DOWNLOAD THE BOOK FRANCESCO
ALBERONI

Falling in love and loving
The experience of
falling in love divides what was
once united and unites what was divided. What is special and unique
about this new union, however, is that it constitutes a structural alternative
to an already structured relationship: though we already have a girlfriend
or wife, a lover or husband, a mother to whom we are morbidly close,
or ‘a special friend,’ the new structure in our lives radically
challenges this old one and degrades it to something of no value. At
the same time this new structure generates the new community that we
perceive radiating out around us, founded on and legitimized by the
absolute right and value of our love; indeed, every other part of our
life is reorganized around it. This reorganization does not happen instantly
but is a gradual process.
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CHAPTER ONE

I love you - A theory of
love
We fall in love when we are ready to change, when we want to discard
a past, worn-out experience, and have the energy and strength to begin
a new exploration and change our lives. We fall in love when we are
ready to use untried abilities, explore new worlds and fulfil dreams
and desires we had renounced. We fall in love when we are deeply dissatisfied
with the present and possess the inner fire to begin a new stage in
our existence. For falling in love to take place, therefore, there must
be something amiss with the present, a slow accumulation of tension,
a great deal of vital energy and then, finally, a spark to trigger it
all off. Falling really in love follows on from a crisis in existing
relationships, from an impression of having gone wrong and having got
caught up in something unreal and false, while feeling acute nostalgia
for a truer, intenser and more real kind of life.
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CHAPTER ONE

Sex and love
In 1979 Francesco Alberoni’s internationally-acclaimed book,
Falling
in Love and Loving, revolutionized the fields of sociology
and psychology. Today, his new work,
Sex and Love,
marks another revolutionary turning point, giving for the first time a
sense and order to the chaotic tangle of clashing and concording facets
of love and sex. Alberoni systematically explores the full range of sexual
and love relationships: from anonymous sex to amorous intimacy, from the
frenzied coupling of two bodies to the union of two souls, from violent
sex to utmost physical tenderness, and from the most rampant promiscuity
to the most exclusive and faithful partnership.
In revealing the primordial bases for the way in which men and women interact,
Alberoni takes an unflinching look at our secret motivations and contradictory
desires, as well as at the facts we would prefer to ignore and the thoughts
we had rather not admit to having. The book features an engaging and innovative
mix of life stories and first-person accounts taken from literature or
interviews. Each individual voice is intentionally left uncensored, and
the language shifts back and forth from the brutal and obscene to the
ardent and passionate, or to the painfully nostalgic if not poetically
sublime. The reader is guided through the myriad of forms that sexual
and love relationships take, a survey which provides true-to-life examples
of impersonal and personal sex, erotic friendship, infatuation, and the
galvanizing experience of falling in love, as well as of the subsequent
love relationships that may either end or endure. The reader finds him
or herself being swept away by a fast current of evoked and revealed desires,
arousal, pleasure, ecstasy, joy, dilemmas, regrets, suffering, and hope.
Francesco Alberoni’s latest work, Sex and Love, is both scientifically
thorough in its approach and a relentlessly honest, sensitive, and compelling
good read.
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CHAPTER ONE
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ABSTRACT THE BOOK FRANCESCO
ALBERONI
Falling in love and loving
“We fall in love. We say it, but what does it mean?
To capture the essence of this only partially-charted emotional territory,
at once familiar and enigmatic to us all, we need to think in a new way.
Admittedly, the rule in most scholarly work is to build up gradually to
a revolutionary definition, but I think that to do so would less than
useful here. I want to entice you to think in a new way straight off.
At the same time I naturally aim to be as precise in my language and theory-making
as possible, seeing that an accurate definition for the state called ‘falling
in ‘love’ means reaching, with all due respect, beyond the
traditional realms of psychology, sociology, and art. But this is important
because our ‘falling in love’ is not an instance of sexual
sublimation, nor a phenomenon of everyday life, nor a trick of the imagination-it
is something very different.
Falling in love is a formative state; scientifically it may be termed
“nascent”, meaning in more common language that it is the
ignition state of a special collective movement made up of solely two
individuals.”
I love you - A theory of
love
There are many kids of love, like a mother's, a brother or sister's, or
a friend's. But here we will be talking about the passionate, erotic kind
of love which exists betwee 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 that burns
itself out in a few days or months, or it can last for years, even a lifetime.
It can be consist in torrid sex or sweet tenderness; it may never develop
beyond unsatisfied passion or it may lead to marriage. It can turn into
an idyll or a conflict, fade away into routine, or carry along with it
all the vibrance and freshness of its early stages.