Читать книгу Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love - Yury Tomin - Страница 15

Understanding love as a story provides an answer to the question of how love triangles are formed in each of the partners entering into long-term close relationships. In this concept, the origin of love and its design are separated. It should be noted that the essence of the concept is related to the formation of an individual channel of love, therefore, one should not attach great importance to the simplified schemes of its origin mentioned here.

The shaping of love stories is as follows: the emergence of love occurs due to genetically transmitted instincts and impulses, and the image (matrix) of love is formed as a result of social learning and following role examples that are beginning to be associated with love. Love is organized mainly by a prototype. We learn about it from books, movies, mass media, parents, and friends, and we begin to accumulate our own experience according to typical schemes for realizing love. On the basis of typical schemes and personal experience, individual implicit stories of love are formed in the minds of each, and when two meet, each has its own plot of love.

The concept of love as a story has another practical meaning. It allows you to link social, historical, cultural, and ethnic contexts with individual experiences. According to Sternberg, the conditions prevailing by the beginning of the 21st century in the United States of America are characterized by the presence of 26 typical love stories. For example, love can resemble in every respect a close or long journey, or develop as a play according to a pre-written script with well-known role-playing tasks, or be like a humor joke, a cookbook, an investment business, gardening, etc.

“Love and, for example, collecting. How do you want to understand it?” – a reasonable question from a romantic-minded reader is heard. Perhaps, in the most impartial way: if you collect a lot of images of love sitting in the minds of American ordinary people, then you don’t need Sherlock Holmes’s deduction to take the dry residue from them and decompose it into piles, and attach an advertising label “Love Collectors” to one of them.

However, even Sternberg’s improved duplex theory of love leaves out of psychological models the key questions of love relationships about its driving force and ultimate goal. These questions became the focus of parallel studies on the psychology of love motivation, and their results were not slow to take shape in a separate theory of love.

R. Sternberg’s duplex theory of love

The formation of love triangles in partners as a result of social learning and perception of love prototypes, embodied in typical love stories.