As a rule, these works analyse love practices that testify to the diversity of cultures or indicate the inspiring role of love through the prism of works of art and other cultural texts devoted to it. These tasks require researchers to be familiar with moral systems, social norms, symbols and gender stereotypes prevailing in a given society or era. However, it is difficult to capture love as a whole. Usually, only some "section/part" of it is studied.
Love has many names and… forms
One can love various entities, in various ways exposing the feeling, but the richness and diversity of forms of love is only one aspect of the phenomenon. Even if we define love – quite standardly – as states and actions directed towards another person dictated by psycho-erotic motivations, its clarity is blurred in the context of accompanying feelings. It turns out that love is an extremely effective nourishment for other emotions, those that are positive and pleasant by nature – fascination, satisfaction, happiness, but also negative ones – jealousy and lack of fulfilment, which can lead to self-aggression or even crime. All of them grow out of the trunk of love, they are its derivatives. On the one hand, the point is that the emotional ecstasies that accompany love sometimes break the delicate boundaries of someone's comfort.
Love may become possessive and oppressive for its recipient, which is why psychologists recommend honesty, dialogue and mutual information about one's needs and feelings to lovers. On the other hand, unfulfillment is a part of love adventures. Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński wrote about it (tongue-in-cheek): "Z tym największy jest ambaras, żeby dwoje chciało naraz" [The biggest problem is for two to want the same things at once], although it is not funny at all for those in love without reciprocation.
14 February – the perfect feeling day
Valentine's Day is a day that allows us to look at love "through rose-tinted glasses". The image of love shaped for this day is a couple in love sitting at a café table or holding hands while walking in the park. It's about flowers and other gifts, going to the cinema or a restaurant together. Sweet words and text messages containing assurances of the stability of feelings (or their intensity).
The anthropological perspective tends to interpret Valentine's Day as a holiday that consists, like any other, of compensating desires and arranging an ideal state. The holiday is there to sort out everyday chaos, restore order, remind how things should be and what constitutes an important value in a specific area of human existence. On 14 February, the sphere of interpersonal relationships of a love nature undergoes "idealisation". We focus on the bright sides of the phenomenon, we build its desired ideal pattern.
Valentine's Day may seem to be a holiday without deep traditions and with specific practices that have only recently emerged, but in fact it refers to a moral and axiological mechanism that is deeply embedded in culture.
Dr Damian Kasprzyk, author of the text
Source: Dr Damian Kasprzyk, Ethnography and Folklore Research Lab, Faculty of Philosophy and History, University of Lodz
Edit: Press Office, University of Lodz