Can We Learn To Improve The Way We Relate To Our Partner?
After more than five years accompanying individual and couple processes to improve the quality and satisfaction of interpersonal relationships, I would like to reflect on a topic that is as vital as it is tremendously difficult to conceptualize: love in the couple
I have observed that there is in the conception of love the generalized idea that it is a kind of grace that comes from outside That is, it depends on luck to meet him. In reality, I see my patients thirsty for love.
Behind most irrational behaviors and psychological disorders you always find a little person wanting to be loved. And that is precisely the genesis of the problem with love. Everyone is thirsty for love, but no one invests the slightest in learning to love!
Aspects of the relationship that we can learn to improve
Next, I will express here a series of problems that usually make it difficult for couples to have fulfilling relationships and generate a lot of suffering in current couples.
1. The belief that love consists of feeling loved
The belief that love is feeling loved and not the ability to love is very harmful. Hence this belief generates a new problem: how to be worthy of love
To achieve this goal, people can spend their entire lives pursuing economic success, social status or the perfect body. All these goals will never bring the desired love because they are ways to compensate for a deficient situation : the lack of personal love.
We can carry this lack from childhood. We may not have been well cared for or recognized by our parents. If we relate to our partner from emotional deficiencies and unresolved stories, we will never be able to develop the capacity to love the other and we will feel eternally dissatisfied.
2. Confusing love with infatuation
Many people believe that when the initial infatuation disappears it means that love has abandoned the relationship I think that romantic movies and the classic image of Cupid shooting his arrows at couples have caused this great confusion.
Falling in love is a combination of emotions of intimacy and attraction that produce a series of chemical changes in the brain. At first we tend to idealize the other , and falling in love usually dissipates when we begin to see its defects and coexistence settles into reality. If a couple’s commitment is conditioned on feeling butterflies in the stomach, the relationship will not have much future.
3. The lack of sexual polarity
The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it erotic love which is based on said polarity.
Contemporary society tends to preach identity equality and people are very confused about the natural polarity they possess. The male-female polarity is a biological reality that we cannot ignore if we want to achieve good results in our relationship.
Sex may not be the essential thing in a relationship based on love, but It is the mortar that keeps the ties together and that adds color and spark to the relationship
In a pair one and one must add up to more than two Couples who share a common purpose or horizon can overcome the attacks that sooner or later the difficulties of coexistence and the conflicts inherent to life will bring. This horizon can be the raising of a common child, a work project or a shared ideal.
The important thing is that it elevates the members of the couple beyond their egoic needs and emotional shortcomings. When mutual growth is also included in the couple’s purpose, the couple can learn from conflicts and grow from them. There is no place where the game of mutual projections is shown as much as in the couple.
5. Closed communication
During our lives we learn numerous concepts and theories that we never use. However, something as vital to our relationships as learning to communicate is often conspicuous by its absence.
Most of the couples who usually come to my office usually recognize that they have a serious communication problem Closed communication is that pattern of interaction that remains rigid because its members are unable to change the communication style. We have the classic example of the woman who complains because her husband doesn’t listen to her and her husband doesn’t listen to her because her wife always complains. What came first the chicken or the egg? In this type of closed communication, each person is comfortable attributing to the other the origin of their own communication.
In conclusion…
Couples psychotherapy is a process of accompaniment to the couple that can allow you to go through temporary crises, change communication strategies and allow the growth of the members that comprise it through their relationship.
The sessions can also be individual as long as there is a mutual commitment on the part of the couple to follow the therapist’s instructions. If you are interested in having this kind of professional service, access the Directory of Psychologists.
