By: Ana Rosa Abraham Funes (psycotherapist)

A great number of times we hear painful complaints from men and women as a result of the dissatisfaction related with their marital expectations. This discontent produces lack of motivation, disappointment, existential emptiness, and even loneliness and abandonment. It is contradictory but today a great number of marriages live with their couples, but the fact is that many years ago “they stopped sharing a life together”.

Married women have stood out both at home and at work, however many of them still have many questions like this: What do I want my success for if I feel so distant from my husband? What is happening with my relationship that we share less and less time every day? Why do I feel more successful at a personal level and lonelier in the love field? On the other hand man also goes through very confusing moments due to many cultural arguments which have taken roots in social and generational patterns that prevent him from understanding that women are not a human being of “short ideas and long hair” (Schopenhauer, cit. en: Mordock, 1993). All this can cause marital resentment and distance; there is no doubt that men also want to feel understood in their nature, but how is it possible to let them feel comforted in this day and age when everything goes around the understanding that women need, believe me sometimes they also feel abandoned and not appreciated by women.

When we analyze the emotional deterioration that many couples live, the evident lack of closeness and common interests, we discover a values crisis, an expectations unbalance and a redefinition of the concept of marriage in this new century. The social change is undeniable and it is the modern couple responsibility to adapt themselves to such changes so that the family nucleus does not get lost among all these adversities. It is important to integrate the social changes and the valuable and productive traditions so that the contemporary couple succeeds in overcoming the crisis periods that they have to face along their married life. Among these things we can mention the incorporation of woman into the professional world, a world that for long time belonged exclusively to men, and for this reason we need to pose the following question: Is it the professional development of each spouse a condition to experiment loneliness? Or is it maybe the lack of emotional intimacy, demands and power struggle, which together with a lack of capacity of the couple to combine their love and professional life that favor that loneliness and abandonment become part of a love story?

The understanding of three key words will lead us to the answer we are looking for: Intimacy, crisis, and loneliness. Intimacy is the need to establish significant links of emotional quality, as individuals, we need to share achievements, successes and failures. Life would be meaningless if we do not have the opportunity to share our affections; love intimacy is an authentic human desire, by means of which we try to consolidate a couple relationship where we feel sexually and emotionally attracted to someone else, but above all, where we experience the unique opportunity to grow and to become with that other person (who makes our heart and our whole spirit vibrate) a better human being. The point is that we forget that men and women also face the challenge to grow together in times of crisis. Discussions are difficult but they also bring the important opportunity of self-knowledge and personal and conjugal improvement! The problem with modern couples is that they associate discussions with the fact that their partner is not making them happy and they even get to think that they should have never got married. In this moment loneliness appears as the main character in the conjugal scene, because the more discussions without solution, the more resentment and distance and less communication. It would seem that the only answer would be the external success, for example, the professional career and external occupations that constitute immediate pleasure sources.

This lonely experience within a couple relationship is associated with specific characteristics such as: pessimism, sadness and abandonment. In some severe cases it is also associated with symptoms of depression, isolation and low self-esteem. It is important to remark that loneliness is not only experienced after breaking up a relationship, it may also appear when expectations within conjugal life are not met and then this loneliness shows as a “deficit” in the quality of the conjugal relationship, as a result of a lack of closeness and contact that terribly harm the love bond.

It is true that conflicts are a natural ingredient of a couple relationship, because there are some that live loneliness periods, and others live a total, deep and devastating loneliness that make them experience unbearable levels of existential pain. Well, it is also true that there are couples that are not well consolidated since the very beginning, which means that the only thing that matters is the idealization and extreme romance… “The fairy tale lasts until the reality of life in common appears” and these couples have not seen it that way, thus, the power struggle and the desire to keep the expectations above all, ends with the love story. True love is not the one that makes us suffer for the suffering itself, this love must transform in an exercise of feeling, thinking, growing up and of course falling in love and living life intensely without losing our freedom.

Let us not forget that truly intimate love relations should provide us with security that will become in our adult life in confidence, freedom and growth. This growth will in turn allow the couple to live with independence, respect and decision capacity. In other words, we as thinking adults decide how we want to live our relationship: “like Romeo and Juliet (who did not have a very happy ending), or standing in reality, learning to combine romance, passion and feelings with the intelligence and capacity to share and give in when we realize that we are demanding too much from our partner.

Trying to escape (excess of work, devoting too much to children, etc.) before a couple conflict, will never be the best alternative to live a conjugal balance. Now a days a couple survives through humility and sensitivity and specially courage, that means, with the clearness that courage gives us to recognize if it is possible that our love story becomes into a chance to really love or if it is going to become a chain, dependency and refuge story so as not to live alone. If we do not realize this, it will cost us a lot in the long term.

I would like to end this reflection with a paragraph of a poem of Mario Benedetti that really shows what living a total and intimate couple relationship means:

“If I love you is because you are my love
my accomplice, my everything,
and outside hand in hand,
we are much more than just two people”.

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