Demystifying Love

Plain Talk for the Mental Health Professional

Stephen B. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135913793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Intended primarily for mental health professionals, Demystifying Love deals plainly with topics rarely written about for clinicians. The book discusses in a small package highly readable and useful topics, such as love (as both noun and verb), psychological intimacy, sexual desire, as well as infidelity, both in background concepts and clinical guidelines.

As the book shows, love is the logical point of departure for a clinical understanding of sexuality and its problems. It is the most conventional framework for understanding sexual behaviors, the one that is broadly endorsed across many cultures, often as the ideal context for sexual expression. The book integrates an analysis of love in patients dealing with intimacy, sexual desire, infidelity, forgiveness and reconciliation. Detailed with compelling case studies, the author's skill as a therapist comes through in the discussion of these topics—many of which are at the heart of numerous couple problems.

In creating this illuminating work for mental health professionals, Dr. Levine may have underestimated its appeal. Dr. Levine's ability to shed light on our internal processes as we love and attempt to be loved throughout life may prove to be of interest to a far broader audience.

1. The Nouns of Love

Love is a noun and a verb, a thing and an action, a concept and an organized set of behaviors, and a subject that clinicians generally avoid. This avoidance is strange to me because love seems to be vital to us at every stage of our lives. I find it impossible to think about human developmental psychology, mental health, and psychopathology without making reference to maternal love, paternal love, friendship, sibling love, love of God, and love of recreation, vocation, learning, food, or music. The range of love is vast and its processes inherent in our fundamental essence as human beings (Lewis, 1960).

This chapter and the rest of the book are about love relationships that aspire to a lasting sexual relationship, an arena in which I have spent all of my professional life. If anything that derives from my consideration of this confined topic proves applicable to the other forms and processes of love, it will be an unintended bonus.

Romantic love has been carefully studied in behavioral science for several decades (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993; Regan, 2000). Its neurophysiology has more recently begun to be examined with imaging techniques (Aron et al., 2005; Bartels & Zeki, 2000), neuroendocrine measurements, and speculations about pathway activations (Esch & Stefano, 2005). Despite these and other impressive modern works (Gilligan, 2003) and enthusiastic journalistic interpretations of them (Gottlieb, 2006; Slater, 2006), sexual love, perhaps because it is supposed to last most of a lifetime, is too complicated for the current reach of science. Science is a bit weak-kneed before love because of its intrinsic subjectivity and because so many variables seem to shape its outcomes (Lee, 1988). What follows is not the product of a scientific process of hypothesis generation and testing. It is merely the synthesis of one person’s obsession informed by reading, clinical work, and personal experiences.

What Is This Thing Called Love? The Nine Nouns of Love

I can provide at least eight answers, perhaps nine, to this fundamental question, none of which is the right or most important answer. Taken together, however, the dark mystery of this elusive thing called love begins to be illuminated. Like those academics who have tried and failed, I have no hope of defining love in a succinct sentence (Watts & Stenner, 2005). Each of these meanings of love can be periodically sensed during all stages of adult life.

LOVE IS AN IDEALIZED AMBITION

Love is so intensely celebrated in culture (Jankowiak & Fisher, 1992) that few people can grow up without longing to experience its highly advertised, full-blown version. Along with this aspiration to fall in love comes the ambition to reap love’s many promised long-term rewards. Here are several alternate ways to articulate the specific ambitions inherent in love (Levine, 1998):

1. Love is an ambition to attain a lasting state of interpersonal harmony that will ensure enough contentment that the person will be able to focus on other important matters such as raising healthy children, having a good job or successful career, or enjoying life.

2. Love is the ambition to live a life characterized by mutual respect, behavioral reliability, enjoyment of one another, sexual pleasure and fidelity, psychological intimacy, and a comfortable balance of individuality and couplehood.

3. Love is the ambition to find a partner who will accompany, assist, emotionally stabilize, and enrich us as we evolve, mature, and cope with life’s demands.

When individuals sense they have found the right partner to attain their ambition, they experience a great and lasting excitement. They are often eager to begin a new phase of life as a couple. When they have lived for a long time with someone and feel their lives are close to ideal, they experience a sense of mental stability and say that they are deeply satisfied. What they feel about their partner and about life in general derives from these private meanings. Despite their enviable situation, most people know their situation can change.

The ambition of love has two faces: to be loved and to be able to love another. The strength of these ambitions should not be underestimated. It can persist for a very long time after a partner continues to disappoint. Optimism that tomorrow will be a better day sustains the ambition. Even when the love relationship has been declared a failure, the twin faces of the ambition often continue to operate. The ambition to love and to be loved is not readily exchanged for a lesser set of expectations — although sometimes the partner is exchanged.

LOVE IS AN ARRANGEMENT — A DEAL

All adult sexual relationships are deals — quid pro quo exchanges of hopes, expectations, and assets. The social process for arranging such a deal is called dating or courtship. During courtship, the minds of the two people are often privately preoccupied with the answers to the question, “What will this person bring to my life?” The question can be asked about many dimensions: social, economic, aesthetic, recreational, sexual, medical, time-to-death, and more.

Young people in their first relationships generally do not prefer to think in these terms. They think more romantically and are often too embarrassed to admit that they thought about the specific assets of the partner. Their embarrassment dissipates with age and the accumulation of experiences in subsequent relationships. Love as a deal can be clearly perceived after a relationship is ended by breakup, divorce, or death and the person begins with someone new. During the second (or third or fourth) time around people are often able to weigh the factors that will determine their involvement. Not only do they carefully consider potential partners’ assets, they are able to discuss their analysis of the potential arrangement with friends.

When we refer to love as a deal, we mean that the person accepts the arrangement — the exchange of assets. Each person perceives what has been offered by the partner. Of course, perceptions vary in accuracy. While there can be a lot of excitement in anticipation of making a deal, once the deal is formally accepted, people often feel a celebratory degree of pleasure, interest, and sexual desire, and think that life is good. In some cultures, parents make the deal. The adolescent or adult children only court after they know who their spouse is to be. They then hope to fall in love through courtship and the early processes of marriage.

LOVE IS AN ATTACHMENT

Once the deal has begun to be worked out, love comes to mean a bond or attachment. People weave their psyches together and begin to feel a hunger to be with the other person more. They think of themselves as belonging with and to the other. Mental couplehood begins in the minds of two individuals early in the relationship though not necessarily at the same rate or to the same extent. Sexual activities, particularly those that involve orgasm, facilitate the private sense of attachment, and the attachment induces strong motivation to attain love’s ambitions.

LOVE IS A MORAL COMMITMENT

Society has a great interest in love. After the deal is made, most people seriously think about marriage and a marriage ceremony. The rituals that sanctify marriage emphasize love as a moral commitment. While the clergy may be uncertain that the ambitions of love can actually be attained on earth, they teach the couple that love is a commitment to try to realize love’s grand ambitions. The charming emotions that occur in the bride and groom and their families during the ceremony are only the internal music that accompanies the public promise of two people to honor and cherish each other through all of life’s vicissitudes. The ceremony officially raises the bar of expectations; the new spouses are expected to honor their vows. Whether religious or secular, the ceremony instantly restructures life and generates a new set of obligations. Love as a moral commitment begins as a strong set of obligations for a lifetime.

People vary in how seriously they take their vows. Those who are very serious will feel painful and persistent guilt when they contemplate extramarital affairs and divorce, even many years after the marriage ceremony. The moral nature of the commitment is more excruciatingly felt when unhappily married parents grapple with the agonizing dilemma between their commitment to provide their children with two live-in parents and the wish to be free of unhappiness with their partner.

LOVE IS A MANAGEMENT PROCESS

While a couple’s love exists in the mind of community (“They are a couple”) and between the two attached adults as they relate publicly and privately in ways unique to couples, the most important place that love exists is in the privacy of each partner’s mind.

Many of the positive and, particularly, the negative mental processes involved in loving another person must remain private from the partner. Under ordinary circumstances, we wisely do not share too much of our anger and disappointment about our partner. We intuitively realize that our partner needs the illusion that we do not struggle to love them. It is ironic that both partners tend to believe that it is not a trying struggle to love them, even though each is quite aware how often he or she struggles to love the partner. If our partners knew how much we struggled to contain our anger, disappointment, and regret over the deal we made, they would worry too much and fear the devastating impact of abandonment. We protect them.

Love as a management process is the practical day-to-day work of love. The usual immediate goals of this work are to remain prudent about what one says, to remain diplomatic about how one says it, to maintain perspective about the bigger things in one’s life, and to prevent the partner from realizing what is actually transpiring within one’s mind. Absolute honesty sounds good as a rule, but its interpretation has to be refined in order to not create interpersonal chaos. A husband’s and a wife’s marriage are two separate subjective states — his marriage and her marriage, each of which exists in the privacy of the person’s own mental world.

Love is good self-management in relationship to the beloved. Much of adult life is spent with an awareness of the gap between our private sense of ideal love and our actual experience of our self and our partner in a relationship. The gap is a source of existential distress and, like all subjective distress, is buffered by an array of competing life demands (“I have children to raise”), defense mechanisms (“I keep telling myself that no partner is ideal”), and self-management techniques (“Take a deep breath and focus on your work!”). When the buffering system works, one’s love relationship, while not continuously or completely harmonious, is good enough. The private mental struggle to maintain cooperative, kind behaviors exists in all people, even the happily married.

LOVE IS A FORCE OF NATURE

Love is a force of nature that creates a unity out of two individuals. At a certain time in life it casts our fates together, organizes reproduction, and remains vital to our adult growth and development and to the maturation of our children. This love is a skeleton that supports the sexual and nonsexual processes of our lives (Lear, 1990). It is not unlike the forces that organize reproduction in other animals. It can be studied both in terms of an individual’s biologic processes and in terms of how collections of individuals behave (Crews, 1998). We humans, after all, have a great deal in common with each other. This force of nature acts upon us without a constant awareness of its presence. It is most pleasingly discussed at the beginning of relationships when people are happily amazed at the transformations in their lives that their new arrangement has brought about. But it can also be seen at the other end of the life cycle when people stay together because they have always been together, even though all the forces that brought them together have long since vanished. Older people often recognize that their partner is now an inextricable part of themselves and that they can never be psychologically free of the partner. Nature — the underlying biological force that brought them together socially — gave them culturally approved tasks that kept them together, and now having slowly attenuated their capacities, has had its way with them.

LOVE IS A TRANSIENT EMOTIONAL STATE

Love is not a feeling but a combination of two, and sometimes three or more feelings. The basic two are pleasure and interest. The third more variable feeling is sexual arousal. When I declare that I love the book I am reading, you can assume I feel pleasure and interest in it. When I sincerely state that I feel love for a person I may mean that I sometimes have sexual inclinations as well.

In order to understand love as a transient emotional state rather than a feeling, we must understand that the words feeling and emotion are not synonyms. A feeling is a simple experience of sadness, anger, disappointment, aversion, pleasure, or interest. An emotion is built from feelings but is more complex and consists of two or more simultaneous feelings. Feelings and emotions alert us to the meanings of events and processes within our relationships. They are our first warning system for the changes in our external and interpersonal environment.

Two separate patterns explain emotions. First, emotions exist because events typically create more than one feeling. Anything important to us typically creates an array of feelings. When a woman, for instance, learns that her newly beloved thinks about her in the same terms and declares his wish to marry her, her feelings might consist of pleasure to the point of joy, interest to the point of fascination, pride in being highly valued, gratitude, sexual arousal, and awe. Yes, she may be described as having the feeling of happiness, but this simple summary does not capture the separate feelings that she is experiencing, their fluctuating intensities, or their individual time courses.

Second, emotion is created because we humans have feelings about our feelings. Consider this example: A child of a certain age can experience envy. But, when a child is taught that it is wrong to feel envy, the subsequent experience of envy may evoke anxiety from the guilt of feeling something of which a parent disapproves. If the parent is watching while envy occurs, the child may experience shame as well. In this child, an initial simple feeling of envy has become an emotion comprised of envy, anxiety, guilt, and possibly shame. All of us can experience the simple feeling of envy. The emotion of envy, however, varies among us based on our attitude toward envy. Your envy may be an unencumbered feeling while mine can be a complex guilt- and anxiety-provoking array.

Here is a second example of how family and culture create emotion out of simple feeling. A religious middle-aged man averts his gaze when he sees an attractive woman, feels guilty and anxious, and tries to redirect his thoughts to his wife. He explains that this is the proper way of handling his sinful response to another woman. His mere aesthetic appreciation of another woman — a simple feeling of pleasure f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halfitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Nouns of Love
• 2. The Verbs of Love
• 3. Professional Humility and the Erotic Transference
• 4. The Path to Love: Psychological Intimacy
• 5. Sexual Desire: Simplicity and Complexity
• 6. Infidelity: Vital Background Concepts
• 7. Infidelity: The Work of the Therapist
• 8. Love Is Connection-Disconnection-Reconnection
• References
• Index