Today, many men and women experience both deeply compassionate love and intense passion, but this usually does not happen at the same time or with the same person. However, romantic love requires both. Between the ordinary and the transcendent, the safe and the adventure, the familiar and the unfamiliar, there seems to be a fundamental opposition that pervades human life. We can find information about this in some of the theories. These binary oppositions point to two fundamental and conflicting human needs: on the one hand, the need for a completely known and predictable terrain, a safe haven or, in Eric Froom's words, "a framework for orientation and commitment"; On the other hand, the longing to encounter something unpredictable, frightening, mysterious, and to escape from the stereotyped and familiar rules/order by going beyond the boundaries. Romantic passion emerges at the intersection of these two currents.
The need for a person to know both himself and another, and for a completely secure attachment, is very strong for both children and adults. But security and predictability in the relationship is difficult to achieve. We fight endlessly to achieve that illusory continuity and predictability. However, secure attachment is not a very useful model for adult reciprocal romantic love. Love is not actually safe, despite our insistence otherwise. Let's expand on this subject, which contrasts with what we have learned so far...
If we assume that there is a fundamental reality in our sense of security and stability, then movement, the gaps in between, and impermanence that provides the environment for imagination, become the factor that makes passion possible. However, the contradiction of the idea put forward in this article comes from this: Human beings are in a state of flux due to their life, and movement and change are inherent to our nature, they are the basic ground of our life. In this inverted perspective, flow and adventure become reality, while security and assurance are fantastic.
Continuing with this perspective... Those who have a vibrant sexual life or get along very well with each other and are very in love with each other. It is quite common for couples to avoid marriage. In fact, what kills desire or love is not the marriage itself, but how the marriage is constructed and what is attributed to it. love We desire absolute security and certainty to protect ourselves. Couples who define themselves as free, childish and adventurous before marriage generally seek continuity and stability from marriage. And they attribute this dullness that comes with stagnation to the institution of marriage, not to the meaning of the marriages they have constructed for themselves with their conflicting longings for security and continuity.
Love and desire give birth to a tense arc in which romantic love emerges. But like all our experiences, love and passion are partly fiction. Love and desire arise in our daily lives, and we have a big role in creating the environment in which they emerge. When blandness or stability in a relationship is accepted as a requirement for security, the tendency to seek passion in safer, other lands will increase. The division that Freud calls psychic impotence is a result of an effort to minimize some kind of risk by separating continuity from adventure.
Human beings seek both security and adventure; He craves both the obvious and the unusual. We alternately sometimes pursue these desires and sometimes finely balance them. The reason for the lack of passion that occurs from time to time or after a while in long-term relationships is not that the fire of love goes out, but rather that the couple works in a collusive way, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, in order to maintain a stability that we attribute to trust. From this point of view, we can say that the most important point to pay attention to in long-term relationships is what we attribute to the relationship.
I would like to end my article with a sentence from Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. According to him, love is "giving something we don't have to someone we don't know."
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