Cap I

- Love is an idealized ambition

↳ to attain a state of interpersonal harmony so you will be able to focus on
other important matters: children, job, career, enjoying life
↳ to live a life characterized by mutual respect, sexual pleasure, fidelity,
intimacy
↳ to find a partner who will assist, accompany... and enrich us as we evolve,
mature and cope with life's demands

- Love is an arrangement, a deal

↳ the social places for arranging such a deal is called dating or courtship.
↳ "What will this person bring to my life?"
↳ dimensions: social, economic, sexual, medical, recreational
↳ love as a deal, that means the person accepts the arrangement - the
exchange of assets.

- Love is an attachment
↳ people begin to feel a hunger to be with the other person more

- Love is a moral commitment

↳ marriage

- Love is a management process

↳ the practical day-to-day work of love
↳ 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.

- Love is a force of nature

↳ at the beginning of relationships, people are happily amazed at the
transformations in their lives
↳ at the end of the life cycle people stay together because they have
always seem together, even though all the forces that brought them
together have long since vanished.

- Love is a transient emotional state

↳ love is not a feeling but a combination of 2, and sometimes 3 or more
feelings: pleasure & interest + sexual arousal
 Feeling ≠ Emotion

→ a feeling is a simple experience of sadness, anger, disappointment, pleasure,

interest etc.
→ an emotion is built from feelings but is more complex and consists of 2 or
more simultaneous feelings
→ 2 separate patterns explain emotions:
→ emotions exists because events typically create more than one feeling
→ emotion is created because we humans have feelings about our
feelings
↳ Example: a child experience envy. When a child it 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
⇒ a simple feeling of envy → emotion comprised of envy, anxiety, guilt,
shame

- Love is an illusion
↳ we create love by internal private process, maintain it by prudent diplomatic
dishonesty and can lose it for our partner without the partner knowing it.
↳ self-perceptions as loving and as be loved can prove to be inaccurate.
↳ society, through its educational and religious institutions encourage us to
behave as though we all know what is.

- Love as a stop sign

↳ many people state that they love their partners, but they find it hard to explain
if asked "why?"
↳ the motive for the stop sign is an unwillingness to think about the question.
This protects the person from confronting the illusory aspects of his or her
love.

Cap 2
- Staying in love is the product of 2 ongoing, hidden mental activities: appraisal
(evaluare) and bestowal (daruire)
- Partners notice our behaviours, give them meanings, and depending on what they
perceive they feel pleasure, admiration, disappointment or anger.
- As we understand ourselves better, we may cease to be as critical of the partner for
traits that we possess.
- Staying in love is in large part the result of what happens in the privacy of one's
conscious mind; perspective is the key.
- Concepts about staying in love:
1. Genuineness:
• re-meeting of 2 people at the point of their genuineness (sharing our
thinking, emotions and the pleasure or pain from the consequences of our
decisions)
• requires the ability to be psychologically intimate with another.
2. Overcoming narcissism: the ability to put him or herself second at times
3. Negotiation:
• decisions are discussed, options weighed, and each persons's wishes are
taken into account
• to get one's needs met, people have to make them clear in a calm, direct
fashion.

Cap 3
- The partner's personality is often the issue behind the issue.

Cap 4
- Psychological intimacy begins with a person's ability to share her or his inner
experience with another. This capacity rests upon 3 separate abilities:
a) the capacity to know what one feels and thinks;
b) the willingness to explain it to another;
c) the skill to express the feelings and the ideas with words:
- Psychological intimacy is a form of nurturance, support, and connection which can
come to be highly valued by the patient. The patient experiences pleasure in seeing
the therapist, shows a great interest in therapist, and feels an important attachment.
In other settings, such private responses would be called love.
- All psychological intimacies can provoke erotization
- Some individuals who are new to intimate conversations may have fear about their
intense responses to their new friend. The power of the excitement of a new
psychological intimacy with a friend can be strikingly similar to the power of the
imaginative burst of falling in love.
- In order for tea-sided psychological intimacy to fully blossom, periodic sharing of
aspects of the inner self is required.
- Sexual desire is severely limited by the absence of psychological intimacy.
Cap 5
- Sexual drive and motivation are not necessarily in sync (people who are too angry,
fearful, disappointed, or alienated to make love to their partners)
- Behavioral fidelity and mental infidelity (one cannot live a long life, even when
happily married, without an occasional extramarital mental excursion)

Cap 8
- Over time, love is a process of fluctuating degrees of emotional connection.
- Love is a continuous process of sharing same aspects of the self with another.
- Love is a process of connection
- Connection → Disconnection → Reconnection