Psychological Peculiarities of Love and Sympathy of Marriage Partners

Abstract

The paper presents a theoretical analysis of love and sympathy psychology in domestic and foreign studies. It is underlined the necessity to systematize the psychological knowledge of love and affection in the marriage partnership. It is summarized the existing theories of love in western psychology, namely psychoanalysis, gestalt-psychology, cognitive-behavioral and humanistic psychology. The author highlighted such characteristic of love, as the tendency to idealize a partner. The classifications and typologies of love by J. Lee, R. Sternberg, E. Fromm, G. Hattiss are presented. To measure the level of love and sympathy mates are used methods such as conversation, questioning, testing, namely the technique of Rubin «Scale of love and sympathy». It is described that love manifests itself in the care, support and desire to help the partner, understanding, affection, responsibility, loyalty, trust, intimacy of feelings. Sympathy – in turn registers the degree of respect, admiration, and the perception of similarity with the object of evaluation. The analysis of the socio-demographic characteristics of the sample, such as gender, age, marital experience, having children allowed to take these figures with a comparative analysis of expressions of love and sympathy. It is revealed that feelings are much stronger showing when persons are married to 5 years; are younger; the love scale dominates in married couples with children, and the scale of sympathy dominates in marriage with no children; men show their feelings of love and sympathy slightly higher than their wives.