LOVE FOR ANOTHER INDIVIDUAL
It is this that most people call love in everyday speech but clearly true love is much more complex. Love at this adult stage brings together a love-object and a sex-object. This needs a little explanation. An ‘object’ in psychological jargon is a thing with which an individual is able to indulge his instinctual needs. A mother can therefore be a love-object to a baby and a wife a sex-object to a husband. When adults are in love, if they are mature, their love-object and their sex-object is one and the same person.
However, for many these two are separate. Some men, for example, cannot have a meaningful sexual relationship with someone they love (their wife, for instance) because they see her as untouchable. Such men (and there are-many of them) will be able to have perfectly enjoyable sex outside marriage but not within it. Most, if not all, of this attitude is, of course, in the man’s unconscious – he does not realise that it is happening unless it is pointed out to him. Others see their partners purely as sex-objects and have little or no love-object relationship with them. Such a couple can be happy loving their children, their home, their possessions, or whatever, and enjoy each other purely as sex-objects.
The ideal marriage blends the two in perfect harmony to satisfy both the childhood craving for love and the adult craving for sex.
The thing to remember is that, whatever sex books may suggest, sex alone is never enough. We all need loving ‘rewards’ in life from one source or another. Psychologists call such rewards ‘strokes’ and say, quite rightly, that we all need ‘stroking’ throughout our lives.
Adults who love each other stroke each other (physically or metaphorically) as much as they need and a good relationship is built up of physical and psychological strokes that demonstrate the partners’ love for each other. This begins to explain why people have such different ideas of what loving someone means. Many people with marital problems say, if he (she) really loved me they would/wouldn’t do . . .’ But the partner may not realise that this is the definition of love to which they are supposed to be adhering.
Communication is vital within any loving relationship because each of us is unique and we all need to get our strokes in different ways. Some want all their strokes to be physical and require an active sex life as a proof of the other’s love. Others want praise, outward signs of affection, practical signs of love, and so on, as their sources of strokes. In a short chapter such as this we cannot possibly do anything more than scratch the surface of this subject, but interested readers should examine their lives to see what they like best in the form of strokes and then discuss with their partners why they are not getting them – if they are not. The giving and receiving of strokes is the hallmark of mature adult love.
The final stage of love expands one’s love for an adult to a love of all mankind.
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