Chapter 8 Chapter 2 The Theory of Love-33

(3) sex Fraternal love is love between equals, and maternal love is love for those who need help. Although there are great differences between the two, they have one thing in common: that is, according to their essence, their love is not belongs to one person.If I love those around me, I love all of them, and if I love one of my children, I also love the other children and all the children who need my help.The difference between these two types is erotic love, which requires the complete realization of twoness, the complete fusion of oneself with others.By its nature, this type of love is specific, not all-encompassing, and therefore it is also the most deceptive form of love.

First of all, this kind of love is often confused with the explosive experience of "falling in love", in which all the barriers between two people suddenly disappear.As already mentioned above, such sudden and intense feelings are by their nature doomed to short life.When strangers become intimate, there are no obstacles to overcome, and no effort is required to achieve true proximity.The lover knows as much about the beloved as he does about himself, perhaps I should say—as little.If you experience the other person to a certain depth, you will not be that familiar with the other person—and the miracle of overcoming the barrier between two people will be repeated day by day.But most people understand both themselves and others very quickly, and soon feel that they can see everything at a glance, precisely because they only understand the surface of people, but do not go deep into the heart.For them, human intimacy is first and foremost achieved through sexual union.Just because they feel that their isolation from others is primarily a physical isolation, physical union means for them the overcoming of human isolation.

Plus, for many people there is a range of ways to overcome human isolation.Telling about one's own life, describing one's hopes and fears, talking about one's childish or immature dreams, and finding common interests in facing the world—all of these are ways to overcome the isolation between people.Even revealing one's anger and hatred, open heart to heart without scruples, is seen as a sign of intimacy.This may explain the unnatural attraction some couples often feel for each other: the sudden feeling of intimacy between two people only after they sleep together or vent their mutual hatred.But this type of "intimacy" has a characteristic of fading away over time.The consequence is that one seeks love in another person, in another stranger.And the stranger would again become "intimate," the new love experience would be intense and blissful again, and then fade away until the hope of a new conquest, the demand for a new love, would reappear—and forever. Fantasizing that the new love will be completely different from the previous one.The deceptive nature of the simultaneity requirement reinforces the illusion.

The purpose of sexual demands is to achieve bonding, not just physical demands and release of tormenting pressure.The fear of being alone then reinforces the need, as does the desire to possess and be possessed, vanity, and human destructiveness - and of course love.As the sexual demand seems to be mixed with and intensified by every strong emotion, so love will also intensify this demand.Most people think that sexual desire is associated with love, so they can easily come to the deceptive conclusion that if two people are willing to possess each other's body, they are in love with each other.Love will undoubtedly give rise to a demand for sexual union, and in its presence the physical relationship is not filled with ambition and desire to possess or to be possessed, but is filled with tenderness.If the demand for physical union is not based on love, if sexual love does not have the element of fraternity, then it will only result in a purely physical and temporary union.Although the attraction of sex creates the illusion of union for a moment, if there is no love, only a feeling of strangeness remains after this union, and the distance between them does not shrink.They were still strangers, and they were either ashamed or they hated each other, for they felt more strongly than ever the strangeness which had left the hallucinations behind.Tenderness is by no means a sublimation of sexual instinct as Freud said, but a direct expression of fraternity, which is expressed in both the physical form of love and the non-physical form of love.

Erotic love has an exclusivity that neither fraternity nor motherly love has.This exclusiveness of erotic love must be further studied.This exclusiveness of sex is often misinterpreted as a relationship of mutual possession.We often see men and women who love each other but have no emotion for anyone else.Their love is actually a common selfishness, and these people tend to identify themselves with the loved one and overcome the isolation between people by dividing one person into two.They think they can overcome loneliness by doing so.But just because they are so far removed from their contemporaries, they are actually isolated and strangers to each other, and union is only an illusion to them.Sexual love is exclusive, but at the same time it also loves all human beings and all life through loving one person.The exclusivity of erotic love is only manifested in the fact that I am completely fused with a person, that is, in soul and body.Erotic love excludes others only at the point of sexual union, at the point of total devotion in the whole sphere of life, and not in a deeper sense of fraternity.

If a man and a woman really love each other, their sexual love has a prerequisite-that is, I love each other from the essence of my life and experience the essence of the other.Human beings are all the same in their essence, we are both part of the whole;Fundamentally, love is an act of will, a decision made by a person to give his whole life to the other.This is the idea that marriage is indissoluble and the ideological basis of many traditional forms of marriage.In these traditional forms of marriage the spouse is not chosen, but chosen by others—the saying "marry first, fall in love later" is believed.In the modern Western world this view is regarded as simply wrong.People think of love as a spontaneous emotional response in which people are suddenly overwhelmed by an overwhelming feeling.Here people only see the characteristics of two people, but not the fact that all men are part of Adam and all women are part of Eve.People refuse to recognize an important factor in sexual love: the factor of will.Loving someone is not just a strong emotion—it's also a decision, a judgment, a promise.If love is only a feeling, then the promise of loving for a lifetime has no basis.A feeling is easy to develop, but it may disappear quickly.How can I be sure that we will remain in love forever if my love is only a feeling and not a judgment and a decision at the same time?

From this standpoint it might be possible to draw the following conclusion: that love is only an act of will, an act of devotion, and that whom one loves in principle plays no role.It does not matter whether the marriage is arranged by others or by one's own decision - once contracted, the will should be able to ensure the continued existence of love.It seems that those who hold this view do not recognize the contradictions in human nature and sexuality.We are all one—but nonetheless each of us is a once-in-a-lifetime, unrepeatable being.In the sense that we are all one, we can love everyone out of fraternity; but in the sense that we are different, sexual love requires a specific, unique, wholly individual element that can only be Exist in a few, not in all.

So both views—the one that says sex is all about attraction between two people, the unique connection between two special people; So the truth is neither here nor there.Therefore, it is wrong to think that the relationship between husband and wife should be dissolved immediately and that the dissolution of marriage is not allowed under any circumstances.