IT’S COMPLICATED (RELATIONSHIPS & DATING)
When we think about relationship or dating. Despite
feeling difficult. For instance,
we have been walking and talking our entire lives, yet walking up to an
attractive person and opening our mouths to say “hi” can feel impossibly
complex to us. People have been using a phone since they were
children, yet given the agony some go through just to dial a person’s phone
number, you’d think they were being water boarded. Most of us have kissed
someone before and we’ve seen hundreds of movies and instances in real life of
other people kissing, yet we still stare dreamily into the object of our
affection’s eyes hour after hour, telling ourselves we can never find the
“right moment” to do it.
Why? It sounds
simple, but why is it so hard?
We build businesses, write novels, scale
mountains, help strangers and friends alike through difficult times, tackle the
thorniest of the world’s social ills — and yet, when we come face-to-face with
someone we find attractive, our hearts race and our minds are sent reeling. And
we stall. What is it about this one area of life
that the most basic actions can feel impossible, that repetitive behavior often
leads to little or no change, and that our psychological defense mechanisms run
rampant trying to convince us to not pursue what
we want?
Our
emotional attachment
As children, none of us get 100% of our
needs met. This is true of you. It’s true of me. It’s true of everyone. The
degree of which our needs aren’t met varies widely, and the nature of how our
needs are unfulfilled differs as well. But it’s the sad truth about growing up:
we’ve all got baggage. And some of us have a lot of it. The nature and
depth of these traumas imprint themselves onto our unconscious and become the
map of how we experience love, intimacy and sex throughout our lives.
Psychologists believe that romantic love occurs when our unconscious becomes exposed to
someone who matches the archetype of parental love we experienced growing up,
someone whose behavior matches our emotional map for intimacy. Our unconscious
is always seeking to return to the unconditional nurturing we received as
children, and to re-process and heal the traumas we suffered.
In short, our unconscious is wired to seek out romantic interests who
it believes will fulfill our unfulfilled emotional needs, to fill in the gaps
of the love and nurturing we missed out on as kids. This is why the people we
fall in love with almost always resemble our parents on an emotional level.
Hence why people who are madly in love say to each other,
“you complete me,” or refer to each other as their “better half.” It’s also why
couples in the throes of new love often act like children around one another.
Their unconscious mind can’t differentiate between the love they’re receiving
from their girlfriend/boyfriend and the love they once received as a child from
their parents.
This is also why dating and relationships are
so painful and difficult for so many of us, particularly if we had strained
familial relationships growing up. Unlike our dating lives are inextricably bound to our emotional
needs, and when we get into potentially intimate or sexual situations, these
experiences rub up against our prior traumas causing us anxiety, neuroticism,
stress and pain.
So that someone rejecting you isn’t just
rejecting you — instead, to your unconscious, or turned down your need for
affection.
Disassociating From Our Emotions
Objectification.
Objectifying someone is when you see them only for a specific purpose and don’t
see them as fully integrated human beings. You can objectify 4/9 people as sex
objects, professional work objects, social objects, or none of the above. You
might objectify someone for sex, status or influence. But objectification is
ultimately disastrous for one’s own emotional health, not to mention one’s
relationships.
Sexism.
Viewing the other sex as inferior or inherently evil/inept is a sure way to
redirect one’s emotional problems outward onto a population at large rather
than dealing with them yourself. Without fail, men who treat and view women as
some inferior “other,” are more often than not projecting their own anger and
insecurities onto the women they meet rather than dealing with them. The same
goes for women.
Manipulation
and games. By engaging in games and manipulation, we withhold our true
intentions and identities, and therefore we withhold our emotional maps as
well. With these tactics, the aim is to get someone to fall for the perception
we create rather than who we really are, greatly reducing the risk of digging
up the buried emotional scars of past relationships.
Overuse
of humor, teasing, bantering. A classic strategy of distraction. Not
that jokes or teasing are always bad, but an interaction of nothing but jokes
and teasing is a means to communicate without saying anything important, to
enjoy yourselves without actually do anything, and to feel like you know each
other without actually knowing a thing. This is most typical of
English-speaking cultures — men and women, straight and gay — as they tend to
use sarcasm and teasing as a means to imply affection rather than actually
showing it.
Most
of us have, at one point or another, disassociated our emotions and objectified
someone (or entire groups of people) for whatever reasons. I will say, however,
that there’s a lot of social pressure on men, particularly straight men, to
ignore their emotions, particularly “weak” emotions such as a need for intimacy
and love. It’s more socially acceptable for men to objectify their sex lives
and boast about it. Whether you think that’s right or wrong or doesn’t matter,
it is how it is.
By:- Shibashis B
