It is in novels, television, movies and even in the public lives of famous people. Love seems to be one of the most and best installed elements in mass media culture, and day by day we receive drip-feed information about what a conventional love life is, or should be, recognizable by everyone, normalized.
Of course, in some cases it can be comforting to have a “mold” to guide a relationship through it with few complications and without moments of ambiguity, but it is also true that Unthinkingly clinging to certain emotional roles can have negative consequences subtract spontaneity from love life and even promote behavioral dynamics that do not fit with the personality and life habits of the lovers in question.
That is why It is healthy to question certain conventions about love, its myths and everything that revolves around stereotypes about life as a couple. After all, your understanding of love life may go far beyond what is typical. The first step to rethink certain things and take love philosophically? Reflecting on the concept of love itself can be a good way to do it, and to do so you can use these ten keys.
Complying with certain routines every day during your life together with someone is not something positive in itself, nor something that will make the relationship progress. In fact, it is not uncommon for the fulfillment of certain rituals to be carried out more than as a way to show love or affection, such as a way to compensate for emotional crises that have not yet fully manifested or as if they were part of an obligation.
Of course, for a relationship to prosper, a base of relative stability is needed, but this is not a guarantee of anything, but rather a necessary and not sufficient condition.
2. There is nothing wrong with routine
The counterpart to the previous point is to take into account that There is no universal rule according to which love life must be constantly crossed by transgression and changes in environment. In principle, a calm life without major contrasts is a perfectly valid breeding ground for a consistent relationship. It all depends on the needs of each person.
3. Be careful with idealization
Idealization is an exciting ingredient in the early stages of falling in love, but it usually leads to deception It is important to know if you feel love for the person or for the avatar they represent. To do this, there is nothing better than meeting this person in very varied contexts, not always in the same way and in the same place. Information is power.
4. Away with stereotypes about ideal couples
Stereotypes about the ideal couple serve to make certain roles immediately recognizable in series, advertisements and novels, but In love life they are of little use and, what’s more, they usually cause problems
Stereotypes exist precisely to guide us in matters in which we invest little time and whose results are not of great importance, such as our way of considering someone who appears for the first time in a movie, but love life can become something much more serious than that and, therefore, requires our brain to give up autopilot to directly take control of the situation.
5. Sacrifices are not proofs of love
Whenever you act, you make a decision whose results have potential advantages and possible drawbacks. Naturally, this also works in love, and It is very possible that maintaining a loving relationship requires efforts in various areas of life
However, it is necessary to know how to discriminate between these small sacrifices whose root is found in the decisions that we must make as individuals who invest in staying close to the other person (and which makes sense as such), and others that are artificial, created as hardly justifiable imposition on the part of our partner or as a result of our imagination, our prejudices about love as something necessarily painful and a good portion of magical thinking.
6. We must keep in mind the notion of symmetry
Love cannot and should not be alienating, or it can become an instrument of manipulation. This second scenario may seem somewhat extreme, but it is not so extreme if we remember that love has a deeply irrational component and that many of the decisions and actions that we undertake based on it do not seem to be aimed at meeting easily expressible needs nor do they respond to a good that can be described objectively.
Manipulation has its reason for being when the person being manipulated does not know that he is being manipulated, and it can also take the most subtle forms, or even be taken as something natural by everyone (even by friends and acquaintances). .
7. Collective goals? Yes, but with communication involved
If it is sometimes difficult to know what one wants, knowing what responds to the interests of the group made up of people who love each other is a titan’s task. That’s why It is worth thinking about whether these group goals really are or have been illuminated by a set of colossal misunderstandings paradoxical communication or “I thought that you believed that…”.
If you’re not excited about something in particular, it’s best to think about the best way to say it. Delicately, but without leaving any room for doubt.
8. Where is the limit of sincerity?
Honesty is an essential component in an intimate relationship, but so is privacy Determining to what extent we want to expose ourselves to someone is essential, and so is letting this person see where they are at the limit they should expect. What is important is not so much the proportion of the shared part over the private part as the fact that the other person is aware of its existence.
There is great social pressure about how much time two people who love each other should spend together, but It is not impossible for love to exist even in cases where you want to spend a lot of time alone This point also has to do with prejudices about love life understood as the beginning of life as a couple and the germ of a new family. Once again, you have to know how to discriminate between social dictates and what the body asks for.
10. What is meaningful to us?
Possibly, This is the fundamental question when reflecting on love, whether as something abstract or something that we try to materialize in our relationship with someone specific. Giving clues about how to deal with it is, in fact, limiting the scope of its implications and taking away the freedom of whoever wants to respond to it.
Pages and pages have been written in philosophy books about how to give meaning to all vital projects worthy of being called as such, and this also includes, of course, treatises on love. After all, A loving relationship is worth it if it is meaningful to us in some way although it is in a way that is difficult to express in words.
Of course, it is not necessary to dedicate yourself professionally to philosophy to lose your fear of this question and make reflecting on it bear fruit. And even more so taking into account that it is a private task, which must be resolved with the raw material of each person’s experiences.
