Contents
The types of love that are not healthy
Sexuality
Dependent, protective, idyllic, addicted, fleeting … Some ways of loving awaken alerts from the psychological point of view. We tell you how to identify them
One of the definitions of the RAE on love says the following: “Intense feeling of the human being who, starting from his own insufficiency, needs and seeks the meeting and union with another being.” We can frame this definition that includes the romantic love as a necessity. If we see love from this perspective, we can experience it from emotional dependence on the other. That is, to need another person to achieve personal well-being and vice versa.
And love has nothing to do with it. Although there is no single model of unhealthy love, there are patterns of action and interpretation that make romantic relationships can be dysfunctional or generate discomfort. Pablo Neira, a psychologist at the López Ibor Clinic says that the conceptualization that love is a need you have to be happy and that, for this reason, you depend on your loved one to be so: “There is even the opposite view; I am responsible for the happiness of my partner and if at some point in her life she feels discomfort, it is because I am not knowing how to make her happy ».
Love can also be conceptualized from the possession; the famous you are mine and I am yours. «In this aspect, the idea is promoted that all decisions made in life have to go through the couple and that the loved one has a series of prohibitions and rigid duties in his life because he is the other part of my relationship. In the same way, I have those same prohibitions and duties for being his partner. It is a concept of slave love», Explains the expert.
All these concepts, which can be disguised as beautiful motives on which to base love, make relationships a source of long-term discomfort.
Loves that are not
What types of love are there and how to identify them? The psychologists of the López Ibor clinic, Pablo Neira and Beatriz Mora, tell us:
Dependent love. The myth of the better half, one of the myths of romantic love, which tells us and makes us believe that if there is not a person by our side we are not complete and we are missing something, it can be a good example. “Something that a priori, seems very beautiful and endearing, can be pathological in the long term since we can tend to attribute our well-being or discomfort to our partner and perceive ourselves adrift, imprisoned by what a third party says or does” , they count. “I am nobody without …”, “My life is a horror because my partner …”, “It is no longer worth anything because that person is not there” …
Protective love. On the other hand, we can also see ourselves as the standard bearers or protectors of our partner. If this happens, we will be responsible for the discomfort of the other person, generating feelings of guilt and hyper-responsibility towards them. “Because of me he’s crying and he’s not happy”, “I can’t make him happy”, “I don’t know how to make him not suffer”, “I’m a lousy boyfriend” …
Idyllic love. Following this line of distortion of love, we distort the concept of romantic love thinking that we will always feel this emotion in the same way towards the person we love, regardless of the time that passes or the circumstances that occur in my life. Psychologists say that this is impossible since the first moments of a sentimental relationship are usually motivated by very intense and pleasant sensations and emotions: «Love in its first moments generates physiological changes in our organism that directly affect the pleasure centers of Our brain”.
Addicted love. At the biochemical level, human beings fall in love when we perceive reciprocity in a person to whom we attribute psychological, social and physical characteristics that are attractive to us. This automatic interpretation passes to the endocrine system secreting a series of hormones such as dopamine, which is closely related to the activation of the pleasure centers of the brain. These reactions are similar to those that occur when consuming some drugs of abuse or addictive behaviors, producing a series of intense sensations and emotions in our brain and impossible to maintain in the long term, so if we understand love as these sensations, it we are understanding as a chemical reaction, abrupt and fleeting, which is opposed to the concept of a couple.
Fleeting love. They can be common, patterns of behavior towards sentimental relationships from the search for the sensation indicated above. In the words of the experts in psychology: couples that start quickly and intensely and that end a few months later to later look for another relationship and find that feeling again.
If you have identified with some type of love, you have already advanced by the simple fact of recognizing it. For the psychologist Pablo Neira, we must become aware of how we are functioning as a couple and try to correct the patterns that we have seen through assertive communication. «Setting limits and independence are important in the couple. Have your own spaces in which I enjoy independently it does not mean wanting less or separating my partner from my life, so you have to try to escape from ‘I’m with my partner doing this plan because that’s what I have to do,’ “he says.
The psychologist Beatriz Mora, for her part, indicates that the myth of romantic love has made us believe that being single is equivalent to being alone when it is not true. «Having a healthy interaction with the people around us, whether they are our partner, friends or family, is what will truly make us feel happy, but because we start from the premise that in order to love someone we first have to love ourselves. ourselves and learn to take care of ourselves and then let ourselves be loved and shared with everything that surrounds us, “he says.
Healthy love
- Have your own spaces
- Independence
- Loving ourselves before others
- We are not responsible for the happiness of others
False myths about love
- Be a single person
- Who does love you, will make you cry
- Love can do it all
- Happiness only as a couple
- The orange stockings
- Everything is forgiven for love
- Opposites attract
Friendship, the key link
You will meet, and surely closely, a couple who have left aside their respective friendships. This, it seems, is the worst decision you can make. Pablo Neira acknowledges that life as a couple pushes us to adapt our single life, but that the area of the couple is one of the many areas that human beings need to achieve their well-being, so «destroy our social area, not it helps us feel better »in our relationship.
Thinking that my partner is everything to me and with that person is enough for me to be happy and cover my needs, leads people to move away from other variables and areas of their lives on which their happiness and well-being are also based. “We must highlight the concept of a better half, very socially established, which makes us see that I am not complete without the other person, that is, that my identity and who I am cannot be understood without the other,” he concludes.