and become close to each other, that moment constitutes one of the most exciting of life. This miracle of intimacy is usually easier if it is combined with sexual attraction and its consummation. However, by its very nature, it lasts little. People get to know each other well, intimacy loses more and more their miraculous character, until their antagonism and their mutual boredom end up killing what may be of the initial excitation.

Any theory of love must begin with a theory of man, of human existence. The man of all ages and cultures faces the solution of a problem that is always the same: the problem of how to overcome loneliness, how to get to union, how to transcend one’s individual life and find compensation. The full solution is in the achievement of the interpersonal union, the merger with another person, in love. That desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful impulse that exists in man. It constitutes its most fundamental passion, the force that sustains the human race, the clan, the family and society. The inability to achieve it means destruction of itself or others. Without love, humanity could not exist one more day.

The important thing is that we know what kind of union we mean when we talk about love. Is it a mature solution to the problem of existence, or do we refer to the immature forms that we could call symbiotic union?

The passive form of symbiotic union is submission, or, to use a clinical term, masochism. The masochistic person escapes the feeling of isolation becoming a part of another person who directs it, guides, protects it, which is their life and air that breathes, so to speak. The masochistic person does not have to make decisions, or take risks;She is never alone, but she is not independent;It lacks integrity. The active form of symbiotic fusion is domination, or, to use the term corresponding to masochism, sadism. The sadistic person wants to escape his loneliness and his feeling of imprisoned making another individual a part of himself.

In contrast to the symbiotic union, mature love means union on condition of preserving one’s integrity, individuality itself. Love is an active power in man;a power that crosses the barriers that separate man from his peers and unites it to others;Love enables him to overcome the feeling of isolation and loneliness of him, and nevertheless allows him to be himself, maintain his integrity. In love there is the paradox of two beings that become one and, however, they remain two.

In addition to these elements, the active character of love becomes evident in the fact that it implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. Those elements are: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.

That love implies care is especially evident in a mother’s love for her son. No declaration of love would seem more sincere if we saw that you neglect the child, if you stop feeding it, to bathe it, to provide physical well -being;And we believe in its value if we see that it takes care of the child. Care and concern imply another aspect of love: that of responsibility. Today that term is usually used to detonate a duty, something imposed from abroad. But the responsibility, in its true meaning, is an entirely voluntary act, constitutes my response to the needs, expressed or not, of another human being. Responsibility could easily deny in domination and possessiveness, if it were not for having a third component of love, respect. Respect does not mean fear and submissive reverence;Denota, the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means worrying because the other person grows and develops as it is. Respecting a person without knowing her is not possible;Care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if the concern did not motivate it. But knowledge has another relationship, more fundamental, with the problem of love. The basic need to melt with another person to transcend the prison of the separation itself is intimated, with another specifically human desire, to know the secret of man. Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent. It constitutes an attitudes syndrome found in the mature person.

So far there has been talk about love as a way to overcome human separation, such as the realization of the union yearning. But above the universal, existential, union need, another more specific and biological origin arises: the desire for union between the male and female poles. The idea of such polarization is notably expressed in the myth that, originally, the man and woman were one, that they divided them in half and that, since then, each man looks for the feminine part of himself that he has lost, forjoin her again. The meaning of myth is quite clear. Sexual polarization leads man to seek union with the other sex. The polarity between the male and female principles also exists within each man and woman. The man and the woman only achieves the inner union in the union with her female or male polarity.

It is thought that Freud made an error to see in love exclusively the expression or a sublimation of sexual instinct, instead of recognizing that sexual desire is a manifestation of the need for love and union. According to his physiological materialism, he sees in sexual instinct the result of a chemically produced tension in the body, which is painful and seeks relief. The purpose of sexual desire is the elimination of that tension;Sexual satisfaction consists of such elimination. This point of view is valid to the extent that sexual desire operates in the same way as hunger or thirst when the organism is malnourished. In this sense, sexual desire is a itching, and sexual satisfaction, the relief of that itching. Actually, as far as the concept of sexuality is concerned, masturbation would be ideal sexual satisfaction. What Freud paradoxically takes into account is the psychobiological aspect of sexuality, male – female polarity, and the desire to solve polarity through union. This curious mistake was probably facilitated by Freud’s patriarchalism, which led him to assume that he is male, and made him ignore the specific female sexuality.

On the other hand, love is not essentially a relationship with a specific person;It is an attitude, an orientation of the character that determines the type of relationship of a person with the world as a whole, not with a love object. If a person loves only another and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love, but a symbiotic relationship, or an expanded egotism. However, most people assume that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.

The most fundamental class of love, basic in all types of love, is fraternal love. The sense of responsibility, care, respect and knowledge regarding any other human being, the desire to promote life is understood. To this kind of love the Bible is concerned when it says: love your neighbor as yourself. Fraternal love is love for all human beings;It is characterized by its lack of exclusivity. If I have developed the ability to love, I can’t stop loving my brothers. In fraternal love, the experience of union with all men, human solidarity, of human reparation is carried out. Fraternal love is based on the experience that we are all. Differences in talent, intelligence, knowledge are despicable compared to the identity of human essence common to all men.

Fraternal love is love between brothers;Maternal love is love for the helpless. In contrast to both types of love is erotic love: the yearning of complete fusion, of union with one other person. By its very nature, it is exclusive and not universal;It is also, perhaps, the most deceptive form of love that exists. This type of love is easily confused with the explosive experience of falling in love, the sudden collapse of the barriers that existed so far between two strangers. But, as he had pointed out before, such an experience of sudden intimacy is, by itself, of short duration.

If love is a capacity of the mature, productive character, it follows that the ability to love an individual belonging to any age culture, depends on the influence that culture exerts on the character of the loved one. No objective observer of our western life can doubt that fraternal, maternal and erotic love is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that in its place there is a certain number of pseudo -amor, which are, in reality, as many forms of the disintegration of love.

Once the theoretical aspect of the art of loving is examined, we now face a much more difficult problem, that of the practice of love of love. The difficulty of the problem is increased by the fact that most people of today. The practice of any art has certain general requirements, completely independent that the art in question is carpentry, medicine or the art of loving. First, the practice of an art requires discipline. I will never do anything well if I do not do it in a disciplined way;Anything I do just because I am in the appropriate mood, it can constitute a pleasant or entertaining hobby, I will never become a teacher in that art.

That concentration is an indispensable condition for the domain of an art does not need demonstration. Anyone who once tried to learn an art knows so. However, in our culture, concentration is even rare than self-discipline. This lack of concentration clearly manifests in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. Eventually. Another condition to learn any art is a supreme concern for domain art. If art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never dominate it.

A last point that must be pointed out with respect to the general conditions to learn an art. You do not start by learning art directly, but indirectly, so to speak. A large number of other things that usually have no relationship with him must be learned, before starting the art itself. With regard to the art of loving, this means that whoever aspires to become a teacher must begin by practicing discipline, concentration and patience through all phases of his life.

The concentration is, with much, more difficult to practice in our culture, in which everything seems to be against the ability to concentrate. The most important step to concentrate is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listen to the radio, smoking or drinking. Without a doubt, being able to concentrate means being only with oneself and that ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love.

Being concentrated means living fully in the present, in the here and now, and not thinking about the next task while I am doing another. It is unnecessary to say that the concentration must be mostly practiced by people who mammically mammate. They must learn to be close to each other, without escaping in the multiple usual ways. The beginning of concentration practice is difficult;You have the impression that it will never be achieved and the purpose sought.

It is impossible to learn to concentrate without becoming sensitive to oneself. If we consider the situation of being sensitive to another human being, we find the most obvious example in the sensitivity and correspondence of a mother towards her child. She notes certain bodily changes, demands and anguish, before the child openly manifests them. He wakes up because his son cries, although another stronger sound would not have interrupted if I dream. All that means that it is sensitive to the manifestations of the child’s life;It is not anxious or worried, but in a state of alert balance, receptive to any significant communication from the child. Similarly, it is possible to be sensitive with respect to oneself.

According to what has been said about the nature of love, the fundamental condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of narcissism itself. In the narcissistic orientation it is experienced as real only what exists within us, while the phenomena of the outside world lack reality and are experienced only from the point of view of its usefulness or danger for oneself. The opposite pole of narcics is objectivity;It is the ability to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to separate that objective image of the image formed by their own desires and fears. The insane or the dreamer lacks completely from an objective vision of the outside world;But all of us are more or less insane, or we are more or less asleep;All of us have a non -objective vision of the world, which is deformed by our narcissistic orientation.

The power to think objectively is reason;The emotional attitude that corresponds to reason is humility. Be objective, use your own reason is only possible if an attitude of humility has been achieved, if it has emerged from the soils of omniscience and omnipotence of childhood.

In the terms of this analysis of the practice of the art of love, this means: since love depends on the relative absence of narcissism, it requires the development of humility, objectivity and reason. All life must be dedicated to that purpose. Humility and love are invisible, as is love. I cannot be truly objective with respect to my family if I can’t be with a stranger, and vice versa. The acquisition of the ability of objective and reason, represents half of the way to the domain of the art of loving, but must cover all those who are in contact with me.

The ability to love depends on the ability to overcome narcissism and incestuous fixation to the mother and clan;It depends on our ability to grow, to develop a productive orientation in our relationship with the world and with ourselves. Such emergency, birth, awakening process, needs a quality as a necessary condition: faith. The practice of the art of loving requires the practice of faith.

Rational faith is not primarily a belief in something, but the quality of certainty and firmness that our convictions possess. Faith is a characteristic feature that penetrates all personality, and not a specific belief.

While irrational faith rootes in submission to a power that is considered overwhelmingly powerful, omnisapient and omnipresent, and on the abdication of its own power and strength, relational faith is based on the opposite experience. We have faith in an idea because it is the result of our own observations and our thinking. We have faith in the potential of others, in ours and in those of humanity, because, and only to that extent, we have experienced the development of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own powerand love.

An attitude, indispensable for the practice of the art of loving that is fundamental is: the activity. Love is an activity;If I love, I am in a constant state of active concern for the loved person, but not just for her. Because I will be unable to actively relate to the loved one if I am lazy, if I am not in a constant state of consciousness, alert and activity. The ability to love demands a state of intensity, of being awake, of increased vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life.

The examination of the art of loving cannot be limited to the mastery of the acquisition and development of the characteristics and aptitudes that we have described. This inseparably related to social domain. If loving means having an attitude of love towards everyone, if love is a characterological feature, it must necessarily exist not only in relationships with family and friends, but also for those who are in contact with us through work, business and profession.

Love is the only satisfactory response to the problem of human existence, then every society that excludes, relatively, the development of love, in the long run due to its own contradiction with the basic needs of the nature of man. Talking about love is not to preach, for the simple reason that it means talking about the fundamental and real need of every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that there is no. Analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence in the present and criticize the social conditions responsible for that absence. Having faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional and individual phenomenon is to have a rational faith based on the understanding of man’s very nature.