Love For Show. Do I Need To Show Love? - Society

She has a kissing couple on the screensaver of her phone. It is not immediately possible to understand that it is she and her husband. He does not immediately answer the call, but only when those around him listen to something like the following: "Love-and-imyyy, answer, your wife is calling." When do people want to show their feelings? And what exactly do they show? Does love need signs and banners? Why is this love for show?

Endless photo sessions with the subsequent posting of photos on social networks, the use of the words “husband”, “wife”, “mine”, “mine”. Is there a place for love itself in a demonstrative relationship? By the way, couples who flaunt their relationship tend to use static images. It is extremely rare to see how they hug and kiss each other, walk holding hands.

In academic psychology, demonstrative behavior in adolescents is described as a way to attract attention during the experience of an age crisis, as well as in hysteria as a psychiatric state.

In our case, in a conversation about show love, we will use the concept of "status demonstration".

What motives drive people to show love?

1. Acknowledgments

For example, a woman is grateful to her man for maintaining the appearance of their family idyll and attending public places and conventions of numerous relatives with her. There is no love, there is a status: family people. For some reason, this union is beneficial to both of them, and the couple demonstrates their status to others. There is simply no way to find a more convenient way than posting photos on social networks. And it is quite possible that, after returning from the next exhibition or dinner at the aunt's, the spouses go to different bedrooms.

2. In spite

Lonely girlfriends, companions, neighbors, ex. The former is a different story. It is in spite of ex-girlfriends, brides, grooms, boyfriends, husbands and wives that new relationships are shown with particular fury. Most often these will be photographs of the upper body without arms, or separately arms, or separately legs. For example, such a photo: male and female feet in slippers and the caption: "Back home."

3. Arrangement

He and she live together by default, function like a family, and this status needs to be advertised. She needed to get married in order to obtain citizenship, or, for example, him - in order to qualify for the highest position. Or just loneliness overcame, and living together turned out to be more profitable.

4. She fell in love with him for his torment …

… and he her for compassion for them. This is a common format of relationships in second and third marriages. In this case, the demonstration of their family ties is a constant confirmation of the correctness of the once made decision to live together, to marry. People convince themselves by assuring others that their union, as it should be, is based on love. Demonstration of joint actions is the very thing: they cook together, wash the car together. Everything is filmed and stored on the phones of both, and is also regularly posted on social networks.

5. When love passes or has already passed

In this case, the demonstration of their faded relationships in the form of some accidentally captured joint photographs is like the last straw that preserves the status of family relations for the public, and for the couple themselves the illusion that everything is fine.

6. Deeply married, married

Living together for a long time and suddenly noticing the sidelong glances of colleagues or neighbors in the country, ladies often grab their husbands in an armful and provide confirmation of their "marriage" in the form of joint weeding of beds or fun at a corporate party.

Lithuanian psychologist Vitas Vilyunas, studying demonstrative behavior in the context of personality motivational mechanisms, identified the following motives for demonstration:

• autonomous self-demonstration, usually found in activity stimulated by other motives and making a person not indifferent to how this activity is perceived by others;
• instrumental acquiring demonstration used as a means of achieving positive goals;
• instrumental defensive demonstration as a means of preventing adverse events;
• a demonstration that preserves or changes the “image of the I” due to the assimilation of the impression produced on others;
• demonstration serving to discharge tension.

So, do true feelings need paraphernalia? Does the noise of the orchestra and the glitter of tinsel interfere with love?

Attribute - from lat. attributum - "attached". Attributes are considered necessary, essential distinctive features common to any number of objects, phenomena, as well as a set of objects necessary to observe the tradition, to perform the ritual.

Of course, pigeons in the sky and rice on the head are quite understandable attributes of wedding rituals. There are many options: limousines and garters, locks on the railing of bridges, burying bachelor shoes and so on, and so on. But, after partying the wedding, it is not at all necessary to constantly advertise your family well-being. Chinese wisdom says: "You said - I believed, you repeated - I doubted, you insisted - I realized that you were lying."

Are the lovers of proclaiming their status “in a relationship” trying to achieve the opposite result? Most likely, behind the flaunting of feelings and emotions that often do not coincide with true experience, there is a reluctance to believe in fading or no love at all. External demonstration - avoiding internal problems …

Vilyunas VK Psychological mechanisms of human motivation. M.: Publishing house of Moscow University, 1990.