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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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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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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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.