Last update: April 15, 2017
To consciously love means to first love yourself in such a way as to eliminate unhealthy addictions or icy gaps that others are forced to fill. Loving in a mature way means giving oneself freely to the other in an act of authenticity, not to appease the sense of loneliness and never to the detriment of one's dignity.
Einstein himself once said that love could not be explained with a scientific approach, because a biological, chemical and fascinating act like love cannot be quantified or observed under a microscope. However, the father of relativity theory was wrong. Because if there is one thing neurology has shown, it is that love is addictive nowadays.
Loving is not just loving, it is above all understanding.
Françoise Sagan
Advances in neuroscience often extinguish the sense of romance and poetry that permeate our relationships, as if they were poisoned candy. Love is made of dopamine, which is why many times we seem almost narcotized in front of a bond that we find it hard to let go and we cannot see the damage it causes us..
Love is blind, we know it well, and we could all fall into a relationship based on unhealthy, suffocating and too intense attachment. However, it is our responsibility to open our eyes and see ourselves first. The relationship that deprives us of our personality, which causes us to abandon self-esteem and self-conception is not healthy. It is as if we are sacrificing ourselves in the name of an unhappiness that we do not deserve.
We invite you to reflect on the subject.
Love based on attachment is pure addiction
A curious thing in the scientific or clinical field is that the theme of depression associated with lack of love has been studied more than the love associated with mania, addiction. This is for a simple reason: from a historical and cultural point of view, the image of boundless, passionate, dominant and blind love has always been seen as admirable, positive and even very inspiring.
Let's face it… we've all thought in life that great loves are “all or nothing” ones. Those in which we merge half of our heart with that of the other person to create only one, those in which we are the air that the other breathes, those in which we are saved from all our fears, from loneliness. We must be very careful with these ideals, however, because they all hide a tragicomic element, the bittersweet note and the relentless poison of disappointments.
One thing needs to be clarified, namely that relationships based on emotional attachment are toxic because it means giving the other the power to erase every aspect of our personality: self-esteem, self-conception, respect for ourselves. Furthermore, when we are subjected to dependent love, strange as it may seem, it is not at all easy to see what really happens. It does not matter if others warn us, it is useless for them to tell us that "we are not like that".
Love based on attachment is stubborn and blind and has no head or tail, but its protagonist is a big and wounded heart that needs its love drug with relentless side effects.
The ideal in these cases is to invest first of all in one's personal growth, in knowing how to manage one's fears and become emotionally mature people and not inveterate seekers of an attachment that satisfies one's needs.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said, loving does not mean looking at each other at all. Otherwise, you end up losing any perspective. To love consciously means to tune one's heart to observe the beauty of the world together, to look together in the same direction. This is what we could call "couple awareness".
This wonderful dimension of "couple awareness" contains three fundamental aspects that are worth remembering:
- Commitment. Commitment is not based only on an integral and respectful affective contract towards the other, but also towards oneself. You have to take care of your psychological well-being in order to fully engage with your loved one.
- Communication. Any stable and happy couple is skilled in communication, they do it with assertiveness, through active listening, empathy and a true closeness that leaves no room for selfishness and blackmail.
- Correspondence. Correspondence is nothing more than a reciprocity for which loving is not only giving, but also receiving. A couple is not a game of forces, but a team that reaches agreements, an alliance in which both win, where the personal growth of the loved one is favored as a form of investment in the relationship itself.
Finally, it must be understood that the variable "love" is not sufficient in the couple equation. A relationship is like a muscle that needs to be trained through a sense of humor, respect and personal freedom. We learn to cultivate healthy relationships, where there is no room for fear, submission and, above all, addiction.
