Rebound Relationships, Or Replacing The Ex After A Breakup: Does One Nail Pull Out Another Nail?
If there is something that characterizes love, it is that it is irrational, confusing and turbulent. We know that it has a very powerful impact on our habits and our emotional state, but it is not always easy to describe these sensations and recognize what type they are.
And unlike other intense emotions such as fear or disgust, in love the source of what we feel is almost never clear: is it the person we are in a relationship with, or is it something that they give us? helps to remember?
Rebound relationships, which occur after having gone through a breakup from which we have not yet recovered, are precisely those in which what keeps the couple together is manipulation and the fear of facing that feeling of emptiness and which, at the same time, are fueled by our inability to recognize what we really feel.
Any relationship has a double edge. They are exciting and sources of many good moments, but if they end they can sink us emotionally.
We cannot control the appearance of that feeling of emptiness, frustration and sadness that invades us when a relationship ends in which we would like to continue living, but we can learn to effectively manage how to adapt to this change. Many people manage to overcome this hard blow, but others refuse to accept their new situation and try to mask reality. Rebound relationships are one of the strategies used to achieve this.
Starting one of those rebound relationships is a way of deceiving ourselves by forcing ourselves to act and feel. in a similar way to how we did it with that person we miss The bad thing is not only that we manipulate someone to achieve it; Furthermore, we are usually not fully aware that we do it.
Why do rebound relationships appear?
In the same way that better special effects can serve to create a very immersive film, the substitute lovers that are used in rebound relationships are a support for our imagination, with the aim of fantasizing what life would be like if that breakup had not happened. produced.
This means, among other things, that rebound relationships are highly unfair, since in them there is someone who is wasting their time, their effort and their hopes on a project that has no future because it is the patch for an emotional lack. But it also means that in the person who has started one of these relationships it rebounds there is an unsolved psychological problem: emotional dependence
The source of pain is called emotional dependence
We call affective dependence a way of relating that is deeply internalized in certain people and that puts us in a vulnerable situation without us realizing it It has two facets: one cognitive, another emotional and another behavioral.
Cognitively makes us transform our self-concept (that is, the idea we have of ourselves) into something composed of two people, so that we cannot conceive our life without the person we love.
Emotionally means that throughout the day anything makes us remember emotions linked to the couple, making it very easy to think obsessively about them.
Behaviorally, makes us take the necessary actions to avoid the discomfort caused by the absence of that person. In these situations of longing, the metaphor of love conceived as a drug becomes clearer.
Rebound relationships are a consequence of these three effects. On the one hand, everything that happens to us makes us focus our attention on the discomfort caused by not continuing to be in the relationship that we long for. On the other hand, we go to the extreme of giving false hope to another person to alleviate that discomfort, and on the other hand, in the moments when we may think we are manipulating someone the self-concept leads us to think that even if it were true that we date two people at the same time (one real and one imagined), that is not bad in itself.
How to recognize the rebound effect in love
The bad thing about rebound relationships is that many times they can only be detected by the person who is trying make up for the absence of your ex-partner by incorporating a new lover into your life
This last person can detect some strange details, usually related to signs of unhappiness on the part of the person they are dating, but it is very difficult for them to know how to identify what makes them act like this.
To know if you are fueling the existence of one of those rebound relationships, ask yourself the following questions.
Do you try to change that person to be like your ex?
This is a recurring action in rebound relationships. Asking the other person to change in the context of a romance is already inappropriate, but if in addition to that the change is directed towards a situation in which the person is more similar to the ex-partner physically or mentally the alarm of a probable rebound relationship should begin to sound.
Do you recurrently think about your ex in the context of the relationship?
If being with the other person frequently evokes memories of that old partner that you miss, It is possible that this is exactly what you are looking for in this new relationship: more situations in which it is possible to fantasize about that person who is no longer by your side.
Have you recently gotten out of a turbulent relationship?
The more recent the breakup of a relationship that was very intense for us, the more likely it is that it is a rebound relationship. However, This fact alone is not an indication
Conclusion: love well and love each other better. Love relationships are something that always involves sacrifice, and that is why You have to reflect before starting the habits of life as a couple with someone If not, we can reach a point where we realize that our own shortcomings have caused another person to embark on a path that is not based on anything, only false expectations of loving and being loved.
