Representations of love in the early stages of love

Western myth of romantic love and its current form

In his important book, Love in the Western World (1972), Denis de Rougemont examined the nature of passion-love (amour passion), which in the Western world has an antagonistic relationship with marital love. De Rougement considers passion and marriage to be incompatible; their parallel existence leads to irresolvable problems and conflicts that endanger “every one of our social safeguards” (de Rougemont, 2001, p. 213^[3]). His rejection of adulterous passion-love is based not on the fact that it ignores the moral imperatives of Christian tradition, but on the malignant effects of a burning passion that brings suffering, tragedy and the risk of death. He thought the myth of Tristan and Isolde, with their passionate adulterous love affair and its tragic ending to be crucial in this respect. The persistence of this myth in romances and more recently in films has resulted in Western lyrics being enthused with amorous passion: “it swoops upon powerless and ravished men and women in order to consume them in a pure flame; … it is stronger and more real than happiness, society or morality” (de Rougemont, 2001, p. 21). Yet Western literature tells us nothing about happy love. The force of passion-love derives from the fact that it cannot be fully realised. Its energy grows as it becomes laden with obstacles; all the things that stand in the way of this love simultaneously foster and sanctify it. But de Rougemont also pointed out it was unreal under conditions of liberty: “The spontaneous ardour of a love crowned and not thwarted is essentially of short duration. It is a flare-up doomed not to survive the effulgence of its fulfillment. But its branding remains…”. (de Rougemont, 2001, p. 42).

In his exploration of contemporary forms of love, Giddens introduces a more up-to-date concept: that of “a pure relationship”—a relationship of emotional and sexual equality between partners. The contemporary democratised form of love owes its origins to older concepts. While the passion-love of the past showed itself to be uncontrollable and even dangerous, romantic love was more stable and became an appropriate unit of cohabitation. Romantic love incorporated elements of Christian moral values, absorbing passion-love and becoming a form of cultivated love (Giddens, 1992). It ceased to be an unreal enchantment and became a potential route to controlling the future, a form of psychological security for those entering into it. For the majority of the normal population love was associated with marriage; couples today are increasingly connected in what is referred to as a partnership. Giddens (1992) defines a pure relationship as one “entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it”. The distant echoes of romantic love brush up against pure relationships and come together in “confluent love”. This latter involves the partners being open with one another, and it is an active, conditional kind of love. It evolves only to the extent that intimacy evolves; in so far as one partner is prepared to reveal their anxieties and needs to the other, and to expose their vulnerabilities. It and erotic love constitute the core of the relationship and the ability to provide mutual sexual satisfaction within it is decisive, determining whether it continues to exist or to die. In a confluent relationship, erotic love forms the core, and the capacity for mutual sexual satisfaction is crucial, determining its continued existence or demise.

However, research findings (D. Marková, 2012) show that in Slovakia, Giddens’s concept of a “pure relationship” is still by and large an idealistic partner relationship. His premise that pure relationships are not based on external criteria, institutions, exterior norms or duties and dependency, but on mutual feelings and emotional gains does not seem to be an accurate reflection of the Slovak reality. It is true that the research found that partners wanted good quality relationships, communication and so forth, but external criteria, obligations and so on were also relevant, indicating that there is still a tendency to favour traditional relationships in Slovakia. As far as value preferences are concerned, D. Marková (2014, 2015a, 2015b,) found a variety of moral preferences in sexual and partner relationships, but also that the prevailing moral ideal in sexual and partner relations is a relationship based on values such as love, fidelity and responsibility. This ideal also included some of the emotional and relational aspects of Giddens’s partnership, such as emotional understanding, trust, mutual respect, openness, intimacy and closeness.

Concept of Christian love

The concept of Christian love is common in Slovakia. A glance at the Slovak national library catalogues, which contain the most representative collection of publications found in Slovak libraries, shows that Christian love is the second largest theme after literature.

There are two main kinds of love in Christianity: “love thy neighbour as thyself” and marital love. The agape concept of love—love for thy neighbour—comes from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and is found in Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity. The Judaeo-Christian concept of neighbourly love is found in the Old Testament and in the Torah. This basic concept of the value and importance of love for our neighbours is found in all the holy books of these three religions. Nonetheless, it has a specific meaning in Christianity. Agape is described as the love God gives to man first in the expectation that he will give the same love to those around him. In the New Testament love takes on a new quality in the Jewish commandment “love they neighbour”. Here it is no longer simply a command meaning love thy neighbour from the same tribe (Nygren, 1953, Aslanian, 2018), but has been extended to embrace the concept of the universal neighbour. The command to love thy neighbour refers to all “others” and exhorts us to let the differences between us and others dissolve away (Steinhouse, 2013).

According to Možný (1990, p. 64) “the fact that Christianity defined the relationship between husband and wife as love is its most important historical contribution”. Marital love means that a man should love his wife as he does his own body. The man is responsible for his wife’s spiritual wellbeing. Love means taking responsibility for the happiness and therefore the spiritual wellbeing of the other. This kind of love need not be erotic; nor should it be egotistic or hedonistic. But in essence erotic love was driven out of marriage (Možný, 1990).

Popular psychological concepts of love

One of the most important sources of representations of love is psychology, a field where a great deal of research and theorising has been done on love (Masaryk, 2012). In Slovak the psychological aspects of love are most frequently found in the books of E. Fromm, J. Sternberg, J. Willi, I. Štúr, M. Plzák, and more recently J. Prekopová (Slovak national bibliography) and others. We will now look more closely at the first two examples which are more prominent in the Slovak environment.

Sternberg (1995, 2008) bases his theory around the fact that people have a specific idea about love (they have their own story of love), and they expect their own relationship to resemble it. If both partners have the same idea of that story, then no matter how peculiar the relationship, or even absurd to others, their shared story—their love—will work. But if their ideas of the story differ, the relationship will begin to fall apart, no matter how harmoniously it develops or seems to others. Sternberg begins from the Kantian premise that it is impossible to know the definitive essence (truth), and then goes on state that in reality fact cannot be clearly separated from fiction, because we adjust the facts of the relationship to reflect our own personal fictions. Although we may feel we are gradually getting to know our partner better, that need not be the case. It could be that we are creating a story that has less and less in common with what that person is really like. The process of getting to know the other person affects the ideas, feelings and wisdoms that we have acquired along with our emotional baggage from the past. Sternberg thinks that in principle our stories are influenced by the environment and culture in which we live, so our stories can change over time and across space. We spend our whole lives listening to and being aware of various stories about love, and we can draw on all these stories when we create our own ones.

Fromm thought love was the only true and permanent solution to questions about the depths of a person’s essence, and that is the need “to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness” (1956, p. 9). This feeling of separation and the finality of natural laws causes people to feel anxious about being excluded. None of these solutions, however, are permanent or even complete, since they do not ensure a true connection with other people. This human need can only be fully realised, thought Fromm, through love and by becoming one with another person (p. 29). He considers love to be an activity and so falling or “standing in” love (p. 22) is impossible. Love’s most basic characteristic is giving not taking, but giving, he warns, is often misunderstood to be a process whereby you have to forfeit something or make a sacrifice. In love giving without getting anything in return brings joy. Erotic (partner) love is exclusive, unlike fraternal or maternal love. It is an act of will. It is the decision to devote the rest of your life to another person. Fromm notes that a degree of confusion entered twentieth century perceptions of love, with love being seen as an object problem rather than a skill problem. People search for the right object so they can be loved, but what is essential, according to Fromm, is realising that love is an art (a skill) and that it has to be mastered just like any other skill (Fromm, 1956).

Research questions

We asked the following research questions: what knowledge, ideas, beliefs and images of love do young people have based on their initial experiences of partner relationships? Which of these are common among young people, which dominate and which are individual? How are they structured? What sources do young people draw on in articulating them?

Method

Bearing in mind the above research questions and our use of social representations theory as a theoretical framework, and given that social representations of love is an under-researched area, we decided to adopt an explorative research plan.

In her research on social representations Plichtová (2002) recommends the researcher should begin by investigating the ideas of specific individuals and how these are embedded in everyday existence. In our study we adopted an inductive approach, in which we used a thematic content analysis beginning with the individual responses, definitions and experiences of love and working our way to more general categories.

The research tool was a questionnaire survey with open questions. We electronically distributed an anonymous questionnaire to which respondents could answer freely. In it young people were asked: 1. What they thought love was, or what they thought suggested love, given what they had observed in their social milieu 2. Which associations, memories, did they make or have in relation to love 3. Had they come across works of art or artistic performances that represented love^[4] and lastly 4. How would they briefly explain what love was to someone. In this research we analysed the written responses to questions 1, 2 and 4, which target the social and individual representations; question 3 was not part of this analysis.

Research sample

The research participants were 264 full-time students at five higher education institutions in Slovakia (Bratislava, Trnava, Banská Bystrica, Nitra and Prešov). The vast majority of the respondents were women (91.7%). The most frequent subjects studied were: education—general (33.7%), psychology (9.5%), ethics, ethics education (7.5%), media studies (5.3%), languages (4.9%), education—subject-based (4.9%) and social work (4.2%). The percentage of research participants declaring they were religious was 78.4%. Regarding sexual orientation, 95.8% stated they were heterosexual, 2.7% bisexual and 0.8% homosexual. The majority were single and in a relationship (64.4%), while 32.3% were single and not in a relationship, and 3.4% were married. The participants were most likely to have had two partner relationships (27.3%), followed by one (26.1%), three (16.7%) and four (12.1%). The most frequent number of short-term partner relationships was one (27.7%), followed by none (25.0%), two (17.4%) and three (6.4%). Most were or had been involved in one longterm partner relationship (48.5%), followed by two (21.6%), none (9.5%) and three (6.4%). Participants with children represented 1.5% of the sample.

Method of analysis

We considered a thematic content analysis to be the most suitable theoretical framework and inductive approach for the analysis in this research. Within described epistemology, an inductive thematic analysis (ITA) was proved to be a suitable approach (Braun & Clark, 2006). In practical terms, we focused on the “bottom-up way”, i.e. the identification and coding of themes emerging from the text. In the final stage of the analysis we looked for the structure of the themes based on the content and language connections.

In the first phase, researchers conducted an initial marking of text passages (initial coding). Individual passages of text were assigned a number of codes. During the coding process, researchers coordinated their codes. At this stage, 44 different love themes were identified. The data coding was performed by four students (first stage only) who had attended a course on data methodology and processing, and two researchers (the authors of this article). In the first stage of coding the six of us independently analysed the first 25 respondents’ answers and then the second 25. Meetings were held during the coding process to ensure there was agreement on the coding (92% at the end of the first coding stage). The remaining responses were coded independently by student pairs and the senior researchers also coded a selection. The codings were then compared at meetings (agreement of 87%– 95%).

Then in the second phase the two researchers independently created the second order categories which were again compared, recategorised and categories were joined together. Where the categories were unclear we returned to the initial responses, and so forth. In the end, the researchers agreed on 38 categories that captured the meaning of the clusters of love obtained from the research sample. The results of this analysis are in Table 1.

In the third phase based on similarities in the content and language of the themes two researchers selected themes that formed a coherent and structured line. This led to the creation of Diagram 1.

Diagram 1

Individual social representations of love among higher education students: lines and structure^[6]

Variety and structure of representations of love

The analysis revealed 38 representations of love. New representations were still being found towards the end of the coding process. This may be an instance of the dialogicality of thinking, described by I. Marková, who states that dialogic thinking is characterised by polyphasia, that is, the multifaceted or even oppositional nature of thinking. One of our categories reflects this multifaceted aspect (19). Even in our case it seems that cognitive polyphasia leads to the use of varied and often very distinctive ways of thinking and types of knowledge, such as popular science (love as emotion), ordinary sharing (e.g. love as reciprocity and love as togetherness), religious (love=God) and metaphor (looking for the heart’s other half). This could also be an example of Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia of language that relates to divergent styles of speech stemming from the infinite openness of language in various specific situations” (I. Marková, 2007, pp. 152-153). The young people described love as an encounter between two people who feel the same way, as the communion of two souls and two bodies or the joining of two hearts. Karandashev and Clapp (2015) also refer to a similar breadth of representations of love, although they call them mental representations. Their dimensions of these representations of love that resemble our representations are affection, comfort, commitment, communion, companionship, concern, elation, empathy, forgiveness, intimacy, obsession, protection, reciprocity, sharing, trust and understanding. The wide range of representations of love clearly relates to the breadth and changing nature of partner relationships and sexual lifestyles (Lukšík & D. Marková, 2012; D. Marková, 2012, 2015a, b). One of the lines of representations of love—passionate and socialised love—largely linked to personal experience, is only weakly influenced by normative social instruments, bringing it closer to Giddens’s “pure relationships”, particularly the aspects we labelled reciprocity and togetherness.

Our results do not appear to support Sternberg’s concept of love (Sternberg, 2008), in which ideas on love are considered to be holistic, intuitively story-based, illogical and spontaneous. Although our respondents’ answers were shaped by the questionnaire method we used, only in exceptional cases, when they have to characterise love, do young people give stories as examples. Nor did we find many connections with Sternberg’s 27 love stories, other than stories of self-sacrifice and of dependence. But we should note that young people of this age still have limited experience, and stories require time to develop. In addition to time the protagonists need both the maturity and the ability to identify and name the specific features of a relationship. These often become clear only once they have arisen in other relationships.

In addition to finding a rich array of social and individual representations of love among young people, we also identified the structure connecting the various representations. Three lines of representations were found: 1. Physical closeness and being in tune, 2. Transcendental love, and 3. Inner harmony and meaning. Each of these contained dominant representations such as love as sentiment, physical love, reciprocity, love as a norm, commitment, and love as inner harmony; and further smaller representations can be linked to these or develop from these (Diagram 1). It is only through further research that we will be able to establish whether these three lines are in some way connected to the basic themes or social representations of love. In this research we did not explore the opposite representations that might constitute these themes (I. Marková, 2007). However, opposites such as self-love versus personal or transcendental love, love as being in tune versus love as a struggle could be examples of these.

Sources of social representations

Although our analysis of sociocultural sources of love is just preliminary, it has revealed some connections to contemporary forms of the Western myth of love as well as to Christian love and psychological conceptions of love (in this case E. Fromm’s). The strong representations of love we identified among young people can be arranged into three lines that correspond to the sociocultural sources of love analysed. The first line—physical closeness, being in tune, —is compared to the written source, a more physical, emotional and socialised type of love than the tragic passion-love described by de Rougemont (1972). The love of passionate flaming is close to the meanings of love as state of ecstasy and fleeting love. This line is closer to what Giddens (1992) describes as a “pure relationship” relating to similar meanings of love, like reciprocity, togetherness, and relationship in particular.

With the meanings of love as a relationship and bond and love as co-creation, this line is interconnected with the second line of individual social representations—transcendental love. The second, line transcendental love may only marginally refer to marital love and not at all to “love thy neighbour” love, but it has a number of indirect features that show it is linked to Christian love. Love is defined as being a commitment to faithfulness, devotion, respect and so forth, and it is also prosocial or social in a positive sense and contains representations of love such as certainty and security, often expressed using the mother–child image. The question is to what extent this line of representations of love is simply the ideal norm and to what extent it is real life, as D. Marková (2012, 2015a, b) has pointed out. The third inner harmony and meaning, where we placed love as inner harmony, liberating, prosocialness and love as a decision is closer to Fromm’s concept of love.