Our love life is hampered by fears, most of which are rooted in childhood. We talked about their reasons with the French psychoanalyst Didier Loroux.
Psychologies: Why does the love that each of us dreams of cause fears?
Didier Loru: First of all, because this wonderful exciting feeling also has a second face: love is also the loss of freedom, suffering, pain … From the very first meeting, each person involuntarily begins to try on the image of an abandoned lover – what will he feel if he is abandoned ? What if this pain becomes unbearable?
Love frightens us so much also because logically we are not able to comprehend its reason: why do I love this particular man, this woman? What is it about them that makes them stand out from thousands of others? This mystery is impossible to unravel, and although it is an integral element of the love game, it often gives rise to a desire to run away, close – that’s how we are arranged, we are always afraid of the unknown.
It is very common for a person to distinguish between feelings and sexual desire. I think everyone has heard something like: “I adore my husband, but we have mediocre sex with him”, “I can only make love with a woman I don’t really love.”
In fact, this is also a kind of defense mechanism – in this way we try to hide from love, to keep it at a distance. For a long time, this behavior was characteristic only for men, but now women make a similar distinction: they increasingly choose for themselves sexual partners, to whom, as they are convinced, they are not in danger of becoming attached.
Are men and women equally afraid of love?
Yes. But since they love differently, their fears are different. A man is more focused on giving – he is ready to offer a lot to his beloved. That is why in the event of a break, he feels devastated, destroyed. The most important thing for a woman is to be loved, so she is most afraid that her self-esteem will suffer, that she will be abandoned.
He is afraid to turn into a henpecked, she is afraid to become a sexual object. But our individual manifestations of fear of love are associated more with personal experience, with those internal scenarios that accompany us through life, rather than with gender.
How can one explain the endless game of hide and seek that many lovers practice?
It is explained by the fear of responsibility. A strong, vivid and not always subject to our mind feeling that we experience in relation to a partner already in itself inspires a certain anxiety, and then the need to bind myself with new obligations looms on the horizon … Becoming everything for another person, I lose my freedom of action, stop dispose yourself. Now I simply have to love him in return, I have no other choice … This thought is very difficult to accept.
It is self-love that gives us the opportunity to build relationships in pairs, to give to others what we ourselves received in due time.
In the same way, it is difficult for a child to comprehend the fact that his mother is able to love other people – he himself, up to a certain age, is convinced that he is the center of her universe. The displacement from this center towards the periphery, the realization of one’s true place in mother’s life is always associated with tremendous disappointment.
Does a mother play an equally important role in the life of a man and a woman?
Yes, still Freud said that a child in the womb is the prototype of all love relationships. Having fallen in love, we turn into a small vulnerable child. The object of our passion approaches in our minds the almighty mother, who can always abuse our defenselessness.
He (she) is a standard, the embodiment of perfection, but we are nothing special. My psychoanalyst colleagues and I often have to deal with patients who are unable to touch the woman they are in love with. In their imagination, her image is mixed with the image of the mother, and he is sacred.
Well, of course, this is extreme …
Sure, but it reflects a very common trend. Choosing a partner of a different race, with a different color of hair or skin, is one of the most common ways to disguise one’s own oedipal aspirations. However, it is hardly possible to predict the development of love relationships for each individual person. One thing is for sure: the way a mother showed her love for us will greatly affect our love relationships as adults.
To dare to travel to the land of love, a person needs to be a loved child in childhood, says psychoanalysis. Why is it so?
It’s not strictly about whether we were loved in childhood or not. The important thing is whether our early environment allowed us to form self-love – a feeling that throughout life remains for each person a kind of core and a powerful source of inner strength. It is self-love that gives us the opportunity to build relationships in pairs, to give to others what we ourselves once received.
Can fears completely deprive a person of the ability to love?
I believe that love is the strongest of all feelings, and the best proof of this is love at first sight, which leaves us no chance of resistance. No matter how old the lover is, for a while he inevitably turns into a defenseless child, unable to properly formulate thoughts, amazed and fascinated by the look of his “mother” – a new partner or partner. Escape, hide from this state is simply impossible.
We don’t decide whether or not to fall in love, we fall in love because something inside of us – our emotional armor, our fears – is cracking. You can only hesitate for a while before starting a relationship. But even if at first you say to yourself: “Careful! I already went through this, and how did it all end? You won’t doubt for long. Provided, of course, that they fell in love for real.
Parental experience
Relationships between parents play a significant role in shaping our love behavior. For example, divorce affects a child who is sensitive to breakups.
“In this case, two fundamentally different behaviors are possible,” said Didier Loroux. – Most often, a person who survived the divorce of his parents in childhood makes a promise to himself: “Everything will be different for me.” He enters into long-term relationships early, willingly and easily creates a family. But the readiness to rush into the arms of love without hesitation, as a rule, hides the fear of loneliness, abandonment.
The second scenario is that a person learns family experience, so to speak, directly: as soon as the question arises of forming a couple or, worse, of having a child, he simply runs away.
About the expert: Didier Loroux is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, author of Tomber en amour (Eres, 2001). Not translated into Russian.