Behavioral Sciences

Why are we so afraid to fall in love?

If you don't want a relationship that's fine (when did it become a mandatory task?) but if you're looking and can't find it, your fears may be driving you.

Or Yanir dives into the question of questions - why are we afraid to fall in love really?

Or Yanir

16/10/2022

Sunday, October 16, 2022, 07:36

• Share on Facebook

• Share on WhatsApp

• Share on Twitter

• Share by email

• Share in general

• Comments

  Comments

No, not all the high-quality bachelors in town are over.

Broken heart candy (Photo: ShutterStock)

"I want to find a relationship, but it just doesn't work out for me", is a sentence heard - in one form or another - countless times in the treatment room.

So many times that sometimes it seems that being in a relationship is a mandatory task, as if if we are not in a relationship something is wrong with us.

A quick look at the broadcast schedule of each of the broadcasters can confirm this thought, with the number of trash-reality programs whose goal is to enter them without a relationship and leave them in love and happy skyrocketing.

So for starters, and this is an important starter to remember, being in a relationship is probably not your life's mission, and if you're not in one that doesn't mean you're spoiled.

And yet, sometimes there is a real desire and attempt to be in romantic relationships, but there is something that stops us.

Even though she's smart, funny, beautiful and everything you could think of, it just doesn't work.

Although he is sensitive, intelligent and gets along with your dog the best in the world, something is missing there.

Despite countless dates, the long-awaited partnership and falling in love just isn't there.

Sometimes this is expressed in phrases like "the quality singles my age have run out in the city" or "I just haven't found the right one yet", sometimes it turns into a preference for the freedom and excitement of the single life because we are tired of being disappointed, and sometimes it just seems like a lot of short relationships that come in a row One after the other, that there is always something missing in them.

More in Walla!

Lots of men are sure they'll be single forever.

Here's why (and how to change it)

To the full article

But many times all these things are nothing more than a disguise of fear.

Fear of truly falling in love.

It even has a name in pop culture - philophobia (philophobia, let's just remember that it's really not a disorder with diagnostic criteria, but only in name).

It is about an elusive fear, which knows how to hide itself quite well, which can have different and complex reasons.

Here are some options:

Falling in love inevitably involves a feeling of vulnerability

A new relationship is unfamiliar territory, and most of us have a basic and natural fear of the unknown and the unknown.

Allowing ourselves to fall in love means taking a risk - trusting another person (who at this stage we still don't know very well), letting another person influence our emotions and feelings, sometimes even being dependent in certain ways.

All of these make us feel exposed and vulnerable, and we don't like it.

Our basic defenses are challenged and come into action and try to prevent us from possible harm through the belief that the more we care, the greater the chance we will be harmed.

From such a point of view - if we don't open an emotion and we don't care, we can't be hurt.

From personal experience, it just doesn't work that way.

If we open up it's to everything, and if we avoid it it's everything.

A young couple in love (Photo: ShutterStock)

"With pleasure comes pain" is a saying that needs to be refined.

Its meaning is not that every good thing necessarily involves a bad thing, but that our ability to open up is horizontal, and not selective - we cannot open up only to good things, and we cannot avoid only bad things.

If we open up it's to everything, and if we avoid it it's everything.

That is, if we allow ourselves to open up to falling in love (a good thing) we risk feeling the less good things as well.

Falling in love overwhelms history

We don't always notice how our history affects us, and entering a new relationship is no different in this respect.

All the ways we were hurt in previous relationships (romantic and non-romantic, starting from our childhood) are burned into us.

This does not mean that we will necessarily suffer from a terrible second grade trauma that will screw us up for the rest of our lives, but our psyche will remember it.

All these vulnerabilities, the little scratches on our defense mechanisms, have an effect on the way we perceive the people we approach and the way we behave in romantic relationships.

Old and negative dynamics make us more careful about who and how much we are willing to open up to, and we may very well want to distance ourselves, unconsciously, from intimacy because it overwhelms exactly the same old negative feelings - pain, loss, anger, rejection and more.

Did you give a flower to the lamp?

A girl cheers up a sad boy (Photo: ShutterStock)

Falling in love challenges our self-concept

We all have inner voices of all kinds.

Some are positive, some are negative.

These inner voices are the result of our past experiences and experiences, and together they make up our self-concept.

That perception is not always positive, but it is always familiar.

It is the way we know ourselves and think about ourselves.

When we open up to one person and allow him to come closer to us, allow him to see our inner colors, he may see things differently than we do.

That is, seeing us and perceiving us in a different way than we perceive ourselves, and our meeting with this point of view is not always easy.

Many times we will prefer to stay with the existing point of view, simply because it is familiar, than to try and adopt a different new self-perception (many times because a new self-perception will have an effect on all our other relationships in the world, an effect that we cannot always anticipate).

Love may overwhelm existential fears

A common perception is that the more we have, the more we have to lose.

Under the same structure, the more important someone is to us, the more we fear losing them.

The point is that when we fall in love or are in a close and intimate relationship (romantic or not) we face not only the fear of losing the other party, but also the unfortunate fact that we all have an expiration date.

Whether it is the actual death of the other party in the relationship or whether it is a metaphorical death in the form of separation and the end of the relationship, it subconsciously reminds us that we too are finite.

In many cases, that relationship also gives our lives more value and meaning, which also become something we can lose if that relationship ends.

In an (not very successful, it should be noted) attempt to obscure this fear and not deal with it, we may engage in artificial and marginal concerns, start fights with our partner, and in more extreme cases simply give up on the relationship or avoid it in the first place.

In the vast majority of cases we will not be aware that our behavior actually reflects a defense against existential fears, we will rationalize those behaviors, and find endless reasons why we should not be in this relationship.

But all those reasons apparently have solutions, and what really drives us is a deeper fear.

What do we do with this fear?

If you recognized yourself in one of the sections, first of all know that you are not alone, and that like any fear it can be overcome.

But it takes some work and a lot of honesty.

First, be honest with yourself and try to think about what exactly and why you are afraid - don't run away from it, and remember that there is no one right now but you, lying to yourself will not change the situation.

It is likely that your fear is not from love itself, but an internalization of other fears such as the fear of being hurt or the fear of loss.

Have you been hurt in the past and the thought of loving someone else scares you?

Do you tend to push others away from you?

Do you fear or avoid sharing your feelings and emotions with others?

Remember that it is completely normal to guard and protect ourselves, but it is important to note that we are guarding ourselves from the right people, and not from the whole world.

Su to allow yourself to experience all the variety of your emotions in the truest and deepest way.

Illustration of a woman (Photo: ShutterStock)

"It's not that every pot has a lid, but finding the person you feel comfortable enough in front of to be exposed, vulnerable, real and honest may take longer than you think. It shouldn't happen on the first date either."

Second, after you have tried to understand with yourself what triggers your fears, try to allow yourself to experience the full range of your emotions in the truest and deepest way you can.

Recognizing our fears and how they affect our behavior is an important step in being able to create and establish relationships.

Yes, there is risk involved.

There is always risk, it is an essential and inseparable part of falling in love and life.

If you're afraid to let your guard down, try to think about what you want your future to look like.

Remember that while no one can promise you that you will spend the rest of your life with one person you love, no one said that it has to be one person forever and no one said that one person must satisfy all of your needs together (on the contrary, the expectation that one and only one person will be able to fulfill all our needs is an unrealistic expectation that will only deprive us of the ability to have romantic relationships).

Also, remember that it's perfectly fine, and even desirable at times, to be vulnerable.

It's not easy to be completely open and real with another person, but emotional intimacy is necessary for relationships, and it means, among other things, that we will be exposed.

Finally, and this is an important ending, remember that it takes time.

Overcoming fear - any fear - is not something that happens overnight, it's a marathon not a sprint.

It may be that the first, second or even the tenth person you meet will not be the one that suits you and the one that you will fall in love with, but that should not make you feel that you are not worthy of love or not worth it.

There is also a matter of compatibility here.

It's not that every pot has a lid, but finding the person you feel comfortable enough with to be exposed, vulnerable, real and honest may take longer than you think.

It shouldn't happen on the first date either.

• health

• psychology

Tags

• Love

• Broken Heart

• a relationship

• psychology