Can we learn to improve the way we relate to our partner?

These are several aspects of the relationship that we can learn to improve in order to strengthen the bond.

After more than five years accompanying individual and couple processes to improve the quality and satisfaction of interpersonal relationships, I would like to make a reflection on a topic as vital as tremendously difficult to conceptualize: love in the couple..

I have observed that in the conception of love there is a generalized idea that it is a sort of generalized idea that it is a kind of grace that comes from the outside.. That is to say, that it depends on luck to find it. In reality, I see my patients thirsty for love.

Behind most irrational behaviors and psychological disorders you always find a little person longing to be loved. And that is precisely the genesis of the problem with love. Everyone is thirsty for love, but no one invests the least in learning to love!

Aspects of the couple's relationship that we can learn to improve.

In the following, I will express here a series of problems that usually make it difficult for couple relationships to be full and generate much suffering in current couples. in today's couples.

1. The belief that love consists of feeling loved.

The belief that love is feeling loved and not the capacity to love is very harmful. Hence, this belief generates a new problem: how to become worthy of love.

To achieve that goal people may spend their whole life 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.lack of personal love.

We can carry this deficiency with us 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, love has abandoned the relationship.. I believe that romantic movies and the classic image of cupid throwing his arrows at couples have caused this great confusion.

Falling in love is a combination of emotions of intimidation and attraction that produce a series of chemical modifications in the brain. At first we tend to idealize the otherAt first we tend to idealize the other, and the infatuation usually dissipates when we begin to see their defects and the coexistence settles in the real. If a couple's commitment is conditioned on feeling butterflies in the stomach, the relationship will not have much of a future.

3. Lack of sexual polarity

The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it the erotic love, which is based on this polarity.which is based on this polarity.

Contemporary society tends to preach identity equality and people are very confused about their natural polarity. The masculine-feminine polarity is a Biological reality that we cannot play at skipping if we want to reap good results in our relationship.

Sex may not be the essential part of a relationship based on love, but it is the mortar that holds the couple together. it is the mortar that holds the bond together and brings color and sparkle to the relationship..

4. Lack of common purpose

In a couple, one and one must add up to more than two.. Couples who share a common purpose or common horizon can overcome the difficulties of living together and the conflicts inherent in life. This horizon can be the raising of a child together, a work project or a shared ideal.

The important thing is that it elevates the members of the couple beyond their egoic needs and their emotional deficiencies. When the couple's purpose also includes mutual growth, the couple can learn from conflicts and grow from them. and grow from them. There is no place where the game of mutual projections shows itself as much as in the couple.

5. Closed communication

We learn numerous concepts and theories throughout our lives 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 come to my office usually recognize that they have a serious communication problem.. Closed communication is a pattern of interaction that remains rigid because the partners are unable to change their communication style. We have the classic example of the wife who complains because her husband does not listen to her and her husband does not listen to her because his wife always complains. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In this type of closed communication each one is installed in the comfort of attributing to the other the origin of his own communication.

To conclude...

Couple psychotherapy is a process of accompaniment for the couple. that can allow to cross temporary crises, to change communicative strategies and to allow the growth of the members that compose it through their relationship.

Sessions can also be individual as long as there is a mutual commitment from the couple to follow the therapist's indications. If you are interested in this kind of professional service, access the Directory of Psychologists.