impossible loves, prohibited, idealized or virtual can become true secrets, affecting us at different stages of our development as adults. Are we all equally prone to this type of relationship?
Apparently not. According to the psychologist and family and couples therapist Susana Muñoz Aburto, director of Serbal, Center for Systemic Development, those who have grown up in family systems where ‘being for others’ is the most relevant would have a greater predisposition to experience them. “Full of self-demands, they have built their image of subject and family according to the expectations they had of him or her… In this way they have developed great skill and efficiency in the exercise of the various roles. However, they do not feel ‘happy’.
The construction and maintenance of a public image prevails over the experiences and search for intimacy in their own private worlds”explains the psychologist.
These romantic or forbidden loves are often more like a dream, as if it were someone else’s story, and not their own. And remembering it nourishes, makes happy and many times provides a focus of meaning to that Personal life or family focused on what «must be»generally following social patterns.
The curious thing is that they are love relationships that their protagonists do not classify as infidelity; for them they are deep, romantic, clandestine loves, of which only a few find out and that apparently do not impact their respective family and couple lives in which they formally develop.
“Clandestine implies hidden from the public”He says Susana Munoz. “It occurs in a different dimension, in a kind of isolation in which only that story fits and where both protagonists feel that they are authentic, without bridges to everyday life. They are like secret lives that are not symbolized in language, because expressing it would imply injury or damage to third parties, and an attack on the image that the person has of himself..
Patricia Star, also a psychologist and therapist, explains that in this type of relationship there is also a share of inherent pain, which is the impossibility of achieving that perfect love. «The pain of anticipatory loss, by choosing not to develop it, implies the loss of something that could perhaps be a change of direction in life.»
Clandestine loves occur in a space where it seems possible to live authentically. “It supports a way of functioning before the external world according to the expectations that the subject perceives that others have according to their roles and image. He avoids the crisis in those ‘not clandestine’ systems, distancing himself even more from the ties with himself (a) and others”comments the psychologist Susana Muñoz Aburto.
It operates as an illusion that sedates reality, and when the experience of everyday life begins to fade, it becomes much more painful, sometimes unsustainable. “It is no longer possible to ‘hold on’, and the crisis and the pain of loss begin to unfold. So people grieve because they choose to restructure their lives, go through the crisis, and that implies realizing that ‘I’m not happy enough’, ‘I don’t know if I love you too much’, ‘I don’t know if I want to be with you’, or if this clandestine love is revealed, it is high treason. Either way implies a crisis”, deepens the director of Serbal.
The therapist Patricia Estrella recommends that those who have lived or are living a clandestine love have the possibility of dignifying the experience, humanize it. “Put it at the level of the possible, because if we stay in the paradigm or dogma of psychotherapy, this falls into the category of something that should not be lived or experienced”. “It implies a process with the patient, with all that he is –adds Susana Muñoz–, strengthening the bond of trust to accompany the moments in which the crisis emerges, placing the experience on the human level, so that it can be integrated, metabolized and put at the service of its development”.
Related note: Infidels prefer Chapinero and Usaquen, here.
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Have you had any clandestine love?