I Love You (A Theory Of Love ) pdf download

I Love You (A Theory Of Love ) By Francesco Alberoni

I LOVE YOU (A THEORY OF LOVE )

A science of love

There are many kinds of love, like a mother’s, a brother’s or a sister’s, or a friend’s. But here we will be talking about the passionate, erotic kind of love which exists between lovers, between a husband and wife, i.e. the love binding a couple together – the kind of love that makes us say “I love you”.

We will be trying to understand how it begins, what forms it takes, how it develops, what problems it may meet, and why it ends or endures. It is the kind of love that can grow slowly out of friendship or explode at first sight.

It can be a passing infatuation burning itself out in a few days or months, or it can last for years, even a lifetime. It can be made of torrid sexuality or sweet tenderness, it may never develop beyond unsatisfied passion or it may bloom into marriage.

It can turn into an idyll or a conflict, fade away into a routine, or carry along with it all the vibrance and freshness of its early stages.

A person who loves and wishes that love to be returned will ponder over innumerable questions, knowing that passion, jealousy, dreams, ideas, eroticism, and love can either make life wonderful or turn it into hell.

Gestures that make us happy or words that plunge us into despair come from very few human beings indeed, only those to whom we are intensely and inextricably bound.ⁱ

The greatest triumph can be poisoned by a cruel word or lack of attention from the one we love. What can the answer be to such questions? There is as yet no theory, no science of love, non “eros-ology” we can today turn to!

Yet being a couple has acquired great

importance in the modern world. Once upon a time, there was the extended family, which included a whole circle of relations. Nowadays people marry because “they like each other”, because “they are in love”.

They stay together while they continue to find each other attractive, and feel they are still in love.

 If “they no longer love each other”, however, having children no longer holds as sufficient reason for staying together – so only the bond of love between man and woman remains to hold the union together.

It is a bond that unites two individuals who are consequently far freer, richer, and maturer. Each has a personal set of connections, a separate job, and autonomous political and religious ideas.

A couple is therefore a dynamic unit, a creative melting pot where two personalities come together, form an alliance, talk things over and complement each other, in order to confront a world that has become more and more complicated. Love is the driving force behind this tension and this union.

But what does being in love mean? What is the meaning of “I love you”?ⁱⁱ Some people say they are always falling in love or never fall out of it. Others hold that falling in love is a fairly rare occurrence in a single lifetime.

And then during a moment of confidence, a person will happen to confess to having had numerous love affairs but only one great love.

Many meanings indeed lie behind the words falling in love, love, caring, affection, tenderness, passion and sexual attraction. Our aim is to put some order into this untidy state of affairs by creating the basis for a real science of love.

We intend to set up a survey and to categorize the various forms of love so as to make it easier for readers to recognize their own experiences, understand what processes gave rise to them, and what possible lines of development there may be. We are offering a map, an explanation, a guide.