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Partner Why successful women have a harder time finding love
Why do some women have more love difficulties when they are in their personal, professional and economic fullness? Encounters and misunderstandings, couples that are made and unmade, loves so liquid that they slip through our hands … This is the diagnosis made by the psychologist and couple therapist Antoni Bolinches about the sentimental reality of a generation of “Disappointed women” and at “Disoriented men” that suffer, according to assures, the consequences of the social changes that they themselves have carried out.
The thesis that Bolinches defends in his latest work “The Superwomen syndrome” is that an important part of successful women is living in the form of “Loving loneliness” their social, cultural and professional achievements, while men who have achieved similar prominence manage to optimize their chances of finding a partner. Why this antagonistic result? What exactly is “Superwoman syndrome”? As defined by the author, it is “the set of positive characteristics that, being good for the woman’s security and self-realization, make it difficult, in practice, to find a partner.”
To analyze this psychosocial phenomenon of a sexist nature The psychologist carried out in the last four years a systematization of clinical practice, collecting cases and testimonies in consultation until he classified a total of 112 people as “super women” and what was behind their emotional problems. “I wondered what were the reasons why these women, who had achieved professional and personal excellence, seemed to have more difficulties finding a partner and from there I began to develop the hypothesis that I put forward in the book,” explains the author.
In fact, in his book he proposes a continuation, or rather a correction of his “Infatuation theory” expressed in another of his works, “The new art of falling in love”, and through which he affirmed that “the art of falling in love is the art of improving.” The nuance that he now proposes is that this aphorism actually works more for men than for women. «It is unquestionable that the men who improve are the ones who fall in love the most. On the other hand, it is not so clear that the women they fall in love with are the ones who improve the most, ”he asserts.
¿Admired or admirers?
Although this phenomenon is somewhat complex and difficult to simplify, according to Bolinches, one of the reasons that could explain this is the fact that “A woman does not fall in love if she does not admire the other person” and that there are few men today who can be “admirable” to these women. But the psychologist also explains that there is another circumstance that complicates the situation and that is the fact that “admirable” men are precisely those who are beneficiaries of access to a younger generation of women. “They want to be the admired ones and not the admirers and if they have to choose between dating a 60-year-old woman on an equal footing or with a 50-year-old who admires them, they choose the 50-year-old,” he argues.
Another key to addressing this situation is, according to Antoni Bolinches, that both men and women accept that this is a reality. «The intention of this essay is to propose a personal change program so that the men of today improve enough to be able to make the women of the present fall in love, “he says.
The solution: “Love is a matter of three”
In his work “The secret of self-esteem” the author already raised three tools of change to improve as people, which he now also reviews in “The syndrome of superwomen” applying it precisely to the aforementioned conflict.
The first of the tools is the “Overcoming acceptance” or internal dialogue, in which a conversation is held with oneself that helps to reconcile contradictions and know the margin of change that depends on oneself and what responsibility they can have in it. Another tool is the “Constructive intelligence” or self-affirming behavior, which leads us to try to do what we must do to get what we want. But the last of the tools, the so-called “Productive suffering” It is the one that has the most to do with the couple because it is what makes us mature. “Internal dialogue and self-affirming behaviors give us security, but security is not the same as maturity. Maturity is the sum of security and well-assimilated moments, ”he explains.
And that’s where your claim that “Love is a matter of three”. With this expression, the psychologist affirms that he does not want to provoke or create misunderstandings, but rather that what he wants is to emphasize something that is not always taken into account: that for there to be love in a couple there must be maturity. «The mistake is to believe that by having suffered we have already learned. But it is not like that. The difference between a mature person and a neurotic person is the way in which they have assimilated the bad moments of their life and how they have learned from the things they have experienced, ”he clarifies. That is why the expert assures that the fact of internalizing certain life experiences correctly can make us choose the people we like from the group of people who suit us.