Fina Sanz: “Some people bond because they believe that not having a partner is a failure”

Fina Sanz: “Some people bond because they believe that not having a partner is a failure”

Gender

The psychotherapist and sexologist Fina Sanz reveals in her work “The couple, a love project” the conflicts or positive experiences that can appear in a relationship and explains how to approach them from self-knowledge and mutual development

«What is the love? What love experiences do you remember? ” Apparently we choose to link with one or another person from the “freedom” of choosing. But do we really do it in a free way? These are some of the questions posed by Fina Sanz, a psychotherapist, sexologist and pedagogue in her work “The couple, a love project.” Throughout her professional career and through her publications (“Loving ties”, “The labyrinths of daily life”, “Dialogues of wise women”, “Men with a heart” and “El buentrato”, among others …) expert has been configuring the “Reunion Therapy”, an integrative model that includes psychology, sexology and health education with a gender, clinical and community perspective.

It ensures that its objective is for people to know each other deeply, understand why they have those values, beliefs and behaviors and discover where they come from, where they learned it and if they are doing well or not. For this, it teaches human processes and provides tools to live better, with autonomy and with meaning.

At the beginning of your work you address the concept of couple itself, what signs indicate that both participants have a different concept of couple?

There is a concept that I talk about in the book that is not usually taken into account: the couple contract. This implies that it may be based on different realities and concepts. And if this happens, you have to negotiate.

The couple’s contract starts from the personal contract that each person can have. How would I like to live as a couple? What would a suitable partner be like for me?… Each person has to think about what they want, what they don’t want and what would be negotiable or not.

One of the problems that can happen is that many times we do not think, we are not aware of what we want in a relationship. People come together because they love each other, because they have sexual attraction, etc., but they do not know very well what each one would want from a partner and from a common project and that leads them not to negotiate it. When this happens we can find problems such as that one person wants a partner open to other sexual relationships and the other person does not want it.

What are the differences between “loving from freedom” and “loving from necessity”

Love from need it is to love from dependency. There are people who bond because they meet social expectations or because they believe that not having a partner is a failure. Then they bond and love from the need to love someone and feel loved or loved.

Love from freedom is to feel that we have an infinite loving capacity, that we can love people, animals or nature … but that I decide to bond and love people who treat me well, with whom I share and create bonds, without being afraid of being alone or alone and feeling that I can love from freedom.

What are the implications of the sexual experience as a couple “with love”? 

We can have sex with love and without love, by physical attraction. If you have a deep love experience, the quality of the love-sexual encounter is different, because sexual intercourse is a form of communication, not only something pleasant but also emotional.

To what extent can coexistence be important for a couple

La coexistence in a couple is one of the elements that has to do with the couple’s contract that I have spoken about previously. There are couples who prefer, at least occasionally, to live in separate houses and have their individual projects but see each other every day or on weekends. On the other hand, there are couples who prefer to have a closer coexistence, in the same house. That can be gratifying because you are creating a joint life project. It is very good if the negotiation that has been made, the care and the “good treatment” is mutual. If the coexistence is good, it is very rewarding and can help a lot in personal and mutual development.

Spiritual couple, couple of lovers, affective-sexual couple, what characterizes these types of couple and how can we know if it is what we really want?

When I talk about it, I mean three important elements in a relationship: the Deep love towards that person, the sexuality (a good sexual, affective, loving communication), and a good coexistence, whether you live in the same house or not, as they have decided. When these three elements occur, there is love, there is very good sexual communication and there is very good coexistence. In that case I would speak of a affective sexual partner, in all its fullness. When they love each other a lot and can live together very well, but there is no sexual attraction or contact, I speak of spiritual couple. They can live very well if they agree to that kind of agreement, contract. The lovers couple It occurs when there is a great sexual attraction between the two, good sexual communication, but usually there is no life project.

There are couples who live together and are spiritual couples and get along well, others are rather a couple of lovers, who do not live together, or are characterized because what fundamentally unites them is sexuality. The affective-sexual couple is the one that has a daily development project, since both consider their life as a project of personal and mutual love.

When analyzing relationship problems, he refers to what he describes as a very invisible “personal conflict”, which is the lack of personal space. Because it is important?

Lack of personal space is something that happens a lot in everyday life. The personal space is our life: what I think, what I want, what I would like to do, my expectations, the activities that I like, what kind of relationships I like to have, what I want to do now, what I would like in the future … I am building day day my personal space and I decide to share part of it with the people I love. It is something very important in a relationship.

Traditionally we have lived a model of inclusion in which the woman depended on the man socially. The woman worked at home and with the children, but outside work was valued. It was understood that the man had his space, the outside, the success, the work, the money, and the woman had the small space of the house, which was not valued. Currently we tend towards more egalitarian relationships where each person develops and is empowered. When we want to have a couple’s project it is important that both have their personal space, their activities, their projects and those issues that give meaning to their life, but also want to share part of those activities with the couple. Without leaving, yes, to maintain a certain personal space. When you are not aware of personal space, many times you fantasize that our life, our space, is the one that the couple gives us, with which we easily place ourselves in dependent relationships.

When you talk about “scripts” in relationships, you illustrate preconceptions, is this belief that we “repeat patterns” or that we “provoke what we fear” true? “

We build our identity, beliefs and values ​​from the first years of our childhood. And that is constituting what we would call a “life script”, a way in which we see the world, we interact, and so on. There are things throughout our life that we see that we do not like and we change them; but there are other things that we reproduce, unconsciously. For example, if a person feels devalued, he can place himself in relationships from inferiority and dependency. Or if you have learned that in order to be listened to you have to yell or use violence, you may tend to reproduce it. We easily repeat aspects of our life scripts that we are not aware of.

How can we identify heartbreak in ourselves and in our partner? When is it appropriate to “let go” and when is it “worth a try”?

I always think it is important to talk to clarify things and try to fix them.

Throughout the relationship, we can see that a certain way of acting or feeling of our partner does not correspond to the expectations we had or to what we had agreed in our relationship. There is thus a drop in our expectations, a heartbreak.

It can also happen that one person or another of the couple changes, and what we had contracted no longer serves us, so that we have to renegotiate the agreements and propose another way of being or living together.

Be that as it may, you have to raise it, you have to dialogue to resolve the conflict because sometimes it is easy to restructure some things. But if agreements are not reached, if there is no possibility of negotiation, it is good to say goodbye in the best possible way, being able to recognize that although many things can unite us, the way the couple works today does not correspond to our project and not generates well-being.