Contents
Why do all the love songs speak to us?
Psychology
Music helps us express, accept or understand feelings that we have inside and we are not able to show
Over the years things have changed. If before you made a cassette or a CD with songs to give to that person you liked, now you make one playlist from Spotify. If before the radio was called to dedicate a song, now a stories to Instagram, hoping that “special person” realizes the reason for the song. But although the move from analog to digital makes everything change a bit, one part remains intact: the use of music, of love songs, to express what we feel.
“All the songs talk about me”, was titled Jonas Trueba’s debut feature,
And it is that when one is very much in love, or the heartbreak squeezes a little hard, it is difficult not to feel that all the films have something to do with what happens to us, that all the books speak of our experience, or that all the songs are written just for us. «We use love songs (and heartbreak) as a means of expressing feelings. It is said that love moves the world, and this type of song is representative of our time ”, explains Marta Ballesteros, a psychologist at Centro TAP.
He argues that love letters connect us with our own experiences, and therefore it is easy to identify them with your own people or situations. For his part, Rafael San Román, ifeel psychologist, comments that if we talk about love songs, we talk about basic themes, very visceral and shared by all, and which are also transmitted normally in a simple and easily informative way. “They are lyrics accompanied by music, which serves as a channel to transmit themselves better and with more power, because it greatly increases the emotional charge of words,” he points out.
Explain to me how I feel
On the power of making us feel about music in general, Marta Ballesteros points out that listening to music “activates our nervous system.” «Various studies in neuroscience show that the pleasure from listening to music it is produced thanks to the secretion of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is also associated with the consumption of drugs, food, sex or money, ”he adds.
An essential factor in these love songs is that they have the ability to help us understand feelings that we may not have identified. «Many times we are more or less aware of what we feel but we haven’t verbalized it yet and that absence of words reduces clarity, prevents us from giving a complete meaning to what happens to us, ”explains Rafael San Román. Therefore, songs can be the vehicle that gives us the words that we are not able to find, and that fit with the emotion we feel. «When this happens our experience becomes deeper, more complete. We say: “That’s right, that’s how I feel,” says the psychologist. Marta Ballesteros sums it up: “It is a facilitating channel that allows us to understand how we feel and makes it possible to communicate it in a more practical and symbolic way.”
Individualize a collective feeling
Psychologist Rafael San Román says that emotions are what they are and the repertoire is the same for all human beings. «In that sense the experience is shared. However, then each one hurts what hurts, or what makes him happy, and that is already a private experience», He points out. For this reason, it is common that when listening to a song we feel that it speaks just about how we feel, although there are thousands of people who may feel exactly the same.
“The lyrics of the songs can make universal situations that may have been perceived by the person so particular or their own, that they think that it is not usual or probable to feel this way,” explains psychologist Marina Ballesteros. But, as much as we talk about emotions that we all experience, there are times when we forget that we are not the only ones who have been through them. «At the moment of truth to all we don’t care if everyone’s heart was broken: now they have broken it to us and there is no consolation for that, because the heart that hurts is ours », adds San Román.
Much talk about love songs, but maybe in our life those that talk about when that love ends may have more force. Both psychologists agree that when you are very sad, listen to a song according to that state of mind It can be able to mobilize our emotions and, in some way, unburden ourselves. «The auditory stimulus helps us to connect with that unpleasant emotion, naming it, understanding it, expressing it and letting it come out; It helps us channel this discomfort by connecting with it while we release it, ”says Marta Ballesteros. The opposite can also be the case: feeling sad and listening to songs that reinforce positive emotions. In both cases, the ifeel psychologist points out that they can be beneficial, since either connecting more with sadness or disconnecting from it, “there is a piece within us that is placed in its place.”
Who believes what we mean by “love”?
Another reason we may feel that these songs “speak to us” is because they themselves have taught us the concept of love that we understand and practice. Rafael San Román comments that «most of the cultural expressions that we have consumed throughout our lives are based on the narrative of“ romantic love ”», and therefore, we have assimilated a series of concepts and symbols that «make us have some certain expectations about romantic relationships».
For her part, although Marta Ballesteros affirms “that we feel so identified with them (the songs) that they can define the way in which we conceptualize affective relationships,” she clarifies that, as we gain experience in life, we see “certain nuances that they make us distance ourselves from the veracity that we gave in their day ”to certain ideas or, for example, songs. Therefore, he concludes by saying that, although in a certain way love songs can influence the construction we make of our place in the world, this is something dynamic, which may change throughout our lives.