Читать книгу Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love - Yury Tomin - Страница 8

In a state of love, intimate relationships also develop, which include such emotional experiences as closeness, connectedness, bondedness. We can say that feelings of intimacy are formed from the sensation of a common inner space. In this area of experience, feelings permeated with warmth are born and poured out on loved ones. In a narrow sense, intimacy boils down to a frank relationship and understanding of each other. If we take into account the tacitly implied conditions of intimacy, then it should include acceptance, trust, respect, honesty, support, care.

In the transformation of the personality of lovers, intimate relationships play an important role. In particular, the determining factor for the expansion of the Self is the process of deepening openness to each other. Partners share with each other their innermost thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Also, such personality traits and qualities are revealed that have not yet settled down, are, as it were, in the project. Exposing the innermost has two sides. It allows you to gain determination and confidence in the embodiment of your aspirations according to the principle: “He called himself a load – climb into the back” but also puts lovers in a vulnerable position – the gap between word and deed can greatly devalue your image in the eyes of your partner, and misunderstanding or indifference on his part can clip the wings of your castles in the air.

To a certain extent, intimacy includes all three components of empathy – conscious or unconscious feeling of understanding that can arise in relation to any person. In a state of love, the ability to empathy, in other words, sensitivity to each other’s inner world, is involuntarily activated and becomes an important but fragile tool for deepening intimacy. Experiencing empathy, the lover understands what his partner is feeling, he begins to mirror and feel similar feelings and anticipates what the partner’s actions might be in such an emotional state.

It’s easy to see that intimacy fuels passion. In extreme cases, for people living with impulses of heart, like Goethe’s Werther, the awareness of their high sensitivity to the requests of their beloved and the ability to respond to them with all their heart decisively convinces them that only they are capable of making happiness for the beloved. It is only one step from here to the desire for complete and undivided possession of a partner, which only ignites the already raging passion.

In enjoying intimacy, it is important to be aware of the fact that this component of love has its limits. Despite the vivid feelings and attractive epithets about unity as one whole, about dissolution in each other, one should remember, no matter how sad it may seem, about the inevitability of a certain distance between lovers.

Moreover, it is this distance that allows us to keep and maintain feelings of attraction and romantic fantasies, that is, what we mean by passion. The content of this experience is expertly presented in the brilliant poem by Anna Akhmatova:

Now, having formed an idea of the content of love and its main components, we can, together with Stendhal, look at the laws of the dynamics of love, its glimpses, the birth, formation, and triumph of love.

Formula of intimacy: Shared interior space = [openness + comprehension] ± [trust + respect + honesty + support + care]