Written and verified by the psychologist GetPersonalGrowth.
Last update: 15 November 2021
Love without attachment or without developing addiction it means to love without needing the other person. Give yourself to your partner in freedom and in a conscious way, share a project where no one loses, where identities are not boycotted and where it does not lead to narcissism. Living such a relationship is possible, as long as one principle is taken into account: it doesn't matter how much we are loved, but how.
Before clarifying how to love without attachment, it is necessary to understand what we are referring to in this context when we talk about attachment. From an ethological point of view, there is nothing as important to the human being as attachment. This is especially true for newborns. It is about establishing an intense and lasting bond essential for our development, a bond where healthy love helps us to build up our personality as well.
"Establishing a dependent relationship means giving up the soul in exchange for a false pleasure and a false security."
-Walter Rice-
From the point of view of emotional relationships, attachment requires another consideration. It is clear that we all need to know that the other person is there for us. We want to feel loved. We want to be part of a commitment. All this makes us part of a couple. However, this term makes fertile ground where fear and insecurity often grow.
A child needs his parents to be fed and find his place in the world. Building love based on attachment means needing a partner just as a child needs parents. It is a personalityless and immature love, where there are only needs, fears and addictions.
Love without attachment, a goal to be achieved
Loving without attachment is not easy. This because most of us have become accustomed to loving conditionally. We want loves that are right for us. People who fill our sense of emptiness and our loneliness. Comrades who heal our broken pieces and who sew wings on our shoulders that allow us to fly. We want everything, forgetting the most important thing: to start with ourselves.
No one is responsible for saving us, rebuilding us or making us what we have always dreamed of. This responsibility is ours alone. However, we have grown accustomed to giving ourselves to others with the hope of feeling complete and fulfilled. We want to satisfy our every need. The explanation for this type of psychological and affective dynamic, curious as it may be, is found in the society in which we were brought up.
From an early age our culture has given us the idea that happiness is achieved by possessing many things. This, however, presents us with a sad emotional idea: the eternal feeling that we are missing something. In this way, we orient our existence on the basis of this constant search to have and accumulate certain things, with the hope of being well. We develop obsessive bonds with objects, ideals and people. We think that perhaps in this way we will make sense of our existence.
This type of attachment corrupts and oxidizes. It makes us eternally prisoners of what we lack. We begin to need things or people and this not because of an authentic need, but of a social and emotional impulse. A blind mechanism due to suffering and the fear of lack.
Is such an existence worth it? Obviously not! Realizing this will allow us to create healthier emotional relationships, but also to have a happier and more fulfilling life.
How to love without attachment and without anxiety?
Loving for the pleasure of doing it and not out of need implies loving the partner as they are, not for what we want them to be. It means loving someone just as we love the sun, the moons and the stars. We cannot and do not want them to belong to us, but we appreciate the fact that they are there to enlighten us, to inspire us day after day, accompanying us on our life path. Not being able to consider them ours does not prevent us from enjoying them.
Let's now look at some ways to love without attachment and to create an addiction-free relationship.
Declare yourself: start with yourself
Declare yourselves emotionally free. You don't need anyone to be happy. Happiness must first and foremost be part of an individual when he is in solitude. It is a feeling of self-realization with which to consider yourself as people who have value and dignity.
Declare yourself a person without attachment. Free yourself from the fear of abandonment and the persistent anxiety of being alone. Get rid of all your "attachments", such as ideals, patterns, inherited false conceptions, etc. Be able to offer yourself to someone in freedom and not out of the need to fill your senses with emptiness or your loneliness.
Love without attachment, without need, with hope
Remember that poisoned love doesn't just imply an obsessive need to own your partner and be a part of them. It is also about the inability to give up on this person when the bond is harmful.
To love means to be clear about what a limitless love is. The results are suffering, depression, jealousy, lack of emotional control, low self-esteem and addiction.
To love implies investing in our personal development and that of the loved one. It means leaving her spaces that will serve to enrich the relationship.
Likewise, we must be able to establish a relationship based on free trade, free from anxiety and insecurity. We are talking about bonds in which there are no obsessive needs, but strength and generosity. These that are created through trust and complicity. A complicity that is based on "I stop being" because "I know I am loved". I have faith in those who have chosen me, because they love who I am and are not with me just to ward off the ghost of loneliness.
