Last update: October 30, 2016
Love without tenderness doesn't suit me, I don't want it. It is not authentic. Because for me tenderness is the most cultured and delicate language of affection. With every word, with every gesture and with every embrace offered tenderly, the vessel of our most intimate essence opens, the one that defines us in the bond of the person we love.
"Tenderness" is the word that we now only find in the Museum of Forgotten Gestures. Moreover, not everyone is made of that material with which affection finds its path, its peak, its paths to give a real meaning to love. You need a certain serenity and inner calm to find yourself in the delicacy of those streets, to find that sincere affection that caresses the skin and makes the heart beat.
“Nothing is small in love. Those who wait for great opportunities to show their tenderness do not know how to love ”.
(Laure Conan)
Paul Elkan, one of the most famous psychologists in the field of emotion studies, proposed a thesis in 1999 in which he argued that tenderness is a basic emotion that many have overlooked. In it, the need for attention, affection, empathy and the need for intimacy harmonize with which we give security and warmth.
Tenderness is, above all, a gesture of offering, the most authentic expression of affection.
The daily exercise of tenderness makes us worthy people
Tenderness makes us worthy human beings. It allows us to acquire a knowledge in which simplicity finally obtains a more worthy and wiser essence, which defeats artifice, selfishness and materialism, to find yourself skin to skin and heart to heart with your beloved.
However, there is one aspect that we cannot leave out. As we said earlier, not everyone knows nor can offer true tenderness: you need a good dose of inner peace, emotional maturity and self-knowledge. To love with passion and honor with tenderness, we must offer the best of ourselves and this will never be possible if we run away from ourselves.
Another aspect to consider regarding the daily exercise of tenderness is that it is not expressed only in the most intimate moments: in the art of sensitivity, it is represented in corporeality. However, the wisest and most committed to giving through affection know that "Tenderness" means closeness and desire to reinvent oneself in the language of benevolence, to please the other's heart.
Affection as a process of self-knowledge
None of us have been taught the basics of the most profitable love, the one that does not hurt and that allows us to grow. We have not been taught or shown by a book, but we have seen and experienced it in childhood, the moment in which every child is initiated into the world of affection in the more or less correct way.
Tenderness is the most powerful bond, it is necessary to strengthen the healthy and solid attachment between parents and children. It is also the most important emotional support for a child. After childhood, we use these meanings, gestures, and rites of affection with our loved ones.
This shows us that tenderness should be present throughout our life cycle. Because attention, affection and caresses give life to a correct education of feelings.
If we put these three dimensions into practice without fear or hesitation, our way of communicating will be more effective. We will know how to choose the words to immerse ourselves in the looks, we will be wise craftsmen of the intimacy that nourishes affection, that calms fears and dispels doubts. Because nothing is more powerful than a hug when our partner needs it, even if it is even more fulfilling when it is given for no particular reason. Only because our heart asks for it.
Now you know how important it is to be “educated” in juggling affection and managing tenderness. Only in this way can you build stronger and more meaningful bonds. Why, believe it or not, what really gives strength and vitality to love is the tenderness, attention and affection that is revealed in the simplest things and elementary of everyday life.
The expression of tenderness is sweet, delicate and precious, because it forces us to open the jar of our essence to share it without fear with the people we love. We let ourselves be known without defensive barriers in order to smooth out all the paths and thus favor a full and exceptional encounter.
Because, after all, tenderness is what gives life to the elderly, which puts the child to sleep and which disarms the adult.
