SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

“Don't know what you got 'til it's gone

Don't know what it is I did so wrong

Do you wanna see me beggin' baby

Can't you give me just one more day?

Can't you see my heart's been draggin' lately?

I've been lookin' for the words to say”(Cinderella)

 Versione italiana al link: L'educazione sentimentale

Just as there is no school for being good parents, there is no course of study for becoming excellent lovers. As Kierkegaard states "we are all beginners in love." This means that we are all a bit inadequate and that we learn at our own expense, through trial and error, adjustments and approximations. Intimate relationships, when lived with authenticity, bring our whole being into play with its lights and shadows, its latent potential and its unavoidable wounds: this is why they attract and scare us so much at the same time. 

As for me, I always say that my love life is not in my favour. Even today, at the tender age of 43, I must admit that I have never had a decent relationship. By this I mean a peaceful relationship without too much turbulence or suffering, which have been the constant in my short and stormy love affairs. 

In the light of my own experiences and those of my friends or counseling clients, I would like to share the words of James Hillman: "Love is madness and it is only through it that we go beyond ourselves. It is what makes us grow wings, what drives us to write love letters, to drive all night, to do incredible things. We are incredible when we are inside that madness, we are incredible when we love."

On that note, I recommend Michele Mezzanotte's video 'True love exists but it has to be built. Four signs to recognise it.’(video) Here Michele uses mythology, and in particular the metaphor of the four wings of Eros, to highlight the key ingredients of the love relationship:

1) War and Beauty. A close-knit couple is rarely born 'at the table', out of convenience, fear of loneliness or to spend the lockdown in company. What is needed is the magical and imponderable spark of attraction, the sense of mutual recognition that makes you choose that woman or man out of a thousand potential partners. This passionate element can also be the source of conflicts, jealousies and fears, precisely because we fear the loss of someone we intuitively recognise as very important to us.

2) Sacrifice: This term is not about immolating ourselves to the relationship in a passive-aggressive attitude of complacency, but rather about 'making sacred' what is still obscure in us and in the other. Sacrifice is also integrity: making our whole being converge towards one person, disciplining our personality and renouncing the lure of dispersing and fragmenting ourselves into other stories and gratifications of the moment. Sacrifice means moving out of our comfort zone, giving up certain reassuring habits and our own spiritual inertia, which often hides egoism and fear of suffering.

3) Support: love must be a crutch in bad times, not an obstacle to our journey. The two partners must be able to find comfort and support in each other, encouragement and motivation for their self-realisation and realisation of their life project. A relationship cannot be stifling or unbalanced, in the sense that one of the partners takes on all the emotional, proactive or planning work of the relationship and the other lets himself be pulled along. 

4) Renewal. Why do relationships end? In fact, everything has its natural course and it is an illusion to believe that we will always be in the butterflies-in-the-stomach phase. Physiologically, the most vital emotions tend to die out after a while, unless the individual is able to renew herself/himself and, consequently, the couple. This happens in highly dynamic people who are thirsty for real knowledge and do not take themselves or their partners for granted. The ability and desire to learn, calibrated on our own interiority or that of our partner, can make us realise that the essence of life is mysterious, and that love can have a thousand shades, a thousand flavours and a thousand colours, just like the soul of a human being.

So, although I am not the ideal spokesperson for couple relationships, I believe it is one of the most fascinating adventures an individual can have. Through an intimate, sincere and open confrontation with the other, we can move towards self-fulfilment, re-integration and even self- transcendence. 

Per prenotare  un colloquio  di Counseling contattatemi attraverso il mio sito  Le Vie per l'Armonia.