The couple’s relationship works
For a few decades now, clinical psychology has begun to study the dynamics of a couple’s relationship. Researchers have identified two types of couple relationships complementary and symmetrical.
The complementary relationship represents “interlocking” relationships, in which the two partners complete each other in their diversity. It could be the perfect relationship but, unfortunately, when complementarity is taken to the extreme, we reach the pathological relationship between victim and tormentor. The symmetrical relationship can be represented by two mirrors looking at each other or by two parallel tracks that never join. This evokes coldness and detachment, but also personal autonomy and respect for others.
What is clear to scholars is that to function well the couple requires alternating complementarity and relational symmetry to guarantee warmth, closeness, and exchange as well as autonomy and mutual respect. Otherwise, the couple risks breaking up due to excessive detachment or excessive bonding. This often happens regardless of sex, which represents a prerogative of happy couples when it works well, although it is not the only component capable of guaranteeing its persistence and stability over time.
Do relationships based on feelings or eroticism survive longer?
Feeling, understood as a bond and emotional impulse, based on trust in the other to whom I can entrust all of myself, including my limits and fragilities, represents an indispensable haven in which to take refuge. In most cases, it is far more powerful than sexual passion. Therefore, couples whose relationship is based on the feeling of mutual protection and belonging tend to survive longer than those characterized by eroticism, destined sooner or later to run out.
But this does not represent happiness, but rather security which is much more sought after, also because there are many other possibilities for pure pleasure, from extramarital relationships to cybersex.
We obtain the winning recipe when both members of the couple can cultivate their autonomy and at the same time maintain a mutual and constant courtship that nourishes the erotic sphere, associated with mutual care and protection.
If we want to continue to experience intense sensations, we must alternate exhilarating sensations with their absence or with the presence of contrasting stimuli, but without exaggerating in detachment otherwise, we could convince ourselves that something in the relationship has broken.
The happy couple what does the relationship need to last?
Wise love” is based on four fundamental prerogatives of the relationship:
- mutual desire
- intimacy
- constant complicity
- exclusivity of the relationship
Mutual desire
If passion disappears, can the couple remain united, and stable, based only on friendship? I think not. If the desire is missing at the beginning of a relationship, it can rarely be built; we can’t even talk about a couple. Friendship alone is not enough. If it exists, however, it can be compromised if it is not cultivated. This is what happens when one or both partners no longer take care of their appearance and attitude, ceasing to be desired and becoming undesirable. This is a very frequent situation, especially when the couple evolves into a family.
Intimacy
The life of the couple also depends on the ability to maintain, albeit partially, the intimacy caused by falling in love. Life as a couple requires telling the truth and being sincere, but it also requires coherence and a plan. It also requires silencing thoughts and emotions that could upset and offend the person we love. Evil words, angry accusations, vulgarities, and insults leave wounds that, little by little, dig an abyss.
Complicity
Complicity, unlike passion, represents the fruit of an understanding developed over time: a look is enough to understand each other, and even a simple smile connotes a bond of mutual trust, esteem, and satisfaction. Being accomplices means always being allies even when one of the two makes a mistake.
Complicity is one of the intimate, reserved aspects of love. It indicates that two people in love are on the same side, uniting against those who hinder them, who threaten them, and who constitute a danger to their union. This meaning is important. It is not enough to say that those two get along, that they help each other, that they support each other.
In the couple’s relationship, there is something more: defense from the outside world. A couple in love must survive in a hostile world. It, therefore, must also be a fortress, a defense, repelling attacks, going on the offensive. Each knows the strengths and weaknesses of the other. He relies on his strengths and makes up for his shortcomings. In social life, it highlights his virtues and hides his defects. When he is attacked, he rushes to her rescue by any means possible.
One might say that there is pleasure in complicity. It increases with life in common, with mutual knowledge, and with the habit of fighting together. It is nourished by ethical virtues such as sincerity, confidence, and intimacy. But it needs the cold intellectual resources to face and solve problems together. She is troubled by passions. She is destroyed by jealousy. Because jealousy is suspicious and leads the two lovers to observe each other as two potential enemies. But also from anger, from fear, because they are too hot, too unstable.
Exclusivity
Love is something chosen, and wanted. It is the product of a pact. If a loyalty pact is not explicitly established, the couple does not last.
The commitment of fidelity, like all other commitments as a couple, must be renewed over time. If the pact is respected for a long time, it produces a profound change in the erotic relationship. Little by little they both give up having fantasies of betrayal, do not expose themselves to temptation, and learn to look for beauty and pleasure in the other’s body. Sexual fidelity must be guaranteed by mutual desire which makes one immune from other temptations. A bond is exclusive when nothing and no one can break it. In this sense, the difficulties to be faced unite even more than a peaceful life.
Happy couple the key is knowing how to resist changes
Life is an incessant process of change. And changes, even if they occur through many small steps, usually manifest themselves discontinuously. If changes occurred continuously and in very small steps and we were aware of this, we could adapt to them easily and prevent crises. But this is impossible. Even the tensions, misunderstandings, and problems that arise within the couple follow the same law.
And this is why psychologists continually advise the two partners to talk, to examine the problems before they increase in size and reach a critical threshold. But all the events of life act on us discontinuously. The couple is inevitably forced to face abrupt changes and unexpected problems. Some are the consequence of ancient desires that we have never been able to satisfy, such as having children, a beautiful house, and traveling to distant countries. Others arise in our maturation, in our evolution.
The happy couple knows how to renew themselves through crises
Once we reach a goal, we set a higher one. We want recognition that we think we deserve. All of these things can affect the two members of the couple separately and have different effects on one or the other. Every change is therefore potentially the occasion of a crisis because it forces the members of the couple to redo their plans. On all these occasions the two subjects can converge, find a common path, and rediscover their love. Or, on the contrary, they can diverge, and take paths that separate them. All the discontinuous events of life constitute for the couple opportunities for convergent or divergent change.
Love is therefore not something that exists, that lasts, that remains. Rather, it is something that is continually challenged, shaken, and put to the test. And which can continually renew itself, and be reborn. Or, on the contrary, attenuate, degrade, or disappear. Love is precisely an overcoming of these crises, a renewal through crises.
An example of a happy couple “We two are many different people and we will never get tired of it”
Let’s think about it carefully. In a couple, where two people love each other, each does not see just one person in the other, but many different people, always new, always amazing.
A friend one day said to me: “After 15 years I still look at my wife with loving eyes and do you know why? Because my wife isn’t just a woman to me. She is many different women.
Fragile and graceful, I hug her and play with her as if she were a daughter. At the same time, she takes care of me as if she were a mother. She is beautiful and I admire her as if she were a diva. But she is also my lover, my geisha. She helps me, full of kindness. She makes me feel important and considered.
At the same time she guides me: she is my manager. She learns from me so she is my student too. She teaches me how to act, she is my teacher. Then since I’m also a little neurotic she is also my psychotherapist. She has my back: she is my accomplice. She scolds me: she is my moral conscience. And finally, she is my most faithful ally in the struggle of life.