Frequently, in this section, I write about people living in stormy and unhealthy relationships. However, living as a couple does not always have to be hell. Many people enjoy in their lives a relationship of respect, equality and mutual growth. Part of the secret to your well-being lies in work together to achieve common goals that benefit all family members equally.
goodbye to romantic myths
First of all, to maintain a healthy relationship, we have to discard from our lives romantic myths like that of the “better half”. In previous articles, we have already seen that this concept is a fallacy that makes us feel incomplete and keeps us in an eternal search for someone external to cover our shortcomings and needs.
This type of relationship, based on inequality, damages us by moving us away from our true being.
Romantic love is based on patriarchal premises in which the couple is sustained by the submission of one of its members to the other. In these cases, a healthy and equitable couple relationship will never be established. To achieve a rich and rewarding relationship, both partners must be free from these dominance and submission patterns that keep other couples tied down.
How to break free from unhealthy dependency patterns
Each person can achieve this state of liberation in a particular way.
- Some may have grown up in their childhood in an environment in which her parents provided her with a safe and sound bond.
- Other people, although they did not know a secure attachment in their childhood, may have lived various personal experiences that have helped them mature and overcome the damage of their childhood. To the heal their emotions and free themselves from their backpack of shortcomings, anger and sorrowthese people manage to establish healthy, empathic and balanced ties with their partners.
These people, growing up with high self-esteem, feeling loved and protected, do not drag into adulthood a pathological need to demand attention. They feel self-confident and establish egalitarian ties with their partners in which no one thinks they are superior or is subservient to the needs of the other. These relationships are based on balance, the common good and the search for the well-being of all its members: all are equally important, all need care, all provide care.
In one way or another, to maintain a healthy and empowering couple relationship, both parties must have worked through and freed themselves from their emotional damage and unhealthy dependency patterns.
These kinds of enriching relationships are not based on dependency, but on mutual support. These couples are united by common interests and the will to walk in the same direction. They do not fight each for their own, but join forces to achieve their goals. Of course, they are not perfect couples, and like others, they go through different crises and problems.
However, this spirit of sincerity and respect helps them take moments of tension as an opportunity for mutual growth.
Each new crisis is a challenge, an opportunity to go further individually and mature as a couple.
In addition, the love that these people profess is freer and more disinterested, much more authentic and enriching than when it relies on insane dependencies or when each one is intended to be a better half that complements the other.
Throughout their life together, each member of the couple becomes a strong secure attachment figure for the other party.
In the face of every problem, doubt, crisis, both members are present to talk and support. They will also be there to share moments of complicity and joy.
Mutual support as a secure attachment
As a general rule, these couples do not usually go to therapy, but I have found in consultation, on countless occasions, the case of people trapped in very toxic relationships or with partners who mistreat them physically or psychologically. As we work on their personal stories of emotional dependency, these people manage to definitively break with their harmful partners and rebuild their lives together with partners, also freed from their ties.
This is the case of Elsa, who came to my office suffering from a deep identity crisis. Elsa was living alone with her husband. Her two daughters had already left home and she felt a deep discomfort. The woman felt trapped in a loveless, monotonous and submissive relationship.
As her therapeutic work progressed, Elsa understood the need to separate from her husband and made the decision. Eventually, she met someone else and they moved in together. Elsa wrote to tell me that for the first time in her life, she felt loved and accompanied in an authentic way: “He supports me and takes care of me the same way I take care of him”, told me. “I had never experienced that.”
This mutual support that Elsa wrote to me about is what helps these people to continue maturing and growing. We can understand it as a continuation of the secure attachment of the early years, which Bowlby told us about. As children, thanks to the love and care of our parents, we grow up safe and confident, and when we grow up and find a partner with whom we can have a relationship of true selfless love, we continue to mature and enrich each other.
If we want to live as a couple, one of the keys to achieve happiness is to find a person with whom you really we can be ourselves, free and authentic, and in turn, for which we too are an important figure to lean on.