We often think about love, but rarely talk about it. We dream of meeting love, but we almost never consciously go to it. We try to understand love, but we understand only the futility of our efforts, and that “this mystery is great.” The book Enjoy, Comprehend, Love addresses those who would like to talk about romantic love with famous thinkers and poets, to open their minds to the perception of the fullness of love, to comprehend its many facets, and if they dare, to choose their own path of conscious love.

The reflections on love are supplemented with excerpts from famous literary works, and the descriptions of certain psychological patterns of love relationships are illustrated by schemes. Thus, the author invites the readers to their own reflections on love, arming them with elegant metaphors and initial logical links.

We have chosen the image of a journey through the spaces of love as the linking framework for the book, and spatial metaphors are used to describe complex, paradoxical manifestations of love relationships. You can start your journey with any chapter of the nine sections of this small but intense book, depending on what interests you the most at the moment. For example, one might start with Courtly Love, interested in the mentioning of Plato, move on to Platonic Love, then, having cleared up its delicate points in the chapter The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, proceed to Building a Love Boat.

The readers are also given the opportunity to independently conduct simple tests and experiments in their own love relationships, allowing them to feel its new bright facets. And for those interested in the secrets of famous love stories, an analysis of the pure love relationships in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot and the metamorphosis of enchanted love in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita is offered.

The Spaces of Conscious Love

Dedicated to my lovely children Egor, Darya, Ilya, and Anna

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

William Shakespeare, sonnet 116

The immense spaces of love are gradually covered somewhere with already well-trodden paths, and in some places with only barely noticeable lost paths. There are no, and, perhaps, there will never be highways. You can find out how to navigate here by studying ancient myths and legends, by getting acquainted with fascinating stories about journeys to the love land of experienced writers, or by referring to modern popular guidebooks that guarantee an easy fun ride on the boats of love along turbulent currents with steep rapids and sharp turns.

Lost in the spaces of love, sometimes they resort to the help of a stalker, in the role of a psychotherapist. Well, one intuition is good, but two, of which the second one with scientific background, is better. And yet, all or most of this path, everyone goes alone, learning from their own mistakes, finding a way out of deadlocked relationships, making their own fundamental discoveries, or accumulating a solid baggage of small but hard-won life lessons by the time the path has already led in a quiet and comfortable harbor. Since ancient times, travelers to uncharted lands left behind maps, so that those following them could see the whole picture of the path, calculate their strength, learn about the dangers that lie in wait, and not go astray at the forks.

In Enjoy, Comprehend, Love, we did the preparatory work and sketched out a schematic map, outlined landmarks and danger warnings, collected advice from wise pioneers. I hope this book will be your good companion. But you, dear reader, should not forget that you are going your own way (or off-road), because only you know what beckons you and waits there, far ahead.

Routes of Conscious Love

The author is convinced that love can be made friends with the mind, make it conscious and meaningful, while not losing the emotional richness and vivid impressions of love.

With Enjoy, Comprehend, Love you can see the stages of maturation and the versatility of love from different perspectives, as well as explore those paradoxes, riddles and traps that often lead love to a dead end and create insurmountable barriers to the conscious experience of this feeling. It will probably be difficult to learn from the book the lessons of love for all occasions, but everyone will be able to adopt two or three invaluable considerations on how to get out of difficult situations in a relationship with a loved one. Lovers are encouraged to take a fresh look at the crises of love and learn to understand them before they have to face disappointments and the fading of love.

The book contains quotes and excerpts from literary works, which, when thoughtfully read, give rise to reflection on your own path of love. And if the readers decide to turn to the full texts of the cited works, then they will again be able to plunge into the multifaceted world of grace-filled love.

Yury Tomin

FOREWORD

Yea, if she knows not love, soon shall she feel it

Even reluctant.

Sappho. Hymn to Aphrodite

In love relationships, we, unfortunately, are accustomed to relying on feelings, the voice of reason is weak and meager. And how can it say a weighty word, if in the field of knowledge about love, significant gaps are visible from century to century.

And indeed, is there knowledge of love? Despite the common skeptical “hardly”, it is possible to give a completely positive answer. It is only this kind of knowledge that is dispersed, broken into many brilliant, but still fragments.

Therefore, before anyone who strives for conscious love, a difficult task arises – to extract and systematize knowledge, putting it in the right pyramid of many blocks of different quality, different sizes, sometimes not rubbing against each other. In other words, you need to collect these particles of knowledge into a flawless mirror for an undistorted reflection of loving human souls that are eager to look into themselves.

In the foreword, we will warm up the mind and try to prepare the readers for a journey through the spaces of conscious love. Let’s start by considering the following question:

Why do we think a lot but speak little about love?

It has been noticed that people tend to imagine more, and in truth, to dream, than to speak, and even more so to reason, that is, to think about love. What could explain this imbalance?

The philosopher Rene Descartes became famous for the fact that, questioning all the pillars of reality, he settled on the only one – a person’s own thinking.

We dare to assert that the ability to love inherent in a person is the core of his personality to the same extent as the ability to think. Why are these basic human qualities, as a rule, located at different poles? And if we make them friends, then we will most likely find that true thinking is unthinkable without love, and real love cannot be without mind.

We have yet to plunge into the philosophical jungle of love, but for now let's talk about it as a constant human thirst.

Our unrelenting thirst for love, said Leo Tolstoy, is due to the fact that “there is something special in the feeling of love, capable of resolving all the contradictions of life and giving a person that complete good, in the pursuit of which his life consists.”

Then it is not surprising that love becomes one of the main rulers of our aspirations, painful thoughts or blue dreams.

But why do we talk (converse, think) about love so little? Perhaps we lack confidence in our experiences and ideas about love, in understanding where this feeling comes from, what it does to us and why it stirs our soul.

Should we talk about love at all, that is, exchange thoughts about this elusive subject? Here you can find different, sometimes opposing points of view. Let’s get acquainted with the most striking of them.

Any reasoning about love destroys love.

(one of Leo Tolstoy’s common quotes)

In love one does not talk about love, one simply loves.

(considered the Soviet writer Konstantin Fedin)

To talk about love is to make love.

(claimed the French novelist Honore de Balzac)

Until now, only one indisputable truth has been said about love, namely, that “this mystery is great,” everything else that was written and said about love was not a solution, but only the posing of questions that remained unresolved.

(so the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov thought in the words of one of his heroes)

And in our time, there is a myth that the analytics of love is killing it. But this opinion is not substantiated in any way and relies on direct distortions of meanings and delusions.

Let us take Tolstoy’s saying that “every reasoning about love destroys love.” It is usually understood in the sense that if a lover begins to share his lofty feelings, then most likely he encounters irony, cynicism, and misunderstanding. In other words, they are afraid of jinxing or belittling love. In fact, Tolstoy’s phrase from the work On Life is taken out of context and means discomfort for love emanating from an “animal personality”, saying that one should not reason, but indulge in love – reasoning only interferes with the love of such a personality. Explaining true love, Tolstoy emphasizes:

The beginning of love, its root, is not an outburst of feeling that obscures the mind, as is usually imagined, but is the most reasonable, bright and therefore calm and joyful state characteristic of children and reasonable people.

Those who are familiar with the work of Leo Tolstoy can even see with the naked eye that behind the descriptions of love in his novels lie deep reflections on the nature of this feeling. So, the clarification that these words should be understood “just the opposite of how they are usually understood” is quite applicable to the biting quote about the destruction of love by reasoning, which he said about another statement that “one must not marry for love, but certainly with calculation”, in the sense: not “according to the calculation where and how to live, but according to the calculation, how likely it is that the future wife will help, and not interfere with living a human life.”

Therefore, if we are reasonable people, then it should be natural for us to open love to the mind, and not to reconcile ourselves to its secrets, and even more so to the eclipses of the mind. However, the intrusion of reason into the sphere of love was and is not easy.

Anton Chekhov was a tireless researcher of love and at the same time a deep skeptic. One of the heroes of his story About Love gives the following arguments about the insolubility of love issues:

First, love must be individualized, so the explanation in one case is not suitable for others. Secondly, we, Russians, only decorate our love with questions, while choosing the most uninteresting questions that irritate and remain unexplained.

The first stumbling block – the uniqueness of each of the many human lives arising from the common principles of being – was well known to ancient philosophers, so we will take their experience into service.

As for the second, we should muster up the courage to raise only interesting questions about love and persevere not to leave even the most fatal of them unanswered.

Paradoxically, most of Chekhov’s stories, novellas and plays are devoted to love, in which the author himself sought to delve into these “fatal questions”. Moreover, an astute reader can find in his works something that is associated with Chekhov’s hope for love and happiness.

But what should the answers to questions about love look like in general – will we be satisfied with Tolstoy's brilliant intuition or Chekhov's timid hope?

Here we cannot avoid at least a minimal idea of knowledge and the ways of its assimilation. To do this, let’s make a small digression to describe the nature of the human psyche.

There are different views on the structure of our psyche (in the European tradition they talk about the soul, in Buddhism – about consciousness). The ancient Greeks had a rather deep and comprehensive idea of the soul, in which they singled out its lustful and rational parts, as well as a furious spirit (Plato). In the Jewish tradition, 5 levels of the soul are defined, of which 3 are in a person: the animal soul (nefesh), the human qualities of the soul expressed by emotions (ruach), and the mind (neshama). After the works of Freud in the human psyche, it is customary to single out the conscious and the unconscious. A deeper analysis shows that there are various areas of the unconscious, and in addition, we have fantasies, imagination and premonition – all that are so activated in love. For example, Carl Jung singled out the collective unconscious, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposed his own three-component structure of the psyche: real, imaginary, symbolic.

Based on these provisions, we will further use the following model of the psyche, depicting it as a pyramid, at the base of which lie instincts, feelings and the subconscious, in the middle – imagination and reason, and in the upper part – the mind.

Accordingly, we can talk about different levels of knowledge according to the degree of awareness of our idea of love and the possibility of its verbal expression. Pay attention to the mutual influence of different levels of knowledge on each other and, most importantly, the periodic abrupt renewal of the entire pyramid when receiving new knowledge, which serves as a trigger for the transformation of our worldview and can come to us at any of the levels: in the form of new experiences and feelings, stunning fantasies, logical conclusions, rational conclusions or insights.

This or that level of knowledge is also the basis of our assessments, decisions or programs that determine behavior and regulate actions. At the same time, they work in different ways: dreaming is easy and safe, instincts work automatically, reasoning requires effort and following logic, and thinking is inseparable from doubts about the truth of existing knowledge.

Our love impulses are made up of a complex combination: first, instincts, feelings and structures of the subconscious, secondly, imagination, dreams, fantasies and other “light” forms of mental activity, thirdly, rational clearly articulated ideas, regardless of whether they are true or false, but subjectively accepted as true; fourthly, comprehension (wisdom) – understanding that goes beyond pure rationality.

What is the opponent of such a rather complex branching knowledge?

First, the generally accepted opinion (doxa), firmly established in the minds of the vast majority of individuals. Secondly, self-conceit as confidence in one’s own, albeit awkward, but rightness. Thirdly, common sense as a way of preferring something concrete, obvious and useful, which is “deaf to the language of philosophy”.

Then, if we begin to study love, then we will have a multi-level, with cyclical updates, consistent progress from “everyday truths” – knowledge A to harmonized knowledge B.

As for the truth of knowledge B, it is rather difficult to judge this, as it has been known for two millennia since the interrogation of Jesus of Nazareth by procurator Pilate. Let's leave this difficult nut to the philosophers.

However, let us take into service the following rule, if not of absolute truth, then of the authenticity of the required knowledge. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (“On the Essence of Truth”) showed that the essence of truth is freedom, understood as openness to what in life opens up to meet us. If this is so, then we should be extremely attentive and careful to what is revealed to us in love. Looking ahead, let’s say that ignoring and insensitivity to the messages of love become one of the main reasons for its extinction.

In addition, it is necessary to take into account two more aspects of the quality of knowledge about love.

First, while gaining knowledge, one should remember that there is a criterion for the difference between knowledge and understanding – when a person not only has accumulated something inside himself, but can also pass it on and teach it to others. Secondly, we are talking about the geometry of our knowledge – the relative length of its constituent segments (Plato used such a visual image) or, using another image, the ratio of the layers of the pyramid of knowledge in our psyche. The super-task that a reasonable person can strive for in his life is to build and fill his own pyramid of knowledge about love according to an ideal model and thereby make love a full-blooded conscious content of life.

Summing up the reasoning and answering the question of why we talk little about love, we admit that conversations, as a rule, do not go beyond the exchange of opinions or prevalent thoughtful judgments and the best that is achieved in them is common sense. But everyone internally knows that you can’t go far in love with common sense and you’re unlikely to be truly happy. For example, today common sense says something about marriage that is completely different from what it said yesterday, say, in the 19th or 20th century, and it is not known what it will prepare for us tomorrow?

We must also warn you about one feature of the study and disclosure of the secrets of love, which can be called “unsafe territory of knowledge.”

The fact is that the study of love relationships, acquaintance with certain theories and practices can radically change your current idea of love, with which, perhaps, you are quite comfortable. What’s more, as psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0, argues, you may learn that love is not what people usually think of it, and you may have to change your point of view and live within a different worldview.

Most likely, the journey through the spaces of love offered in this book will change your idea of romantic love. If, for one reason or another, you value your ideas and are afraid of destroying them, then you should not join us. One thing we can guarantee you is that the growth of awareness in love does not lead to a decrease in its emotional richness, on the contrary, you will experience new bright colors and discover the delightful horizons of boundless love.

I would like to wish the brave: good luck and new discoveries on the roads of love!

So, despite warnings about the possible loss of our own, perhaps narrow, but familiar and comfortable world of tender feelings, following the example of great minds, we choose the path of research and reflection on love in the hope of finding the desired full-fledged (high) conscious love. But before we hit the road, let’s check the equipment. Since thought operates with words and language, let’s look at the conformity and serviceability of the tools we use in relation to the knowledge of love.

Lexicon of love. What is love?

With the words of love – it vocabulary – the situation is not at all simple.

Let's start with examples of verbal creativity that goes from heart to heart – the song genre:

How do I dare to tell about it? I walk, not daring to give free rein to the words … My dear darling, guess for yourself!

(sounds in the popular song “Oh, the viburnum is blooming”)

You talk to me about love, but the conversation started in vain. I listen to your words, but they mean nothing.

(reported in the song from the movie “Three Days in Moscow”)

The intrigue in these widely known love songs is connected precisely with the words of love: their absence or their nonsense.

Without pretending to be an exhaustive classification, the following areas of the language of love can be distinguished: poetry, various genres of literary prose, psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, as well as folk wisdom in the form of proverbs and sayings or aphorisms stylized as proverbs.

Separately, there is obscene language. The discomfort caused by it, apparently, testifies to the approach in our innermost to the lower boundary of love, which separates the qualities of humanity and animal instincts. Sex is undoubtedly included in love, but only in forms isolated from obscene language.

It is easy to see that depending on which language we choose, the level, volume, and, most importantly, the possible semantic field of reflection (discourse) about love is set.

The language of Proverbs and Sayings

Each of us has some favorite or otherwise stuck in the head sayings about love. For example:

Love is a ring, and there is no end to the ring.

Love will teach a priest to dance.

Old love is remembered.

The heart is not a stone.

In love, women know everything that they have not been taught.

Love is like glass: if it breaks, it won’t grow together.

Was love invented by troubadours in the 11th century?

Love is a play where intermissions are major than acts.

We accept or reject these sparkling aphorisms, but in any case, they affect our understanding of love. Let’s pay attention to the reflection of rather deep questions in them:

The riddle and the role of first love: Old love is remembered. A little later we will meet the same thought in another language in a brilliant poem by Nabokov.

Mirroring of love or infection with love: The heart is not a stone. Martin Eden, thinking about Ruth’s love for him, finds just such the only reasonable and correct explanation for the fact that she fell in love with him.

How to emphasize the saying about women: In love, women know everything that they have not been taught? 1. Women know everything. 2. They have not been taught and don’t need to, because they know (or think they know). 3. Love is not taught, but women learn faster, educate themselves and then teach men.

Poetry

Poetic language has a special place in love. It is the closest to her. Allows with its wonderful techniques to convey the rich variety of this quivering feeling. Poetry equips us with metaphors. And our consciousness is arranged in such a way that the images of metaphors in their figurative meaning convey love experiences that are consonant with us faster and more voluminously.

For example, one of Vladimir Nabokov’s filigree poems:

Enclosed together in a crystal sphere,

high in the sky among the stars we flew.

As silently at breakneck speed we’d steer

along the flashing points of blissful blue.

With neither a past nor a goal to chase,

fused by the rapture of eternity,

we flew through heavens in a deep embrace,

as stars smiled, blinding us with their beauty.

Then someone’s sigh smashed our sphere of crystal,

brought our ecstatic travels to an end,

and interrupting our kiss eternal,

apart, as captives, forced us to descend.

Earthbound we’ve forgotten much of our flight,

But sometimes in our dreams we do regress:

We shimmer with the stardust and delight

to the lovely hum and pulse of stillness.

And though we still rejoice and grieve apart,

I’ll always recognize your face, I trust,

among all others, beautiful and smart:

your eyelashes’ ends will glow with stardust.

(translated by Mila Gee)

It would seem that poetry is the ideal language of love. And this consideration is not unreasonably shared by many. Let’s look at the place of poetry in the pyramid of knowledge we use. It is primarily associated with our dreams, fantasies, and imaginations. But in poetry, we also sense something more than what is contained in the words used.

A talented verse carries and conveys to us surprisingly filled meanings that are perceived beyond both imagination and rational thinking. It can be said that our mind, on the wings of poetry, rises to the heights or sinks to the depths of the understanding of love.

The very poetic inspiration coincides in many ways with the thrill of love and the rise of a loving soul. The interpenetration of these experiences is expressed in the chased lines of another poem by Nabokov:

Inspiration is the voluptuousness

of the human self:

a hotly growing happiness, —

a moment of nothingness.

The voluptuousness is the inspiration…

of a body as sensitive as the spirit:

you have seen, you have flashed for a moment, —

and in a tremor you are extinguished.

But when the thunderous pleasure

was gone, and you fell silent,

in the secret place of life arose:

a heart or a verse…

Love Prose or Love Stories

As for love prose, it has the difficult task of choosing between dry or moist words about love, as the psychologist Eric Berne elegantly observed. In terms of reflections on love, many works of fiction and popular science literature belong to the genre of love stories. In our youth, we are fascinated by the dramatic fate of the characters, we empathize with their anxious feelings, and sometimes we put off in our minds the images that have excited us. At a mature age, we are able to follow the vicissitudes of love’s fates with sympathetic understanding, but with unwavering fascination. Talented love stories can provide rich food for thought, but tend to leave us with only a vague, vanishing trace.

In prose, our brain reacts to the plot, the sequences of events, the fates of the characters, and their connections. Perhaps neurobiologists are right to point out that similar structures – sequences of electrical signals and intricate connections of neurons – operate in our minds.

We will make extensive use of outstanding love stories in the subsequent work as the most vivid mental images to illustrate thinking about love.

Philosophy

In the language of philosophy, we turn to the initial, basic concepts of love, generalizing its main properties and deep sources. So, the ancient Greeks, when speaking of love, used the following concepts: Agape – sacrificial unconditional love, Eros – passionate love, Ludus – love-game, Mania – love as an obsession, Philia – love-friendship, Pragma – rational love as mutual services, Storge – love as family affection, Xenia – love as generosity and hospitality.

In the philosophy of love, one can often find the justification of love as an in-depth consideration of one or more of its above-mentioned sides. For example, in 1973, Canadian sociologist John Alan Lee, in his book Colours of Love, proposed considering three basic (Eros, Storge, Ludus), three combined styles of love (Mania (EL), Pragma (SL), Agape (ES)) and nine tertiary, and this classification was confirmed by sociological surveys.

There are other philosophical theories of love that connect it with a single, as a rule, metaphysical source. For example, the supreme good, the cosmic generative force or God. Here, the intellectual efforts of the authors of such theories go beyond conceivable limits to the level associated with prophecy or other superhuman breakthrough of consciousness. Therefore, in our journey through the spaces of conscious love, only when absolutely necessary will we delve into the wilds of this fog-covered realm.

Fortunately, ancient people created quite fascinating ways of describing it allegorically, in modern terms, a virtual visit to metaphysical origins. In this vein, we will touch on the topic of the metaphysics of love.

Metaphysics of love

In this area of our thinking, we seek to discover what precedes the earthly manifestation of love, which is its transcendent beginning, cause and ultimate goal. This is done by resorting to special intellectual constructions, such as myths.

In ancient times, love was represented in the form of mythological creatures: Aphrodite (Venus) – the goddess of love, born either from sea foam, or in a shell and set foot on the ground on the island of Cyprus. Her husband is the lame Hermes (their descendant is Hermaphrodite). From her lover, the god of war Ares, the god of love, Eros (Cupid), was born. Aphrodite was in love with the earthly handsome Adonis, who was killed by Ares incarnated into a boar.

From the union of Ares and Aphrodite, Himeros (god of sexual desire), Eros (love), Anteros (hatred from love), Pophos (god of love longing), Phobos (fear), Deimos (horror) and Harmonia (goddess of consent) were born.

Plato also cites another myth about the birth of Eros from Poros, the god of abundance and wealth (his mother Metida – the goddess of wisdom and cunning) and the nymph Phenia – the deity of nature, a symbol of need and poverty.

For example, in the myth of Eros and Psyche, the soul is represented by the image of Psyche. Accordingly, this myth is an allegory about the path of the human soul in love. You can familiarize yourself with it.

We will draw your attention to the fact that Psyche’s curiosity twice leads her to almost disastrous consequences. Wanting to see her mysterious lover, she burns Eros with oil from a lamp, and he flies to Olympus. Then, fulfilling the task of Aphrodite, she, having received in the kingdom of the dead from Persephone (goddess of fertility) a box with miraculous beauty tools, opens it and falls into eternal sleep.

These episodes can be viewed as a warning against the dangers that await those who seek to penetrate the innermost secrets of love, that is, you and me, dear readers. However, the risks are not fatal – Zeus grants Psyche immortality. Let us take note of this and continue our preparations for the journey through the spaces of love.

Psychology

The language of science is a tribute to the special turn of the modern mind, which cannot do without scientific confirmation of certain considerations through laboratory experiments or in situ observations. The areas of psychological research on love are vast and varied, from observing facial expressions, measuring the physiological reactions of lovers, and large-scale surveys of men and women about their intimate lives, to analyzing love hormones and scanning the brains of test subjects in different states of love relationships. At the same time, one can hardly point to any new discoveries made in psychology, ethology, social psychology and other scientific disciplines that have turned to the study of love, because love is as old as the world and a lot has already been said.