Romantic Love
Love as a social construct – February 2023
Sculpture by Mujin_park
Scale 1:12
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Media and cultural references portrait romantic relationships as a one-size-fits-all kind of relation. It must not only the number one relationship in one’s life, it must also last forever, be exclusive and should get all possible efforts and attention to succeed.
Romantic love is religiously taught into every facet of Western societies to manipulate and minimize any other forms of love and relations. Only one model of relationship is accepted, and anything that deviates from that ideal is automatically disregarded.
The Ideal
We all know what love is supposed to look like, we have seen it in movies, we have read about it in books and we have been fed with its idealistic image to exhaustion.
Love is a bond with another person that finally completes us. This one person will be our sexually fulfilling lover, our best friend, our confessor and caregiver, our family… the half that we miss. Not only this person will gladly acomplish our every desire but will also turn into our most important relation, becoming a priority for everything. They will be the crutch on which we stand on, and, by being so, they have the right to be our one and only.
The Consequence
And it comes natural that this kind of love feels sometimes suffocating. We have all been there, we have all felt the weight of the ideal relationship, the pressure of becoming this idealized person we are not, or the fear of not fighting enough for a relation that was supposed to last forever.
Sometimes the fear of loneliness and the guilt of failure is so profoundly embedded in our minds that we accept all kinds of toxic behaviors as a part of that ideal of love.
Wouldn’t it be better to forget about what love is expected to look like? Maybe if we stop looking to an ideal, we can achieve something really meaningful for us.
The Result
But it is not only our romantic relations that are affected by this construct. Once we accept the mandate of love, we are forced to assume a pattern that further leads us to that tiny suffocating space.
We are supposed to prioritize our partner before all the other relations, thus relegating the love we have for our friends and family (or even our other lovers) to a lesser place. We will spend money on ceremonies, and furniture, and pets and kids, that we will undoubtedly share with our partner.
And, according to plan, we will then pay a lawyer, because in the effort to maintain a decaying and suffocating relationship, we will have destroyed everything that once held us together.
peliculero
y literario era totalmente erróneo e inducido,
y había llegado el momento de formatear.
Learn more about the topic
The Ethical Slut - Janet W. Hardy, Dossie Easton
In this book you can read not only about alternatives to monogamy, but also about how to make relationships a conscious choice.
Loving without boundaries
A web were you can find information regarding Ethical Non Monogamy
All about Love - Bell Hooks
All About Love explores loves as a causeof a polarized society. It is an inspiration to instill caring, compassion, and strength in our lifes.
Poliamory Weekly
A podcast about ethical relationships, consent and healthy long-term loving relationships.