Passion and love: what are relationships built on?

If in heaven there is only talk about the sea, as the heroes of the film “Knocking on Heaven's Door” claim, then on earth there is talk only about love. You probably have to be very original not to write about this on the eve of Valentine's Day. Let's talk about love and passion!
For many people, these two concepts are identical, they are periodically confused, but from the point of view psychological health and healthy relationships, this is fraught with problems. This endless confusion occurs because often these two feelings occur in parallel.

If we now try to define “love,” we will have to publish a multi-volume book with hundreds of thousands of text, and add terabytes of video and audio materials. Therefore, let's focus on the differences between love and passion, and we will rely only on some theses.

Dictionary “Ozhegova” Love defines as a strong feeling of deep affection, selfless and sincere affection. A passion like an ardent desire.

These two conflicting definitions will help us distinguish between these feelings. Love is based on intimacy, while passion is purely on desire.

Passion- a person’s lust that is uncontrollable and has a significant impact on his thinking and behavior.

E. Fromm argued that instincts, or natural drives, are rooted in the physiological needs of a person, while human passions are rooted in his character. In other words: instincts are a response to a person’s physiological needs, while passions are a response to his existential needs. E. Fromm distinguished between rational passions (for example, love) and irrational passions (greed, vanity, etc.). Rational passions are viable. They lead to a person’s self-affirmation, enhance his sense of joy, contribute to the manifestation of his integrity and give meaning to his life. Irrational passions, on the contrary, interfere with a person’s life, undermine his strength, lead to duality and loss of the meaning of life. A person is possessed by such passions as the need for love, tenderness, solidarity, freedom, truth, on the one hand, and the thirst for power, submission, destruction, on the other. All these and many other passions lead him through life, become the cause of worries and anxieties, and are the source that feeds dreams, myths, legends, religions, art, and literature.

What is at the heart of the relationship?

In the context of talking about relationships and love, we, of course, consider first of all love passion. The reason for such passion lies in the biochemistry of the body. The first thing we notice in the object of our attraction is bodily sympathy; this is where our unconscious ideals of beauty come into play. The second is the smell produced by the pheromone, which is recognized by an organ on the wall of the sinuses. Therefore, one person’s smell for us looks like “mine, attracts”, while another, on the contrary, “is not mine”.

Passion is a feeling that causes very strong emotions due to the powerful release of adrenaline and neurotrophins into the blood, which act like a drug. That's why we like to experience attraction so much.

For a person, this feeling is like a long-awaited, fresh breath, giving an incredible amount of strength, a storm of emotions, and an incredible increase in motivation.

Have you already been impressed by this explosive mixture of biochemistry and mental processes? But unlike animals, we make decisions using reason and logic. You can give in to passions (such is human nature), but whether to give in to passions is an ethical and psychological question for everyone.

Relationships based on passion

In a relationship based on passion, satisfying your desires comes first. In this state, we want to experience bright love emotions, to be with another, but we do not want to get attached. These two opposing forces create tension, a barrier that prevents you from seeing and accepting the other. If passion fills the entire space of a relationship, it will destroy it and ultimately lead to loneliness. In pursuit of passions, we are unable to accept the warmth and care of another. Often independent people are victims of their passion: the relationship brought pain and disappointment, and now unexperienced passion and fear prevent them from experiencing true love.

Therefore, we can say that in itself with Trust is wonderful, but when it occupies only part of the relationship and is rational. Moreover, the production of neutrophytes lasts no more than two years. Morbid passion, like madness, deprives a person of personality. We seek to absorb the other, denying ourselves. Such a relationship is akin to blackmail, where the question “do you love me?” is constantly heard, although in fact the person orders “love me!”

There may be passion in love, but in passion there is no place for love.

Relationships based on love

What can we say about love? The first is undoubtedly a more lasting feeling than passion. IN healthy relationships there is “I” and there is “YOU”, there are clear boundaries, there is freedom and trust, there is care and warmth, and at the same time there is an amazing feeling of intimacy. It’s not for nothing that I highlighted “healthy relationships”, because there are unhealthy forms of such relationships that tend to be passed off as love. These, for example, include dependent relationships (dependent love). When there are no boundaries between “I” and “YOU”, but there is only one form – “WE”. Such relationships can last for years and bring a lot of suffering in exchange for moments of happiness.

In a love relationship, the happiness and desires of the other are highly valued, and the feelings of the other are respected. Such relationships are always long-term, and like any relationship they inevitably encounter crises. However, in case mutual love, actions are chosen and considered with care, with a desire to agree and find a common solution.

Unfortunately, it's far away not all people had experience unconditional love from his mother, in his parental family, did not know the experience of open, safe and trust relationships. Therefore, in adult life may demonstrate some a surrogate that seems to them like love.

And only a miracle can solve the situation if they meet a truly loving other person and are open enough to learn how to love. In all other cases, it’s purely about working on yourself. In everyday psychology, it is generally accepted that people do not know how to express negative feelings and emotions, and this is why they have problems. But I more often come across another phenomenon, when people do not know how to express feelings of love, and what’s even worse is that they simply do not have the experience of this love.

Learn to separate passion from love, learn to love! Let not only passion cover you, but let there be love in your life!

What is passion?

Passions are very interesting feature human consciousness, and, like with all other similar things, one must be able to handle them correctly.

What is PASSION?

This is the moment when a person’s emotions, in relation to something, some specific object, approach their maximum value. This is a state when emotions begin to go off scale, to boil, all thoughts and desires are directed only towards the desired object.

And look what's special about this. All this boiling and seething is not aimed at GIVE something to the object of desire. Quite the contrary, everything is aimed at ensuring that the desired object GET, attract to yourself, become its owner, owner or master.

All passionate experiences, so well and massively described in various kinds of literature, shown in films, told in stories and legends. All of them occur due to the fact that a person has lost something or someone, or wants to have something or someone despite the prevailing circumstances.

If you calmly decompose all this into its components, then you get the following picture.

Here is a person, he is in a certain process, and he is completely unhappy with the fact that this process does not have one specific component. And until this item or object appears, a person will spend all his capabilities and efforts to obtain it.

How and what is happening around at this moment does not interest a person. He has one task - to passionately get what he wants. Create conditions, situations, opportunities to have this object in your power, at your disposal.

And since all the forces are directed towards the desired object, then there is simply no energy left to analyze what is happening, to accept the situation, or to thank the participants. A person sees only what he wants to see, everything around fades into the background.

Is this object needed, will there be any benefit from its possession, what to do next with this object, is it worth the effort expended, all this is not taken into account. This is all secondary. There is simply not enough energy and attention to answer these questions.

So it turns out that a person, like a horse in blinders, sees only part of what is happening, and only directs his strength there. Passion blinds a person, begins to dictate its terms, a person becomes a toy in its hands. About nothing situation management There can be no question here.

So, gentlemen, before you passionately desire something, think, try to pause and look at yourself from the outside, and then, you see, the passions will subside.

Once you have a passionate desire, that is the most sure sign that the verification of your compliance has begun. Either you blindly succumb to this overwhelming desire and all-consuming feeling, or you find the strength within yourself to calmly analyze and formulate the right actions in the direction you need.

Here the choice is yours, this is your life, your process, your growth.

And, as a rule, this passionate desire, upon calm consideration, is not as necessary and valuable as it seemed at first glance. And, you can calmly either refuse it, or shift the focus to the next task, and this object or event will happen automatically, of course.

And, probably, the only place where you need to be able to completely surrender to passions in all their breadth and completeness is art. This is where you can turn around and convey the depth of the issue to the public as reliably as possible. This could be theater, cinema, music, literature, and various crafts. Here are good and jobs for passion. True, there should be some safety precautions, but that’s a conversation for another article.

P.S. You can receive information about new articles by email.

Passion is a personal experience that we cannot prevent and which we cannot completely overcome. Passion is both opposite and symmetrical to action.

The soul submits to the body, as the classics said, i.e. that part of yourself that does not think or thinks incorrectly. Thus the extreme degree of passion is madness, and its benign form is inclination or inclination. However, most often the word “passion” is used to describe neither the first nor the second, but something in between.

Passion is a state of mind, often expressed very clearly, but at the same time non-autonomous. Descartes could call passion a movement of the soul, arising under the influence of the body, the actions of which it feels (“Passion of the Soul”, part I, § 27-29). Spinoza would probably say that this is an affect, the adequate cause of which the person himself is not (“Ethics”, part III, definition 3; see also “General Definition of Affects”; cf.: Latin text of “Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy”). Hence the passivity of passion, which is not inaction (which is refuted by experience), but imposed action.

Passion is what is stronger in me. Free, voluntary passion ceases to be passion - everyone who has ever experienced passion will agree with this. We do not decide voluntarily that we will fall madly in love, that we will suddenly fall out of love, that we will become a miser or an ambitious person, etc. That's why justice considers passion a mitigating circumstance, and philosophers look down on her. A crime of passion deserves neither severe punishment nor respect.

One often hears that the classics condemned passions, while the romantics, on the contrary, admired them. This approach seems to be a clear simplification. Descartes, for example, believed that “all passions are good by nature, and we should only avoid their bad use or excessive enthusiasm for them”; Moreover, “all the good and evil in this life depend only on the passions,” and people most susceptible to passions are able to experience all their sweetness (“Treatise on the Passions”, part III, § 211 and § 212; a more subtle consideration of the problem is contained in § 147 and § 148). However, passions must be properly controlled, kept in check as necessary and used as much as possible. By these signs we recognize a person of action. Hegel’s words are widely known that “nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion” (“Philosophy of History,” Introduction). This sounds very plausible. But in the same way, nothing great was accomplished without action, and Hegel himself hastens to clarify this in the following lines: “Passion is not a completely suitable word for what I want to express here. Namely, here I mean in general the activity of people, determined by private interests, special goals, or, if you like, selfish intentions, and moreover, in such a way that they invest all the energy of their will and their character into these goals, sacrificing other goals for them, or rather, they even sacrifice... everything else for them” (ibid., introduction).

There is passivity in passion, and it is in this sense that the classics understood it. But passive passion ceases to be a full-fledged passion in the newest sense of the word; it is just a whim or an irresistible attraction. It seems obvious that passion cannot be reduced to love interest, since the second is just one of the forms of the first.

In one of his lectures on passion, Alain reminded students that there are three main types of passion: love, ambition and stinginess. And then he casually commented: “20 years, 40 years, 60 years.” Of course, it was a joke, but one that probably had some truth in it. Each passion has its own age, or rather, each age has its own passion that prevails over others. A 20-year-old miser is as rare as a passionate 60-year-old lover, and such cases should be considered difficult. In any case, passions exist in the plural and not all of them are caused by love. At the same time, any passion implies love. What is ambition if not a special kind of passionate, to the point of obsession, love for power that one does not yet possess? What is stinginess if not the love of money that you have managed to accumulate? In the most general sense, passion is the polarization of desire on a single object (Tristan) or a single type of objects (Don Juan) that one does not possess or whose possession one fears losing. This is the triumph of Eros, or rather, its extreme manifestations. A person possessed by passion remains a prisoner of love for what he does not have (ambitious, selfish, Don Juan), a prisoner of the fear of losing what he already has (a ruler clinging to power, a miser, a jealous person).

Those possessed by passion only look significant, in fact they are like small children who do not want to part with their mother’s breast: either they are looking for a replacement for it, or they are afraid that the moment when they will be weaned will nevertheless come. They love only themselves (they only know how to take and store), and this explains a lot. To free yourself from passion means to outgrow it small child, which weeps bitterly in each of us. This means learning to give and act, i.e. become an adult. This process never ends. Another reason to start it without delay.

, "Passion in relationships

Passion in relationships

“Nothing great has happened without passion and cannot happen without it” Hegel

The disease is mind-blowing!
Half-wild instincts power,
uncontrollable attraction...

Do you know what passion is?
Sizzling thirst!
And I want to fall to my lips -
get drunk enough, at least once...

Do you know what passion is?
It's crazy that it won't happen again!
When you can't stop!
When you can't help but fall,
foreseeing - destined to break...

Passion......What is it? This is a very interesting feature of human consciousness.

This is the moment when a person’s emotions, in relation to something, some specific object, approach their maximum value. This is a state when emotions begin to go off scale, to boil, all thoughts and desires are directed only towards the desired object.

And look what's special about this. All this boiling and seething is not aimed at GIVING something to the object of desire. Quite the contrary, everything is aimed at ensuring that the desired object GET , attract to yourself, become its owner, owner or master.

And what is happening around at this moment does not interest a person. He has one task - to passionately get what he wants. Create conditions, situations, opportunities to have this object in your power, at your disposal.

And since all the forces are directed towards the desired object, then there is simply no energy left to analyze what is happening, to accept the situation, or to thank the participants. A person sees only what he wants to see, everything around fades into the background. And very often, under the influence of this emotion, actions are committed that we may later regret.

All of the above concerns relative general concept passions. But since my site is dedicated to more intimate topics, then Here I speak loudly in defense of this emotion.

You may not agree with me, but in my female opinion, first If, when communicating with a man, a woman sees passion for herself in his eyes, she perceives him as more attractive than a man with a cold gaze.

Well, what can we say about our dear men in this case??? Most of them perceive the female gender first of all as a sexual object - this is nature, and only then as a social one. And that woman in whose eyes there is a spark of passion is more attractive, more desirable, more mysterious))))

Second, that woman who makes love to a man with all passion remains in the man’s memory for a long time. And which woman doesn’t want to leave a mark on a man’s soul?

The concept of "passion" in modern world has turned into a squeezed stamp, which is absolutely necessary for every person in order to be a full-fledged personality. It is believed that it is impossible to live without passion in a relationship, that love fades away without it, people get divorced. But is this true? What is passion in a relationship? And is there really an urgent need for it? Or is the family still built on something else? Let's try to figure this out.

After reading the commentary of any experienced and intelligent woman, we will be convinced that passion is by no means a virtue, but rather a vice, which we definitely should not strive for by force. Of course, every couple sometimes dreams of a spicy relationship, but something spicy can cause you to get cut off and even damage your partner.

What is passion and where to look for the reasons?

Passion is a feeling of a very strong nature, which is usually caused by an acute desire to possess something, regardless of reason and ethical standards. Against the background of passion, everything else fades and dims, and life itself in its essence becomes empty and lifeless.

It doesn’t make the object of passion any better either, because it’s not a desire to love, caress, fulfill desires... but simply the need to possess. Passion goes hand in hand with sexual concern, and a person can... dignity forget.

Passion does not usually arise in relation to something positive, accessible or, conversely, already familiar and from a less than pleasant side. But if there is a mystery in a person, if he seems like a closed book in an attractive cover, then passion arises - the passion to learn more, to touch, to try. Once the opportunity arises to see him/her, it does not provide guarantees for the further development of events, which gives rise to such feelings as:

• Fear;
• Uncertainty;
• Mistrust;
• Waste of strength.

A family built on love, mutual respect, and not on blind passion, guarantees a healthy psychological background.

Passion is like a spice

Of course, passion is not an entirely negative manifestation of feelings. The passionate attraction of spouses for each other, like a hot spice, adds flavor family relations, fuels the fire of family love. And many spouses eventually begin to complain about its absence. Here are some tips to spark your passion.

1. Flirting. So what if you’ve been married for many years, so what if you’re no longer young. Flirting in small doses is good for everyone. This is a reason to forget about everyday life for a while and feel like a conqueror/predator.
2. Replace the word “sex” with some nice allegory, like “strawberries and cream.” Such mystery will excite.
3. Write each other SMSs with erotic content, or just about something intimate or pleasant.
4. Organize joint entertainment such as a joint photo shoot. It will allow you to open up in a new way, realize old fantasies, and just interact for an hour.
5. Change the situation: spend the weekend not on the couch, but, for example, in a park or in the countryside.
6. Assign to your significant other romantic date like in the first days of your acquaintance. And it doesn't matter whether you are a man or a woman.