Is loneliness always a coincidence?

Five men – five failures

Svetlana has a wealth of experience in terms of failed relationships. “The first, Mikhail, was a wonderful, but intolerable egoist. The second, Alexei, is an employed intellectual, and at the same time a nightmarish narcissist. Then there was an artist in a creative crisis, Pavel, who needed me only when he himself was in despair.

And when I, also desperate, wanted some kind of stability and normality, Victor appeared, a manager, a very practical and bright person. The most ruthless of all. The last one, Andrei, finished me off. We were supposed to move in together when he confessed to me that he agreed to a one and a half year trip abroad in order to … think. About myself, about me. As a result, I am 39 years old, and I am completely alone. ”

A lot of women could tell similar (and not so) stories about men, missed opportunities, and the exhausting wait for their one and only. What unites them?

“It is no coincidence that all these women are lonely,” says philosopher and psychoanalyst Enriqueta Boukli, an expert at the Italian Psychologies. “They are not victims of fate or bad luck. Behind every story of loneliness are hidden their reasons, sometimes so hidden and unobvious that it is almost impossible to detect them.

Weak mother, strong father

Svetlana, who is eager to find a partner at any cost and admits that she allows men who are averse to long-term relationships to dominate relationships, demonstrates a type of love that can roughly be called “patient love.” The man disappears, reappears, and she justifies his actions. As a result, a break is inevitable.

To understand the nature of such behavior, it is necessary to reconstruct the family situation – and here we see a meek mother who is ready to reckon with anything so as not to be left alone, a father who has all-encompassing power, and a daughter who repeats this pattern already in her life.

The Too Perfect Father

35-year-old Elina quite clearly understands what kind of man she needs, but the relationship still does not add up. “The longest relationship lasted six months,” she says. – Every time it was like a lightning strike, everything is just wonderful, especially in the beginning. Then the same scenario: quarrels, resentments, the end.

Elina represents the most common type of love in our time – “fluid”, as Enriqueta Boucley calls it, “superficial relationships that both begin with sex and end with it. Such women are like collectors: not a single man lives up to the ideal invented by them.

Elina had a father whom she loved very much: therefore, in order to fall in love, she must first … stop being a daughter – but she does not succeed. “This is the myth of fatal love, the very last one that philosophy and literature have passed on to us. Women dream of a romantic love story of Tristan and Isolde and idealize a partner. When a man appears before them with his shortcomings, then “the fairy tale is over,” says Enriqueta Boukli.

Fear of responsibility

36-year-old Maria always falls in love with married men. “Every time I sob: well, why do I come across them again? They did not want to leave their wives, they felt guilty, they asked me to be patient – and I endured. Maria decided to look into what was happening together with a psychologist and realized that her main problem was fear. Fear of living together, fear of responsibility to a potential child – an inevitable component of a future family. It was this fear that made her choose a priori inaccessible men.

“Today, women are more confident in their work than in their feelings,” says Enriqueta Boukli. “They are immersed in their careers, striving for economic independence, and maybe because of this they block their deep feelings. By concentrating on the goals to be achieved, they push away anything that could potentially upset the balance they have created, and nothing can upset it like a child. And then comes the feeling of emptiness. Successful women are looking for men with whom they could share all the responsibility that they themselves refused.

It is believed that most women think of themselves as part of a couple, but psychologist Marco Villamira has a different opinion on this matter: “One day, women who claim that they crave family life with all their hearts will eventually come to a fair conclusion: they are an endangered species. The foundation of the future society will be a single person, not a couple.” Then why does loneliness cause such suffering, even for those who say that they are “and so good”?

Either a boy or a son

48-year-old Lyudmila chooses men who are much younger than her. “I feel strong, seductive, alive. I look at peers, hostages of failed marriages, and think: how lucky I am. However, for one reason or another, all my partners leave me. I have no future with them,” she admits. There are women who willingly take on the role of a mother in relation to a young man. They choose male children, playmates and nothing more. But children, as you know, leave their father’s house …

And yet: what role does desire play? In fact, it is the key to everything that happens to us. What do we really want? What are we really afraid of? Why do we choose married/young/single? To understand this, you need to have the courage to understand what we ourselves represent and, perhaps, go to therapy. Although there are enough of those around us who are happy to say that they are lonely not “unfortunately”, but “fortunately”.