“But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore/ It’ll never be the cure”
The Cure – Olivia Rodrigo
The 23 years old singer, Olivia Rodrigo, made a statement that many find hard to comprehend: romantic love doesn’t cure all of our wounds. The idea that love is the solution to all the bad in the world is sold to us from an early age. Stories of beautiful princesses saved by brave men, ending with: “…and they lived Happily Ever After!”. Every single problem faced in life is reduced as soon as the perfect partner comes in and introduces the untouchable love.
But… have you realized a tiny issue in those stories? The magical castle with queens and kings are tales mostly told to little girls. While they are learning that they should wait for a prince to come save them, young boys are taught about superheroes. In other words, under this ideal, boys can save the universe, explore superpowers and, if wanted, find a partner to enjoy romance. Whereas all that girls have is the love story.
This is not a coincidence. According to the psychologist Eliane Vecchi, romantic love has been historically associated with the idea of value, belonging, and female fulfillment. Therefore, many women grow up with the idea that being loved and chosen validates who she is.
“Single men are often seen as free and independent, while single women are frequently associated with loneliness or romantic failure”, said Vecchi.
WOMEN AND THE PERCEPTION OF “THE OTHER”
Throughout centuries, the figure of the woman has been shaped to be the good wife, the one who takes care of the household, is obedient, kind and pure. Realize how every one of these adjectives relate the woman to another?
Well, the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir explored this pattern decades ago, in her book The Second Sex, 1949. According to the French writer, being a woman is a social construction and everything that has to do with what defines it, is in relation to the male.
Furthermore, the woman is “the other”. She is not a complete individual, she just isn’t a man. And for this reason, her existence is only fully validated if she is accompanied by a male figure. Marriage has to be her life goal because if not achieved, she has not fulfilled her mission. She is still incomplete.
Love ceases to be merely an encounter of desires and pleasures and becomes a symbolic mechanism for social recognition, for acceptance by society.
Claiming that there is an obsession towards finding love may not even be true. Maybe what women are searching for is not companionship, but social validation. ‘Love’ is just a mask that will allow their entrance into the world. Just like a secret password, there is a quiet hope that by grabbing romance, they will be seen.
Beauvoir’s portrait of women’s situation back in the 1900s isn’t so far from today’s reality. Even though rights were conquered, they are still fighting for equality. It is not that a woman cannot wish for love. But rather than that, love for her is more than just desire. It is one of the very few ways society finally turns their heads and listens to at least a couple words out of a woman’s mouth.
And that’s where the obsession towards finding yourself a match intensifies. It is not only the will to have company, but also a social weight. This doesn’t mean that the desire for love is artificial. Rather, it means that it was culturally amplified and normalized in a way that pressures women to find it, creating unreal expectations.
LOVE THROUGHOUT HISTORY
According to the psychoanalyst Antônio Fernando Gomes Alves, it was back in the medieval era that passion came to be understood as a transcendental experience. Then, in the XVIII century, romanticism came to reinforce the idea that love was capable of filling the existential voids of everyday life. There was a stronger appreciation of emotion.
And this thrill leads us to the XX century, where the cultural industry gained strength and became the main thermometer for social trends. What is shown in movies, series and portrayed in books has an unbelievable power of constructing the social imaginary.
This way, romance was transformed, associating the endless search of humanity for happiness, with love. Better saying, the cultural industry, in its never ending attempt to sell, shaped love as a key product to achieve endless peace and completeness. “So, happiness here becomes narrated as a way for us to find the right person”, says Fernando.
FANTASIES, FAIRYTALES AND A DOSE OF PAIN
We’ve understood that women are historically set to be more pressured when the topic is love. And exactly because of this, many truly believe that finding the greatest passion is the only key to happiness.
This fantasy works, apart from rooted misogyny, because it speaks to what the Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud, has said in his theories: humans possess this intense need for belonging and recognition of affective bonds.
According to lacanian psychoanalysis, the person is always a subject of lack. In other words, we are never entirely complete. There is always something we feel is missing. And so, it’s genuine to try to suppress this hole with another person. As people, we need one another. Humans are social creatures. And having doubts, flaws and fears are scary. So, we allocate the possibility of salvation to another.
We hope that by meeting someone, they can fix us: “It removes the burden of any responsibility from you and places the expectation on the other person”, explains Fernando.
We set unhealthy expectations, envision the moment where, just like the prince on a white horse, our savior is going to come and swipe all of our demons away. But, the thing is: no human connection can fully resolve your flaws, your internal conflicts, your existential anxieties.
And when we finally achieve our goal of being in a relationship and realize we still feel pain, have insecurities, and our unresolved issues are still the mess they used to be, agony falls over. It doesn’t make sense — Romance was supposed to be our salvation, how come we are still the same?
“The person in love rearranges their priorities, constructs interpretations of the world, often idealizing an expectation. And if that expectation is not fulfilled, they fall into suffering”, tells Fernando.
It is what Miss Olivia sings in her latest release: “I thought I found the antidote with you/ But my head is full of poison/ And my heart is full of doubt”. No love can save us from ourselves. No matter how magical and transforming it might seem.
THE PROJECTION OF OUR UNCONSCIOUS DESIRES
Falling into reality hurts. It is deeply painful to be forced to clean off the blur that covers our vision and perceive life the way it actually is.
Veck explains that, from a psychological standpoint, no healthy relationship can single-handedly fulfill the function of saving someone from deep inner pain, trauma, insecurities, or the difficulty of being alone. Therefore, when love is placed in this position of salvation, there is a high risk of frustration, idealization, and the maintenance of unhealthy bonds.
This logic leads some people to remain in unsatisfactory relationships because they believe any company is better than being alone. The fear of meeting who you really are is so horrifying that any company feels greater than your own.
But emotional loneliness can also exist within a relationship: “Sometimes the bond persists more out of fear, habit, validation, or difficulty breaking up, than out of genuine emotional exchange”, explains Vecchi, after analyzing what she sees in many of her patients during therapy sessions.
Even though life doesn’t follow a Disney script, there is beauty in accepting things the way they are. The issue is not about loving. It’s about transforming love into a requirement for living fully through the other person, as Antônio Fernando clarifies.
Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, claims in The Hermeneutics of the Subject that before you can justly govern or guide others, you must first cultivate your own soul, establish your own truth, and achieve inner freedom, learning how to exercise care of the self (souci de soi). Furthermore, what he means is that one must take care of oneself in order to take care of others.
At the end, the cliche broadly spread that ‘You cannot give what you don’t have. How can you love another if you do not know how to love yourself?’ confirms to be true.
Growing a healthy relationship with yourself first, getting to know who you truly are, what you like, where do you stand, what do you dream of and what you actually want, redirects the weight of “being saved” from someone else and puts the responsibility back on yourself. You are the one in charge of your existence — And instead of being terrifying, it’s a freeing realisation — It all depends on you, and you do not depend on anyone. You are responsible for your own life. Look at how amazing that is!
L – O – V – E
What did the Beatles mean, then, when they proudly sang: “All you need is love!”? Were they lying? Do we even need love? What is love, after all?
Breaking down topics that we just pass through daily may set our minds on fire. It’s understandable to question everything after realizing one thing we took for granted is, actually, not that true. But the good news is that love is essential for human integration and societal construction. We need to perceive the other and create bonds in order to maintain our group life.
Love can enhance empathy, a sense of belonging, and self-esteem. And a relationship can provide support, good exchange, and emotional security. Romantic love can be extremely transformative. It just cannot be presented as the ultimate emotional solution — A partner cannot be perceived as a savior.
Perhaps, the issue isn’t about discrediting romantic love, but about questioning the idea that it should solve everything: “Love can always alleviate your suffering and pain. But it won’t eliminate the complexity of what it means to be human”, explains Fernando.
And maybe, that is a tiny step closer to a more enjoyable life: recognizing love is not everything, and that it has no powers to save us from ourselves. If we act alongside it, learning how to exist comfortably under our own skin while remaining open to the beauty that passion brings, we may taste true happiness.
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The article above was edited by Alyah Gomes.
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