Does Romantic Love Create a Good Couple?

Romantic love: a commitment that knows no limits even beyond death, unbridled passion, a perfect complicity, birds singing…candles, soft lighting, music, possibly a languid melody of love, a couple in love holding each other, contemplating exchanging vows of passionate and intense devotion. Utopia? Impossible?

This is how we imagine ideal love or rather, life with an ideal partner. However, unlimited romance is impossible and waiting for it only leads us to bitter disappointments.

Until death do us part? We should relearn to fall in love and put aside the romantic education we have absorbed from childhood through fairy tales.

Farewell to the idealization of the loving bond

The belief in the permanence of romantic love has an entourage of allied concepts to be revised, let’s look at the main ones:

• Love at first sight: if we understand love we will really know that this feeling requires time to develop. You may feel attraction or desire for a person at first sight, but love requires the passage of time to unveil those qualities worthy of being loved, to create mutual and enriching satisfaction.
• Being lovesick is another phrase we hear (and say!) frequently. However, the phase of infatuation or “temporary insanity” cannot be sustained for long. The fundamental reason is that it is not adaptive or at a physiological level (constant alteration) or social-personal level (we’d end up neglecting a lot by thinking about our love or about being with them).
• True love should be like a fairytale: Cinderella is a good story; it’s nice and metaphorical, but behind it contains an unhealthy rational outline. In real life the charming prince and the beautiful princess will have mixed roles and most likely discover that their conditions are so different that many times conflicts will occur.
• Good men repair the house and good women wash clothes: fortunately we started to become aware and to fight against theses rigid gender stereotypes. We must instead emphasize individuality and equality, essential pillars of a relationship.

In defense of real relationships

An ideal couple is one in which partners share their ideals, their qualities, their ability to think and their way of experiencing their feelings and emotions. That is, an ideal couple is one that is built by itself.

Often we find people who think that if you do not take photos of you kissing, don’t post romantic messages on Facebook, don’t orient your life around a common interest and don’t depend on the person you love, then you’re not in a real or healthy relationship.

Often it seems wrong that someone does not adhere to these canons and they seek to tell us that the right thing is not to say “without you I am nothing.” But if we pay attention to it, we will realize that it is an outline that undermines our autonomy and our relationships.

A couple can be how it decides to be and the uniqueness of the relationship is what makes it real. As long as these exchanges are based on respect for one’s self-growth, the couple is on the right track.

Each person has their special features and, with them, a distinctive love between two people is forged. True love is not romantic; it stands for freedom and mutual affection. That is, the feeling that gives wings to fly and reasons to stay.

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