Contents
How to keep the bonds of love strong in the couple
Gender
The psychologist and family therapist Marta de Prado García explains in her work “How you relate as a couple” the keys to maintaining healthy emotional ties
How and why do you choose your booths? What makes you feel good in that relationship? And bad? We have a natural tendency to maintain affective relationships and to be part of a “we” but sometimes the fear to loneliness can lead us to maintain relationships that harm us and to hide this hurt both to others and to ourselves. The psychologist Marta de Prado García puts on paper in her work “How do you relate as a couple?” (Ed. Loquenoexiste) more than two decades of work as a psychotherapist and provides the keys to maintain healthy affective relationships, based on communication, growth and mutual respect.
When it comes to talking about the dynamics that are established in couple relationships, the psychologist distinguishes two types: bonding and instrumental.
In the first, the bonding relationshipsWhat moves the couple is the feeling of love, of “pair”, of equals and of “team”. There is no abuse of one towards the other. «It is as if we were talking about a pair of shoes: they have their differences and each one of them is for a different foot, but they are the same size, the same model, they go in the same direction and fit. The same happens with a couple who have a bonding relationship, “he explains.
But in the case of instrumental relationships that “pair of equals” is lost in favor of a “for what” so that one of the parties benefits (or harmed) or even both can be harmed. However, the question is not so much in knowing which of them benefits but whether or not these differences generate a “relationship between equals”. And there, as the expert explains, is where we find that this relationship does not occur “between peers or equals.” Let’s see the reasons that explain why this happens, knowing the three types of instrumental relationships (with active and passive roles in each of them) that the expert describes: “Maintainer” and “maintained”, “Protector” and “protected” y «salvador» (or rescuer) and “saved” (or rescued).
In the relationship between the “Maintainer” and the “maintained” The person who supports the other feels that he will always stay by his side because he believes that it gives him quality of life, either emotionally or financially, while the person who is supported thinks that he cannot separate from his partner because he believes that without him or without her You can never find the same state of satisfaction for your needs. “The feeling that one has in this type of couple is that one cannot meet their needs without the other,” explains Marta de Prado.
In the case of “Protector” and the “protected” We are faced with a relationship in which one of them acts as “father” or “mother”, so that the “protégé” will always need the “protector” to do almost everything, as if he were a small child. As for the “protector”, he will feel that his partner is not really his partner, but his son or daughter, so that he will not have the feeling of working as a “team” with an equal but of constantly caring for the other.
The relationship between “Savior” and the “saved” it leads to a feeling of “permanent debt” to the rescuer so that the “saved” feels that he owes the other his permanence in the relationship (or even his obedience or submission) for having helped him in a distressing, difficult or sometimes insurmountable situation. The “savior” thus assumes that role of good person or “admired.”
What is a healthy relationship?
Once we have seen the dynamics that can be established in the couple, the psychologist Marta de Prado explains that in bonding relationships a perspective of equality and feeling of team that makes each of the members complement the other in it, while in the instrumental there is inequality. «The key to knowing if we are in an instrumental relationship is to check if it generates suffering“, reveals.
To take care of and reinforce that feeling of team defining a link relationship, the expert proposes to address these aspects:
— Have passion and intimacy with your partner. When referring to this question, the psychologist does not speak only of the sexual sphere, but of a more generic question that has to do with that our partner is “palatable: to chat, to have a laugh, to go for a walk, to watch a movie together, to prepare food together, to organize the house … The idea is that “we are not with each other just to be” but rather that “we enjoy being together ».
And to keep that appetite alive, the psychologist explains that it is important for each of them to work internally because “we cannot be desirable” if we are not palatable to ourselves. “If I am desirable, if I am kind (from the verb ‘to love’, that I can be loved), I will understand that my partner sees me as desirable and loves me, not only on a sexual level, but in many other ways,” he explains.
— Affectively commit. «If I play for a football team and we face each other in a Champions League game, I doubt very much that my teammates are going to leave the game 15 minutes into the game, right? With this what I mean is that in the case of the couple, the idea of commitment to affective permanence leads us to not be able to be all the time with the doubt of whether tomorrow my partner will continue with me or not because that generates anxiety and makes the relationship is not balanced or linking, “he argues.
— Show mutual interest and admiration. Admire the partner, be interested in their things (even if they have nothing to do with us), ask about their day to day and recognize their achievements so that we admire that person for who they are and for how they enjoy what they are. It does lead us to strengthen ties with it.
On the other side of the scale would be those attitudes or states that take us away from the team vision in a couple relationship, such as the panic (being afraid to see reality or not wanting to think about what is happening or not), the daze (living in a kind of emotional dizziness and not thinking clearly), depressive states (affect self-esteem and fill us with mistrust and lack of concentration) and stagnation (stay paralyzed, complaining about the past and afraid of the future).