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Love as a cultural universal. What is the concept of love in different cultures of the world

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Introduction

1. Classification of the forms of love

2. Origins and evolution of the concept of love

3. The meaning of love

4. Love according to Fromm

4.1 Love is the answer to the problem of human existence

4.2 Love between parents and children

4.3 Love objects

Bibliography

Introduction

What is love?

Love is a feeling inherent in a person, a deep affection for another person or object, a feeling of deep sympathy.

Love is one of the fundamental and common themes in world culture and art. Discussions about love and its analysis as a phenomenon go back to the most ancient philosophical systems and literary monuments known to people.

Love is also considered as a philosophical category, in the form of a subjective relationship, an intimate selective feeling directed at the object of love.

The ability to love in higher animals can manifest itself in the form of attachment, complex relationships of a social type within a group, but it is controversial and has not yet been fully confirmed.

Etymology

Russian "love" ascends through other Russian. love to praslav. (same root as the verb "to love"). This word, as well as "blood", "mother-in-law" and many others, belonged to the type of declension na. Already in the Old Russian language, this type fell apart, the lexemes related to it passed into more productive types, at the same time the nominative case was supplanted by the original form of the accusative case love (Pra-Slav.). There is also a hypothesis about the borrowed nature of this word in Russian.

Fundamentals of understanding love Terminology

The complexity and dialectical diversity of love has given rise to a significant number of interpretations of the phenomenon in various languages and cultures throughout the history of human society.

1. Classification of forms of love

The distinction between individual types of love can already be seen in the ancient Greek language: “eros” (other) is spontaneous, enthusiastic love, in the form of reverence directed at the object of love “from the bottom up” and leaving no room for pity or indulgence.

§ "Filia" (ancient Greek) - love-friendship or love-affection, due to social ties and personal choice;

§ "storge" (ancient Greek) - love-tenderness, especially family;

§ "agape" (ancient Greek) - sacrificial love, unconditional love, in Christianity - the love of God for man.

Also, the Greeks distinguished 3 more varieties:

§ "Ludus" - love-game to the first manifestations of boredom, based on sexual desire and aimed at obtaining pleasure.

§ "Mania" (from the Greek "mania" - painful passion) - love-obsession, the basis of which is passion and jealousy. The ancient Greeks called mania "madness from the gods."

§ “Pragma” is rational love, when the experience of this feeling in a person is prompted not by heartfelt affection, but only in selfish interests in order to gain benefits and conveniences.

Subsequently, a number of classifications were developed on this basis, including the concept of six love styles proposed by the Canadian sociologist J. A. Lee: three main styles - eros, storge and ludus, love-game, in their mixtures they give three more - agape , love-mania and rational love-pragma. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov defines love as the attraction of one animate being to another in order to connect with him and mutually replenish life, and distinguishes three of its types:

1. Love that gives more than it receives, or descending love (lat.amor descendens) - he refers to this type of love parental love, mainly maternal love for children. In a person, this love, or the care of the elders for the younger, the protection of the weak by the strong, creates a fatherland and is gradually organized into a national-state way of life.

2. Love that receives more than it gives, or ascending love (lat. amor ascendens) - he refers to this type of love the love of children for their parents, as well as the affection of animals for their patrons, especially the devotion of pets to humans. In a person, in his opinion, this love can also extend to deceased ancestors, and then to more general and distant causes of being (before universal providence, the one Heavenly Father), and is the root of all religious development of mankind.

3. Love that gives and receives equally, or sexual love (lat. amor aequalis) - he refers to this type of love the love of spouses for each other, as well as a stable relationship between parents in other species of animals (birds, some animals, etc.). P.). In a person, this love can reach the form of perfect fullness of life reciprocity and through this become the highest symbol of the ideal relationship between the personal principle and the social whole.

Solovyov emphasizes that in the Bible the relationship between God (including in the person of Christ and the Church) and the people he has chosen is depicted mainly as a marital union, from which he concludes that the ideal beginning of social relations, according to Christianity, is not power, but love. . Solovyov also writes that from the point of view of ethics, love is a complex phenomenon, consisting of:

1. Pity, prevailing in parental love;

2. Reverence (pietas), which prevails in the love of children for their parents and the religious love that follows from it;

3. Feelings of shame, combined with the first two elements, form the human form of sexual or conjugal love.

2. Origins and evolution of the concept of love

In the history of religions, love has twice taken precedence: as a wild elemental force of sexual desire - in pagan phallism (still preserved in some places in the form of organized religious communities, such as, for example, Indian Saktists with their sacred pornographic writings, tantras), and then , in contrast to this, as the ideal beginning of spiritual and social unity - in Christian agape.

Naturally, in the history of philosophy, too, the concept has occupied a prominent place in various systems. For Empedocles, love (Greek) was one of the two principles of the universe, namely, the principle of universal unity and wholeness (integration), the metaphysical law of gravity and centripetal motion. For Plato, love is the demonic (connecting the earthly world with the divine) striving of a finite being for the perfect fullness of being and the resulting “creativity in beauty” (see Platonism). This aesthetic meaning of love was left unattended in patriotic and scholastic philosophy. Plato, in his treatise "Feast", introduces a significant formulation about the connection between love and knowledge. Love is a process of continuous movement. Platonic eros is the eros of knowledge.

According to Aristotle, the purpose of love is friendship, not sensual attraction. Aristotle proposed to define the concept of love in this way: “to love means to wish someone what you consider good for him [that is, this other person], and not for your own sake, and try to deliver these benefits to him as much as possible”

A different meaning was put into the concept by Sufi philosophers and writers of Persia and the Arab East during the Middle Ages. Thus, in the poetry of Omar Khayyam and Alisher Navoi, love in the spirit of the Sufi tradition is identified with wine. Wine poured into a vessel, that is, into a mortal human shell, fills people with a spiritual component, dialectically introducing the concept of love for God. Nevertheless, the existence of God in itself was not an obligatory attribute for them. And the direction, the vector of love, could have different meanings.

In the Middle Ages, a kind of fusion of Christian and Platonic ideas on this subject we find in Dante. In general, in the Middle Ages, love was the subject of religious mysticism, on the one hand (Victorines, Bernard of Clairvaux, and especially Bonaventure in his works "Stimulus amoris", "Incendium amoris", "Amatorium"), and a special kind of poetry on the other; this poetry, which spread throughout Europe from southern France, was dedicated to the cult of women and idealized sexual love in the sense of a harmonious combination of all three of its elements: reverence, pity and modesty.

In the Renaissance, through the works of Marsilio Ficino, Francesco Cattani, Giordano Bruno and others, the course of Neoplatonism begins to develop. At the heart of this love philosophy is the doctrine of beauty. The nature of love is the desire for beauty. This concept links ethics and aesthetics and has a significant impact on the art of the Renaissance.

In the Baroque era, Benedict Spinoza gave the following definition: “Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause” (lat. Amor est Laetitia concomitante idea causae externae) Spinoza identifies love with absolute knowledge (amor Dei intellectualis) and argued that philosophizing is nothing else how to love God.

In the new philosophy, one should note Schopenhauer's theory of sexual love ("Metaphysik der Liebe" in Parerga u. Paral.). Schopenhauer explains the individualization of this passion in man by the fact that the will of life (German Wille zum Leben) strives here not only to perpetuate the genus (as in animals), but also to produce the most perfect specimens of the genus; Thus, if this man passionately loves this particular woman (and vice versa), then it means that it is with her that he can produce the best offspring under the given conditions.

In the 20th century, the relationship between love and sexuality formed the basis of the work of Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, love is an irrational concept, from which the spiritual principle is excluded. Love in the theory of sublimation developed by Freud is reduced to primitive sexuality, which is one of the main stimuli for human development.

Subsequently, attempts were made to develop Freud's theory and move from a pure biological description to a social and cultural component as the basis of the phenomenon. This new direction, born in the United States, was called neo-Freudianism. One of the leaders of neo-Freudianism is the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm.

In January 2009, scientists from the Stony Brook Institute (New York, USA) summed up the scientific basis for the existence of “eternal love”: they came to the conclusion that the level of dopamine (the hormone of pleasure in life) is the same for old-timers of love and those who have just fallen in love. However, they did not take into account the level of oxytocin, which is responsible for attachment and its level changes over time.

3. The meaning of love

Erich Fromm, in his works, proposed to save the word "love" only for a special kind of unity between people, which, in his opinion, "has an ideal value in all the great humanistic religions and philosophical systems of the past four millennia of the history of the West and East", unity, which he considers the mature (the only reasonable and satisfactory) "answer to the problem of human existence". Fromm distinguishes such love from other forms of love, which, in his opinion, are immature.

Human consciousness can give rise to dichotomies. The main existential dichotomy is the problem of existence: a person realizes that he is mortal, so is it worth living, and if living, then how? The history of religion and philosophy is the history of the search for answers to this question. A mature and fruitful answer to this question is love.

Such names of teachers of humanity as Buddha, Moses (Musa), Jesus Christ (Isa) and many others have forever entered the history of religion. In philosophy, such names as Hegel, Marx, Tolstoy, Lenin and many others are widely known.

L.N. Tolstoy believed that “Love is the only rational activity of a person” and warned:

This love, in which there is only life, manifests itself in the soul of a person, like a barely noticeable, tender sprout among the coarse sprouts of weeds similar to it, the various lusts of a person, which we call love. At first, it seems to people and to the person himself that this sprout - the one from which the tree in which the birds will hide - and all other sprouts are all one and the same. People even prefer weeds first, which grow faster, and the only sprout of life dies and dies; but what is even worse is that it happens even more often: people have heard that among these shoots there is one real, vital, called love, and instead of it, trampling on it, they begin to nurture another sprout of weed grass, calling it love. But what is even worse: people seize the very sprout with rough hands and shout: “here it is, we have found it, we now know it, we will grow it. Love! Love! the highest feeling, here it is! ”, And people begin to transplant it, correct it and seize it, crush it so that the sprout dies without blooming, and the same or other people say: all this is nonsense, trifles, sentimentality. The sprout of love, in its manifestation tender, not enduring touch, is powerful only in its growth. Everything that people will do to him will only make it worse for him. He needs one thing - that nothing should hide from him the sun of reason, which alone brings him back.

4. Love according to Fromm

love sexuality sublimation freud

Erich Fromm in his works compares two opposite forms of love: love on the principle of being or fruitful love, and love on the principle of possession or unfruitful love. The first “involves the manifestation of interest and care, knowledge, emotional response, expression of feelings, pleasure and can be directed to a person, a tree, a picture, an idea. It excites and enhances the feeling of fullness of life. It is a process of self-renewal and self-enrichment.” The second means depriving the object of his "love" of freedom and keeping him under control. “Such love does not bestow life, but suppresses, destroys, stifles, kills it.” He also talks about the profound difference between mature love and its immature forms and comprehensively explores the subject of love.

“If a person loves only one person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love, but a symbiotic attachment, or extended selfishness.”

Fruitful love involves care, responsibility, respect and knowledge, as well as a desire for the other person to grow and develop. It is an activity, not a passion.

4. 1 Love is the answer to the problem of human existence

Man is a self-conscious life, for which the experience of alienation from nature, from other people is unbearable. Therefore, the deepest, core need of a person is the desire to leave the prison of his loneliness, the desire to find unity with other people. "The history of religion and philosophy is the history of the search for answers to this question."

And complete unity is possible only “in achieving interpersonal unity, merging one’s “I” and the “I” of another person, that is, in love.” However, in addition to the true, mature form of love, there are immature forms of love that can be called a symbiotic union. "The passive form of symbiotic union is submission, or, to use the clinical term, masochism." "The active form of symbiotic union is domination, or, to use the clinical term associated with masochism, sadism." "Hitler acted primarily as a sadist in relation to the people, but as a masochist - in relation to his own destiny ...".

“In contrast to a symbiotic union, love is a unity, provided that one's own integrity, individuality is preserved. Love is an active force in man, a force that breaks down the walls separating man from his fellow men; which unites him with others. Love helps him overcome feelings of isolation and loneliness, while allowing him to be himself and maintain his integrity. There is a paradox in love: two beings become one and remain two at the same time. "It has been established that the frustration of the need for love leads to a deterioration in somatic and mental states."

4. 2 Love between parents and children

The newborn perceives the mother as a source of warmth and food, he is in a euphoric state of satisfaction and security, in a state of narcissism. Later, he experiences "guaranteed" mother's love "I am loved because I am". If there is maternal love, then it is “equal to bliss, but if it is not there, it is the same as if all the beautiful things had gone out of life - and nothing can be done to artificially create this love.” Time passes and the child comes to the feeling of being able to arouse love with his own activity. “For the first time in his life, the idea of love goes from wanting to be loved to wanting to love, to creating love.” Many years will pass from this first step to mature love. In the end, the child, perhaps already at adolescence, will have to overcome his egocentrism, seeing in another person not only a means to satisfy his own desires, but a valuable being in itself. The needs and goals of the other person will become just as, if not more important than your own. Giving, giving will be much more pleasant and joyful than receiving; to love is even more precious than to be loved. By loving, a person leaves the prison of his loneliness and isolation, which are formed by a state of narcissism and self-centeredness. A person experiences the happiness of unity, fusion. Moreover, he feels that he is able to cause love with his love - and he puts this opportunity above that when he is loved. Children's love follows the principle "I love because I am loved", mature - "I am loved because I love." Immature love screams, "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you"

In the parental love of every adult there is a maternal and paternal beginning. Mother's love (mother's principle) is unconditional, and father's love (father's principle) is conditional. “... a mature person combines maternal and paternal feelings in his love, despite the fact that they seem to be opposite to each other. If he had only paternal feeling, he would be evil and inhuman. If he had only the maternal, he would be prone to losing his sanity, preventing himself and others from developing. And one beginning is not enough for the normal development of personality.

4. 3 Love objects

The ability to love is closely related to a person's attitude to the world in general, and not just to one "object" of love. Therefore, love is an attitude, an orientation of character. However, most people are sure that love does not depend on one's own ability to love, but on the properties of the object of love. “They are even convinced that since they do not love anyone other than the “beloved” person, this proves the strength of their love,” however, this is not love, but a symbiotic union.

Thus love is an orientation that is directed towards everything and not towards just one thing. However, there are differences between different types of love, depending on the types of the object of love.

Bibliography

1. Bologne Jean-Claude The history of love victories from antiquity to the present day. M., Text, 2010. ISBN 5-7516-0803-3

2. Vysheslavtsev B.P. Ethics of the transfigured Eros. Problems of Law and Grace. M.: Republic. - 1994. - 368 p.

3. Ilyin E. P. Emotions and feelings. - St. Petersburg: Peter, 2001. - 752 p.

4. Karpov M. M. What is love? Feature article. -- Rostov n/a. 2005. - 76 p.

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Love is a feeling that people experience everywhere. However, society always influences how people name their experiences, what they expect, and how they build close relationships. The definition of "ideal love" varies across cultures. In Europe, for example, Shakespearean passions in the spirit of Romeo and Juliet are traditionally considered “true love”. Romantic (passionate) love-attraction between two human beings is an important, sometimes even decisive stimulus for marriage in Western society. At the same time, there are societies that do not approve of romantic love, do not consider it an ideal, and even condemn it.

Psychologist Robert Levine and his colleagues surveyed students in 11 countries and asked them: “Suppose that a man (woman) has all the qualities you think you want; will you marry (marry him) if you are not in love with this person? The researchers found that in Western cultures and where Western values were common (in the United States, Brazil, England and Australia), the vast majority of students answered negatively, and love marriage had a minimal value for young people in developing countries of the East (India, Pakistan and Thailand).

The researchers also compared attitudes toward romantic love among college students in Germany, Japan, and the United States. They found that the German participants had the most passionate romantic views of love, while the Japanese were the least romantic. The Americans took an intermediate position.

Romantic love in an individualistic society is a tumultuous personal experience; a person plunges into the inner world of his partner and, sometimes for some time, does not even notice friends and family. The decision about who to establish a relationship with, marry or marry a person most often makes personally. But in Eastern collectivist cultures, when a person feels love, he must necessarily take into account the wishes of the family and other members of the group to which he belongs. In fact, marriages are often arranged for convenience, and families themselves pair the bride and groom, sometimes long before they enter marriageable age.

A European in love asks himself: "What do I feel?" The Chinese will first of all ask the question: “What will other people say?”. When studying different types of love, researchers found that young Asians, compared with their Western peers, more often identify their feelings with friendly rather than romantic love, i.e. with that style of love that least disrupts the complex web of existing relationships in the family and society.

So, the Chinese have the concept of "gan quing", denoting close and important relationships for a person. It differs from Western notions of romantic love, which necessarily implies sexual overtones (attracting partners). "Gan quing" is born when we simply help another person or do something for him; for example, a "romantic act" might be fixing a faucet or helping with schoolwork.

Korean love is different from Chinese love. Koreans highly value the concept of "jung". "Jung" binds people much stronger than passionate love. While couples feel strong love-passion for each other, there is no "jung" between them - this feeling takes time and many mutual efforts. Interestingly, "jung" is evoked by both positive and negative relationships, such as those between competitors who dislike each other. "Jung" over time may intensify between them, as people will feel the existence of some strange connection with each other. It vaguely resembles our concept of love-hate.

The Japanese are extremely positive about the so-called "ame" - an emotional state in which a completely passive object of love enjoys the fact that a partner takes care of him, this is somewhat similar to the relationship between a mother and a child. In English, as well as in any other language, there is no equivalent for the word "ame"; the closest word in meaning is addiction, an emotional state that in Western culture is considered abnormal in adult relationships.

Introduction

Classification of forms of love

Origins and evolution of the concept of love

The meaning of love

Love according to Fromm

1 Love is the answer to the problem of human existence

2 Love between parents and children

3 Love objects

Bibliography

Introduction

What is love?

Love is a feeling inherent in a person, a deep affection for another person or object, a feeling of deep sympathy.

Love is also considered as a philosophical category, in the form of a subjective relationship, an intimate selective feeling directed at the object of love.

Etymology

Fundamentals of understanding love Terminology

The complexity and dialectical diversity of love has given rise to a significant number of interpretations of the phenomenon in various languages and cultures throughout the history of human society.

§ "Filia" (ancient Greek) - love-friendship or love-affection, due to social ties and personal choice;

§ "storge" (ancient Greek) - love-tenderness, especially family;

§ "agape" (ancient Greek) - sacrificial love, unconditional love, in Christianity - the love of God for man.

Also, the Greeks distinguished 3 more varieties:

§ "Ludus" is a love game until the first manifestations of boredom, based on sexual desire and aimed at obtaining pleasure.

§ "Mania" (from the Greek "mania" - painful passion) - love-obsession, the basis of which is passion and jealousy. The ancient Greeks called mania "madness from the gods."

§ "Pragma" - rational love, when the experience of this feeling in a person is prompted not by heartfelt affection, but only in selfish interests in order to derive benefits and conveniences.

Subsequently, a number of classifications were developed on this basis, including the concept of six love styles proposed by the Canadian sociologist J. A. Lee: three main styles - eros, storge and ludus, love-game, in their mixtures they give another tri-agape, love mania and rational love-pragma. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov defines love as the attraction of one animate being to another in order to connect with him and mutually replenish life, and distinguishes three of its types:

.Love that gives more than it receives, or descending love (lat.amor descendens) - he refers to this type of love parental love, mainly maternal love for children. In a person, this love, or the care of the elders for the younger, the protection of the weak by the strong, creates a fatherland and is gradually organized into a national-state way of life.

.Love that receives more than it gives, or ascending love (lat. amor ascendens) - he refers to this type of love the love of children for their parents, as well as the affection of animals for their patrons, especially the devotion of pets to humans. In a person, in his opinion, this love can also extend to deceased ancestors, and then to more general and distant causes of being (before universal providence, the one Heavenly Father), and is the root of all religious development of mankind.

.Love that gives and receives equally, or sexual love (lat. amor aequalis) - he refers to this type of love the love of spouses for each other, as well as a stable relationship between parents in other species of animals (birds, some animals, etc.). ). In a person, this love can reach the form of perfect fullness of life reciprocity and through this become the highest symbol of the ideal relationship between the personal principle and the social whole.

.The pity that prevails in parental love;

.Reverence (pietas), which prevails in the love of children for their parents and the religious love that follows from it;

.Feelings of shame, combined with the first two elements, form the human form of sexual or conjugal love.

2. Origins and evolution of the concept of love

In the history of religions, love has twice taken precedence: as a wild elemental force of sexual desire - in pagan phallism (still preserved in some places in the form of organized religious communities, such as, for example, Indian Saktists with their sacred pornographic writings, tantras), and then, in contrast to this, as the ideal beginning of spiritual and social unity - in Christian agape.

3. The meaning of love

L.N. Tolstoy believed that "Love is the only reasonable human activity" and warned:

4. Love according to Fromm

love sexuality sublimation freud

"If a person loves only one person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love, but a symbiotic attachment, or extended selfishness."

Fruitful love involves care, responsibility, respect and knowledge, as well as a desire for the other person to grow and develop. It is an activity, not a passion.

4.1 Love is the answer to the problem of human existence

“In contrast to a symbiotic union, love is unity, subject to the preservation of one's own integrity, individuality. Love is an active force in man, a force that breaks down the walls separating man from his fellow men; which unites him with others. Love helps him overcome feelings of isolation and loneliness, while allowing him to be himself and maintain his integrity. There is a paradox in love: two beings become one and remain two at the same time. "It has been established that the frustration of the need for love leads to a deterioration in somatic and mental states."

4.2 Love between parents and children

4.3 Love objects

The ability to love is closely related to a person's attitude to the world in general, and not just to one "object" of love. Therefore, love is an attitude, an orientation of character. However, most people are sure that love does not depend on one's own ability to love, but on the properties of the object of love. “They are even convinced that, since they do not love anyone but “beloved of a person, this proves the strength of their love, ”however, this is not love, but a symbiotic union.

Thus, love is an orientation that is directed towards everything, and not towards just one thing. However, there are differences between different types of love, depending on the types of the object of love.

Bibliography

1. Bologne Jean-Claude The history of love victories from antiquity to the present day. M., Text, 2010. ISBN 5-7516-0803-3

Vysheslavtsev B.P. Ethics of the transfigured Eros. Problems of Law and Grace. M.: Republic. - 1994. - 368 p.

Ilyin E.P. Emotions and feelings. - St. Petersburg: Peter, 2001. - 752 p.

Karpov M. M. What is love? Feature article. - Rostov n/a. 2005. - 76 p.

Love is the most beautiful feeling a person can experience. We feel it everywhere. However, despite all the romanticism of this feeling, society has a great influence on how a person evaluates his experiences and how he shows his feelings. The editors of Estet-portal decided to look into this issue and understand how representatives of different cultures perceive love.

Studies on love in different cultures

Scientists have conducted several interesting psychological studies that have shown the difference in the perception of love for residents of Western and Eastern countries of the world. So, a group of researchers led by psychologist Robert Levine conducted a survey of students from 11 countries of the world and asked them the same question: “Suppose that a man (or woman) has all the qualities that you would like to see in a person nearby. would you tie the knot with him (or her) if at the same time you are not in love with him (her)?

Interestingly, the answer to this seemingly understandable question was ambiguous. Thus, the majority of students, from the Western countries of the world and countries where Western culture prevails, gave a negative answer. But young people from eastern countries give more preference to the presence of the necessary qualities in a partner, and romantic relationships are relegated to the background.

In addition, the researchers compared attitudes towards romantic love, a vivid example, albeit a sad one, is the story of Romeo and Juliet among students in the United States, Japan and Germany. This study showed that young people in Germany have the most passionate and passionate attitude towards love, while Japanese students adhere to more conservative views, which are extremely mediocre about romance. Among the Americans, opinions were divided, and they took an intermediate position.

What is love for different cultures

Romantic love is a strong inner experience of the individual. Often, it pushes a person to rash and impulsive decisions. A marriage that begins with such a passionate relationship often becomes a stumbling block between family members of lovers. Not giving a damn about what others think about your own feelings is the essence of romantic passionate love. In such romantic relationships, lovers are immersed in each other's world without seeing the others. This model is quite suitable for representatives of Western culture.

Eastern culture, however, cannot afford such impulsive decisions. Accordingly, romance fades into the background. It is much more important for them how other members of the family or social group will evaluate their choice. Among the representatives of Eastern culture, the largest percentage of arranged marriages. Moreover, it is worth noting that a couple of the bride and groom can be built long before they enter the legal age of marriage.

So, a European in love asks himself: "What do I feel?", And a Chinese "What will others think?" When examining various aspects of love, scientists have found that young Asians often classify their relationships as friendly love, with little or no perception of romantic love, which, through passion, pushes people to unjustified risks. But even among the representatives of the East there are differences in the perception of love.

Love in Chinese

In China, there is such a thing as "gun quing". It denotes important and close relationships for a person. This concept has almost nothing to do with the Western idea of romantic love. After all, "gan quing" does not imply a sexual attraction to a person. This feeling arises when one person does something or helps another person with something. So, the manifestation of love in Chinese can be manifested as repairing furniture or helping with studies. Very often marriage relations in China are built on this feeling. And only after that they supplement it with sexual relations and other "attributes of Western love."

Love in Korean

But the manifestation of love in Korean is different from the understanding of this feeling by their neighbors. So, in Korea, the most valuable feeling is "jung" - a feeling that arises between people for a long time. Koreans believe that "jung" is much stronger and more closely connects people to each other than passionate romantic love.
Interestingly, this same feeling can occur between people who dislike each other. After all, a passionate feeling of rejection of another person also establishes a connection between people.

Love in Japanese

Japanese culture highly values such a thing as "ame". It means a strong emotional attachment of one person to another due to caring for him and getting pleasure from this care. In some ways, love in Japanese is more like the relationship between mother and child. In other languages, of course, there is no equivalent for the word "ame", but the closest in meaning may be - emotional dependence. Interestingly, in Western culture, such a relationship between two adults is considered strange.

Interestingly, this is how different cultures form the idea of "ideal" love in the eyes of the younger generation. In fact, it doesn’t matter what kind of love you experience, the main thing is that it is in your life. The editors of Estet-portal wish you to love and be loved.

People experience the feeling of love regardless of in which country and on which continent they were born and live. It is possible to talk about family happiness only when the hearts of both spouses are warmed by love. Marriage without love is a difficult test, because not everyone can tolerate an unloved person next to them, sooner or later irritation and hostility will prevail and the marriage will begin to crack at the seams. But whatever you say, society always has a certain influence on how people tend to name their experiences, what they expect from their feelings, and how they build close relationships.

Different cultures vary the definition of "ideal love" in different ways. So, in Europe, for example, "true love" is traditionally associated with Shakespearean passions in the spirit of Romeo-Juliet. Romantic, and moreover, passionate love-attraction captivating two people is an important incentive for marriage in European society. Sometimes this feeling acts as a decisive stimulus. At the same time, there are societies that do not approve romantic love. They do not consider such love ideal, and even condemn it!

The concept of romantic love in different cultures

1. Poll and its results

The famous psychologist Robert Levine, together with colleagues, conducted a survey of young people (mostly students) in 11 countries.

One of the questions sounded like this: “Suppose that your partner (partner) has all the qualities you want; will you marry (marry him) if you are not in love with this person? The survey revealed:

a) In European cultures, as well as in cultures based on European values in the USA, Brazil and Australia, the vast majority of students answered in the negative.

b) At the same time, for young people in the developing countries of the East (India, Pakistan and Thailand), love marriage is given minimal importance.

2 . Attitudes towards romantic love

The researchers compared attitudes towards romantic love among various representatives of European countries. College students in Germany, Japan and the United States were surveyed. As a result, the participants in the experiment from Germany turned out to be the adherents of the most passionate romantic views on love, and the Japanese turned out to be the least romantic. The Americans have an intermediate position.

3. Polarized views on love

Romantic love in an individualistic society is a tumultuous personal experience. Falling in love, a person, as it were, plunges into the world of his experiences and sensations in relation to the object of his adoration. He is so passionate about the inner world of his object of adoration that he forgets about those around him: friends, family, loved ones. The decision about whom to establish a relationship with, and whom to marry or whom to marry a person most often takes alone. It is possible that he consults with relatives, informs them, but considers it not at all necessary to listen to the opinion and advice of relatives. As for the eastern collectivist cultures, there a person, even feeling love for a partner, must necessarily take into account the wishes of his parents, family, members of the group to which he belongs. In fact, in the East, marriages are often arranged for convenience, and families sometimes, long before their children reach marriageable age, themselves form the future couple.

4. A European in love asks himself: “What do I feel?”.

The Chinese are worried about the question: "What will other people say?". Studying different types of love, the researchers concluded that young people in Asian countries, compared with Western peers, are more likely to associate their feelings with friendly love. This style of love is the least disruptive of the complex web of existing relationships in society and the family.

@N. Orlik, specially for the site About happiness

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