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Couple Dismantling romantic myths: we are not half oranges, but whole oranges
The psychologist Laura Fuster explains that there are “as many ways to love as there are people who love” and proposes to discover them instead of being guided by what we saw in the movies or what they sold us as romantic
Neither half an orange, nor a quarter and a half, nor squeezed juice … These concepts do not connect with the type of Couple relationships that are lived today. “In recent decades, both women and men want to feel fully fulfilled by themselves. They are not looking for a person to complete them, but to share what each one of them possesses individually, “according to Laura Fuster, a psychologist at the Center for Cognitive Behavioral Psychology in Valencia.
The idea is, as he explained, that we are already born whole and that we should not bear the responsibility of making someone happy or that someone else makes us happy. «Our happiness is in our hands. Furthermore, only when we are very much in love with ourselves will we be able to fall in love with another person », clarifies Laura Fuster.
What is “being romantic”?
The concept of the “better half” is one of the myths of “romantic love” that some people still defend and that is linked to that belief that leads to associate “romanticism” with details. As Laura Fuster comments, it is socially accepted to think that details, gifts, and physical, explicit and evident samples of love They imply that our partner loves us more. But this, as he clarifies, is not necessarily the case since people can show love in many different ways. For example, we can expect our partner to give us flowers on a special day and if this does not happen we can get frustrated or even think that he loves us less. But what sometimes we do not take into account, according to the psychologist, is that perhaps it is not important for him or her to do this type of gifts, but it is possible to demonstrate love in another way, such as listening carefully to your partner when he has a problem, helping him with a work-related project, accompanying him to see a movie even if he does not like it, or preparing breakfast before he gets up . “Although it is fine to consider romanticism as a positive value in the couple, it is important to understand the other person’s way of being. There are as many ways to show love as there are people who love», he says.
What they told us in the movies
The usual in romantic movies” is that the argument is something like: “Boy meets girl, there is a problem but since love can do everything, the supposed problem ends up being solved.” But this type of argument, according to the psychologist Laura Fuster, contributes a very wrong concept: that of the vision of couple love as the only way to be happy.
However love can’t handle everything And we should not blame ourselves for this, according to the expert, who remembers that when a couple has economic, family or other problems it may happen that they do not have a good time, that they argue, that they distance themselves and even that they separate.
An example of this type of film is some of the first generation of the factory Disney. Those in which the prince rescued the princess, it was transmitted that the woman only had to wait and the man took action and happiness only came when they were together. All three are misconceptions, according to Laura Fuster, who also highlights the fact that those movies end right with the first kiss. “What happens in those relationships afterwards?”
To escape this external influence, he advises each one to know himself well. «If we know what our nutritional, what things are important to us, what situations we would never admit or where our limits are, we will be able to have an idea of a couple that adapts to our vision of the world ”, he proposes.
Having a partner should be a conscious choice, based on the self-knowledge and not in a idealization. “We cannot adopt what is socially thought to be the ideal couple because it is not a construction that we have made,” he says.
Ultimately, whole oranges choosing to live their own story and not that of the movies.