Falling in love
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In romantic relationships, "falling in love" is mainly a Western term used to describe the process of moving from a feeling of neutrality towards a person to one of love. The use of the term "fall" implies that the process is in some way inevitable, uncontrollable, risky, irreversible, or that it puts the lover in a state of vulnerability, in the same way the word "fall" is used in the phrase "to fall ill" or "to fall into a trap". The term is generally used to describe an (eventual) love that is strong, although not necessarily permanent.
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[edit] Sociobiology
'Sociobiologists point to the preeminence of heart over head at such crucial moments...[as] bonding with a mate';[1] suggest that 'the answer to why we fall in love encompasses...complex neurochemical processes that occur in our brains when we are attracted to another person';[2] and 'tell us that when we fall in love we are falling into a stream of naturally occurring amphetamines running through the emotional centres of our very own brains'.[3]
Arguably however 'explanations like these neo-Darwinist ones...obscure what it is in sexual passion that so often leads not to attachment but to impossibilities of attachment, whether tragic or comic or tragicomic', as well as just what in falling in love is 'so frightening to us human beings and so frighteningly difficult'.[4]
[edit] Crystallization
For Stendhal, "love is largely self-generated", and falling in love a "process Stendhal calls crystallization....Before you fall in love, you see the other person as a bare branch; as you fall, you coat him or her with jeweled attractions about 80 percent of your own making".[5]
[edit] Who and why?
'Factors known to contribute strongly to falling in love include proximity, similarity, reciprocity, and physical attractiveness'.[6] Similarity would seem especially important: some would even claim that 'when we fall in love we fall into narcissistic identification'.[7]
Family therapists maintain that 'the reason we're attracted to someone at this very deep level is that basically they are like us - in a psychological sense'.[8] Others suggest that 'the very act of falling in love sets in motion old patterns of how we love...Falling in love returns us to emotions of infancy and childhood'.[9]
[edit] Alberoni's theory
In his socio-psychological theory, Francesco Alberoni states that falling in love is a process of the same nature as a religious or political conversion. He believes that people fall in love when they are ready to change, or to start a new life.
According to Alberoni, falling in love is a rapid process of destructuration-reorganization called the nascent state. In the nascent state, a state of pure creative energy, the individual loses his or her previous identity, and becomes highly fluid and capable of merging with another person to create a new "us," a unit of two that is highly charged with solidarity and eroticism. The new couple realizes their dreams, aspirations, and unexpressed potential through one another, and develops a shared life project and common view of the world. Individuals in the nascent state put one another through tests, which if successful eventually give way to a solid love relationship, and the forming of new identities and life structures formed by the merging of the two individuals.
Alberoni does not consider falling in love as a regression, but instead as a launching of oneself towards the future and change, and as fundamental to the formation of a romantic partnership. 'Falling in love transforms their whole world, it is a sublime experience, an act of folly...the discovery of one's own being and one's own destiny'.[10]
Others would agree that 'falling in love, being by definition an intense experience of change...is itself in some way also a therapeutic experience';[11] while arguably 'the most severe form of love disturbance is the inability to fall in love'.[12]
[edit] Spiritual
Some maintain that 'falling in love in the truest sense of the phrase, not just infatuation...is really the closest most of us come to seeing life in its spiritual form'.[13]
Others would take the view that - in the majority of instances, at least - 'the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love...is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behaviour', and so that 'falling in love has little to do with purposively nurturing one's spiritual development'.[14]
Both standpoints could perhaps agree with Eric Berne: 'Love is a sweet trap from which no one departs without tears'.[15]
[edit] Cultural examples
[edit] Literary
- In Practical Magic, the boyfriend-to-be of the heroine's eldest daughter wins her heart with the contemptuous phrase: '"Love...Love is worth the sum of itself, and nothing more"'.[16] By the book's close, however, the heroine herself has acquired certain things that she 'knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can'.[17]
- In Possession: A Romance, the academic hero falls in love in the teeth of his own convictions. '"It isn't convenient....But that's how it is. In the worst way. All the things we - we grew up not believing in. Total obsession, night and day. When I see you, you look alive and everything else - fades. All that"'.[18]
[edit] Art
Biographers of Picasso have noted the force of 'Dora Maar's maxim - whenever a new woman comes into Picasso's life, everything changes....The style changed, and so did the way of life'.[19]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (London 1996) p. 4
- ^ R. Crooks/K. Baur, Our Sexuality (2010) p. 186
- ^ Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Where Do We Fall When We Fall in Love? (2003) p. 20
- ^ Young-Bruehl, p. 5
- ^ Noel Perrin, A Reader's Delight (1088) p. 41-2
- ^ Crooks/Bauer, p. 223
- ^ Young-Bruehl, p. 20
- ^ Robin Skynner/John Cleese, Families and how to survive them (London 1994) p. 14
- ^ Robert M. Gordon, An Expert Looks at Love, Intimacy and Personal Growth (2008) p. xiv-v
- ^ Gilles Delisle, Personality Pathology (2011) p. 132
- ^ Giovanni Salonia, in Barbara Jo Brothers, Intimate Autonomy (1991) p. 58
- ^ Gordon, p. 2
- ^ J. Bailey/J. V. Bailey, Slowing Down to the Speed of Love (2004) p. 50
- ^ M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled (London 1990) p. 94-5
- ^ Eric Berne, Sex in Human Loving (Penguin 1970) p. 130
- ^ Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic (London 1995) p. 124
- ^ Hoffman, p. 279
- ^ A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (London 1990) p. 506
- ^ John Richardson, A Life of Picasso Volume II (1996) p. 260
[edit] Further reading
- Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World. Pantheon Books, 1956.
- Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)
- Francesco Alberoni, Falling in Love (New York, Random House, 1983)
- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse (1990)
