Love: Are you attached or free?

Jung on Love

• In The Psychology of the Transference, Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.

Love in Psychology

The traditional psychological view sees love as being a combination of companionate love and passionate love.Passionate love is intense longing, and is often accompanied by physiological arousal (shortness of breath, rapid heart rate); companionate love is affection and a feeling of intimacy not accompanied by physiological arousal.

Love in Biology

Biological models of love tend to see it as a mammalian drive, similar to hunger or thirst. Psychology sees love as more of a social and cultural phenomenon. Certainly love is influenced by hormones (such as oxytocin), neurotrophins (such as NGF), and pheromones, and how people think and behave in love is influenced by their conceptions of love.

Is our idea of romantic love truly our own?

“Love is first a rumor that whispers in our ears the most beautiful promises:We venerate it before we experience it in actuality, we rehearse this play for years without understanding it. It is inculcated in us as a code by our family and by society. “

MarriageIn many traditions, marriage used to simply be an arrangement instituted by families for practical reasons—child rearing and family stability.

Later on, as people (women especially) began to gain autonomy within the family, the arranged marriage transformed into marriage for love.

A little French marriage history:

• September 20th, 1792: • Civil marriage was established on in

France alongside the right to divorce, depriving the Church of its• long-standing control over the

institution of marriage.

Marriage & Law

• 1816: Divorce was abolished

• 1884: Divorce was reauthorized (68 years after.)

• June 21st, 1907: Young people able to marry without their parents consent (thus opening the way to matrimonial paradise!)– Formerly stigmatized as a fatal illness (Romeo and

Juliet), passion was now REQUIRED as a basis for a strong marriage…

Marriage & Law

Now we have tons of legal options! Wooo.

• Civil marriage dissociated from religious marriage: stopped being a sacrament and is simply a legal contract

• “Married” couple was dissociated, leading to legislative authorization of common-law marriage in the 1970s.

• “Pacte vicil de solidarite” – civil pact of domestic partnership…but not a marriage, just property-sharing ;) and more easily undone

• Thus the borderline between being married and unmarried is increasingly vague.

Happy Valentine’s Day

• In the eighteenth century, historians tell us, “valentinage”, from which Valentine’s Day was derived, allowed wived in northern France to make love, on a few days each year and with the knowledge of their husbands, with a “valentine” of their choosing.

Japan

• Koi describes a longing for a member of the opposite sex and is typical interpreted as selfish and wanting. The term's origins come from the concept of lonely solitude as a result of separation from a loved one.

• The term ai (愛 ?), is often associated with maternal love or selfless love, originally referred to beauty and was often used in religious context.

Turkish

In Turkish, person can love a god, a person, parents, or family. But in context the person "loves" just one special person, which they call the word "aşk.”If a Turk says that he is in love (Aşık) with somebody, it is not a love that a person can feel for his or her parents; it is just for one person, and it indicates a huge infatuation.

“Love” in China

Two philosophical underpinnings of love exist in the Chinese tradition, one from Confucianism which emphasized actions and duty while the other came from Mohism which championed a universal love.

The modern family that arose between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries was based on the growing affection that binds the parents to their children. This model, shaped by a middle class in full expansion, made the home a small sentimental community that isolated itself from the rest of society.

Worldwide, we are now more alone without our parentsand with fewer children.

Confucian FamilyIn traditional Chinese culture, boys stay with their parents and the girl moves in with the boy’s family. Marriage strove for the Chinese family idea—to have “many generations under one roof.”

Chinese Churches

“Ai” as Universal Love

The concept of Ai (愛 ) was developed by the Chinese philosopher Mozi in the 4th century BC in reaction to Confucianism's benevolent love. Mozi tried to replace what he considered to be the long-entrenched Chinese over-attachment to family and clan structures with the concept of "universal love" (jiān'ài, 兼愛 ). In this, he argued directly against Confucians who believed that it was natural and correct for people to care about different people in different degrees.

Chinese slang

Naked marriage (裸婚 , luǒhūn)• Describes the growing number of marriages

between partners who do not yet own any significant assets. The "Five Nos" involved are: no ring, no ceremony, no honeymoon, no home, and no car.

Chinese Slang

• Flash or blitz marriage (Chinese: 闪婚 , shǎnhūn): describes a marriage between partners who've known each less than 7 months.

• The concept of sheng nu or "leftover women" (pinyin = Shèngnǚ, 剩女） has been created by the state media and government in order to pressure women into marrying earlier.

Chinese Slang

• Imbalance between sex ratios of men and women with figures showing that there are over 30 million more men than women in China.

• However since the opening and reform period in the 1980s, increasing numbers of women hold college degrees and are now reluctant to be "tied down" to a married life so soon after their graduation, with women choosing to be more career orientated until they reach their 30s

Bride Kidnapping

• Also known as marriage by abduction, or marriage by capture, is a practice in which a man abducts the woman he wishes to marry. Bride kidnapping has been practiced throughout history around the world and continues to occur in countries in Central Asia, Caucasus region, and parts of Africa.

Bride Kidnapping

In most countries, bride kidnapping is considered a sex crime, rather than a valid form of marriage. Some versions of it may also be seen as falling along the continuum between forced marriage and arranged marriage.

Bride Kidnapping

Some cultures today maintain symbolic bride kidnapping ritual as part of traditions surrounding a wedding, in a nod to the practice of bride kidnapping which may have figured in that culture's history.

India - Santals

Among the Santals, if a boy fancies a girl, he must keep a branch of a sal tree outside her house. If there are two or more sisters in the house and the bride is not known, all the sisters must be ready.

India - Santals

• The next day, preparations for the marriage are made and relatives called. The girl is then encircled by all family members and relatives.

Santal Folk Dance

India - Santals

The boy must break inside the circle to get to his bride. If she is willing, they get married. If she is not, she may run away. If he catches her and she still doesn't consent, she may use arms and weapons against him.

Honeymoon

According to some sources, the honeymoon is a relic of marriage by capture, based on the practice of the husband going into hiding with his wife to avoid reprisals from her relatives, with the intention that the woman would be pregnant by the end of the month.

The Paradox of Love

Pascal Bruckner says about modern Western Love in “The Paradox of Love”:“…we now ask everything from love; we ask too much of it; we ask that it ravish, ravage, and redeem us. It is assigned such a grandiose ambition in no culture other than ours.”

So now people are saying all kinds of things:

• “Passion no longer exists, it was killed by women’s liberation, the consumerist hedonism that makes the universe ‘liquid’ ”

• – Zygmunt Bauman

“We are living in a hypersentimental period and today couples die because they put themselves under the jursdiction of a cruel and merciless god—Love.”

It is not only whims and selfishness that put an end to couples, but also the quest for a permanent passion as the cement that will hold them together. It is the mad intransigence of these lovers or spouses who reject any compromise: either fervor or flight, no half-measures. No compromise.

Love as Oscillation BetweenFreedom and Attachment

“I have loved women to the point of madness. But I have always preferred my liberty.”-- Giacomo Casanova

“God, how I loved my freedom before I began to love you more than I loved it. How it weighs on me today!”-- Guy de Maupassant

Contradictions of Modern Love

Our new freedoms have also brought new burdens and rules--without, however, wiping out the old rules, emotions, desires,

and arrangements.

• The couple• Marriage• Jealousy/demand for fidelity• The war between constancy and inconstancy.

“It is no wonder that love, sex, and relationships today are so confusing, so difficult, and so paradoxical.”

Love as Oscillation Between Attachment and Freedom

“Freedom does not release us from responsibilities but instead increases them. It does not lighten our burden but weighs it down further. It resolves problems less than it multiplies paradoxes. If this world sometimes seems brutal, that is because it is “emancipated” and each individual’s autonomy collides with that of others and is injured by them: never have people had to bear on their shoulders so many constraints. This burden explains in part why contemporary romances are so hard.”

Marriage

“Each sex now intends to take on the tasks previously assigned to the other: women work, manage, study, while fathers care for the children and in theory do their share of the housework.Do men excel in these activities? Then they are reproached for lacking authority and verve.Do their wives succeed in their professions? Then they are blamed for neglecting their children.”

From outside looking in:

Raja Rao, an Indian writer, returned to India disappointed by the impatience of Western culture:

“Their desire for a happiness that is as constant as it is complete. In India, we put a cold soup on the fire and it warms up little by little. Europeans put a hot soup in a cold dish and it cools down little by little. They take affections too seriously to tolerate the slightest shortcoming.”

“I Love You”Common expressions of love preexist us and combine affection with an automatic character.“I love you.” “I love you too.”

“I love you” as a synchronizer:Adjusts the temporal difference between loves and puts them in the same time zone“I love you” as a passport one holds out to allow the other to enter into their territory.

“I Will Always Love You”

I Will Always Love You“A good marriage, if such there be, avoids the company and conditions of love.”

I promise to act as if I love you and were going to love you forever even if it is not in my power to control the variation of our feelings.

“I Will Always Love You”Confidence in the Midst of Insecurity

• The oath implies confidence and a wager: by leaping over doubt and fear, it postulates that the world is a place in which we can develop together and take responsibility for ourselves.

• Yet by invoking chance, it also puts the lovers in the same insecurity, transforms them into potential murderers of one another.

Jealousy

• Jealousy is a fellow traveler of democratic equality: closely related to the desire for ubiquity, the wish to be simultaneously everywhere

• It results from the vertigo that occurs when we come to realize the opacity of the other. Complete lack of control. You are not your lover.

It’s not all doom and gloom.

There is so much beauty to be found in attachment:

“You have just turned eighty-two. You have lost 6 cm. in height and you weight only 45 kg, and yet you are still beautiful, charming, desirable. We have been living together for fifty-eight years and I love you more than ever. Recently I fell in love with you again and once again I am bearing within me an overflowing life that is fulfilled only when I hold your body in my arms.”

Ending note:

• Page 178-179