Keyword: «romantic love»

The psychology of love has a long history of formation and development. However, the main goal of revealing the nature and essence of love feelings has not been achieved yet. The explosive nature of the twentieth century made it possible to come closer to the realization of this goal, since human sensuality was rehabilitated during this period, opening up new opportunities for the realization of the "private" being of the individual. The research subject here is the existential analytics of love by the Catholic theologian Dietrich von Hildebrandt, which is of great importance in the theoretical studies of love in the twentieth century. In the program work on love (“Metaphysics of Love”), the author made an attempt (successful) to identify the psychological essence of romantic love, which is the initial stage of love feeling regardless of the cultural-historical context, and containing the potential for self-development of love feelings.

Marital and family relationships have various foundations; relationships based on love are their ideal, desirable kind. The requests of the modern individual regarding family and marriage are determined not only by a desire for emotional intimacy, but also (due to the erotic revolution of the twentieth century) a new - included in the love content - need for the erotic component of a romantic love feeling. Thus, a married couple faces new challenges that test reciprocity and the depth of a love feeling uniting them, in particular, a poorly studied character of unfaithfulness; love experience may include an event of unfaithfulness resulting from a lack of the evolutionary logic of love understanding, psychological "hygiene" of family relationships. The article is devoted to the examination of the feeling of love in marriage and family relations at the present stage of their existence, as well as some reasons leading to the disharmony of interpersonal relationships in marriage.