Paradoxically, no one can give a clear definition to the feeling that rules the world. Love has no objective criteria, reasons, universal forms. All we can do is feel or not feel love.
A little girl hugging her mom and a kid screaming in anger that mom is bad. The man who brings flowers to his beloved, and the one who, in a rage, hit his wife. A woman who is jealous of her husband for a colleague, and the one who tenderly hugs her beloved. All of them can sincerely and truly love, no matter how beautiful or, on the contrary, disgusting the way of expressing this feeling may be.
Contrary to popular belief that there are many people in the world who are not able to love, statistics say the opposite. Psychopathy, manifested in the inability to experience empathy and sympathy and, as a result, to love, occurs in only 1% of the world’s population. And this means that 99% of people are just capable of love. It’s just that sometimes this love is not at all what we are used to seeing it. So we don’t recognize her.
“I doubt that he/she truly loves me” is a phrase I often hear from spouses who seek help. Meeting a person with a different way of expressing feelings, we willy-nilly begin to doubt — does he really love? And sometimes these doubts lead relationships to a dead end.
Yesterday I had a consultation with a couple in which the partners grew up in very different conditions. He is the eldest child in the family, from whom it was expected from early childhood that he would independently cope with his problems and help the younger ones. He learned not to show painful experiences, not to disturb loved ones and to “go into himself” in situations of stress.
And she is the only daughter in the “Italian type” family, where relations were clarified in a raised voice, and the reaction of impulsive parents was absolutely unpredictable. As a child, she could at any moment be both treated kindly and punished for something. This taught her to listen with keen attention to the emotions of others and always be on the alert.
Fate brought them together! And now, in a situation of the slightest tension, she peers with horror at his distant face and tries to “knock out” at least some understandable (that is, emotional) reaction with familiar impulsive methods. And he closes up more and more from any outburst of her emotions, because he feels that he can’t cope, and anxiety makes him become more and more stone! Each of them sincerely does not understand why the second behaves in this way, and less and less believes that they really love him.
The uniqueness of our childhood experience determines the uniqueness of the way we love. And this is why we are sometimes so different from each other in the manifestations of this feeling. But does this mean that we are all doomed to love according to the scheme laid down in us in childhood? Fortunately, no. Habitual but painful ways of relationships can be changed, whatever the family heritage. Every adult has the opportunity to rewrite their formula of love.
… And in this couple, by the end of our third session, a sprout of hope began to sprout. “I believe that you love me,” she said, looking into his eyes. And I realized that they were starting to create a new, their own love story.