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Juanpe Sánchez López, writer: "Calling a relationship toxic prevents us from improving it, from forgiving"

2023-06-02T10:45:34.834Z

Highlights: The researcher writes in 'Superemotional' an extreme defense of love in all its senses and regrets the language and rhythm with which we treat it. Juanpe Sánchez López decided, therefore, to dedicate his literary production to love. First, a collection of poems, Desde las gradas (Letraversal, 2021) and, now, Superemocional (Continta me tienes), an academic essay in defense of loving in this battered world.


The researcher writes in 'Superemotional' an extreme defense of love in all its senses and regrets the language and rhythm with which we treat it


Juanpe Sánchez López (Alicante, 29 years old) does not forget the lesson of 2020. The then student of Literature intended to spend that year outside of Spain, an ambition that came face to face, and what not, with reality: "Then the post-pandemic began and I realized that I would have been completely sad if I had left," he recalls today, already as a researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid. "There's a moment, I think it's essential, when you realize that life isn't what you're doing, but who you're doing it with."

Sánchez López decided, therefore, to dedicate his literary production to love. First, a collection of poems, Desde las gradas (Letraversal, 2021) and, now, Superemocional (Continta me tienes), an academic essay (prefaced by Belén Gopegui) in defense of loving in this battered world; in whose 17-page bibliography philosophers of high gradation such as Lévi-Strauss or Durkheim intersect with passages from Twilight, comics by Liv Strömquist, chapters of Girls and lyrics by Lorde.

Question. What was love to defend against?

Answer. I think we have to redefine the metaphors with which we talk about him. The idea of toxicity, for example, ultimately comes from what makes you sick, from poison. To label a relationship as toxic is to impregnate it with the image of something that is going to kill you. And that prevents there from being a possibility of forgiveness, of being cured of that poison. What is the remedy for toxicity? Sever the relationship.

Q. If that's what comes in handy...

R. What is good for you? It is the great question of psychologists. It is good for you to cut with the toxic because you do not want to poison yourself anymore. But that leaves you in a place of non-commitment to the things that matter to you and the impossibility not only of forgiving, but that bond that may improve does not improve.

Q. With how easy it is to flirt on Tinder, Grindr, to have these liquid relationships that Zygmunt Bauman says, isn't a timely withdrawal a victory?

A. Things are coming to an end. Is that better than when they couldn't finish? Yes. On the other hand, everything seems to end because we are in an application, and if I do not like you, I will go with another. Yes, things are over. But things matter to us.

Q. Is there too much insistence that love shouldn't hurt?

A. It is very important to accept that we are vulnerable beings and that we are going to suffer. [The French-Israeli sociologist and writer] Eva Illouz argues that we have become entrepreneurs of ourselves, profitable and profitable, and we do not accept suffering even in our relationships. But how can you not suffer in life if, no matter how well you do and how much you love yourself, people in the end do things that you do not expect and that will hurt you? That pain does not have to be qualified as positive, negative, or even useful. It's just another emotion. I actually remember the first few months I fell in love with my boyfriend: it hurt a lot.

Q. Really?

A. It hurt a lot.

A. What hurt him?

Q. That at any moment it could be finished and he didn't want it to end. I said to myself, 'What is this emotion telling me? That I care. And if I care, I'm going to make it work.'

The writer Juanpe Sánchez López, in the center of Madrid one afternoon in May. Jaime Villanueva

Q. Romantic love was presented to us as something almost religious, decontextualized from the earthly. Does that still strain?

A. We live in a capitalist system of speed, precariousness and working extra hours, Byung-Chul Han's essay on this is famous. The life we have left is dedicated to rest... to keep working, because if you're not rested then you can't perform. It is very difficult to find spaces to dedicate to what you like, to the people you love. What do we have left? Well, I don't know.

Q. Me neither.

A. There is some potential in being aware that we are tired and why. In seeing, in these certain moments in which one clears and is with the people he loves, remnants of the life he wants to live.

Q. Are we too tired to love well?

A. We are told that we have to work on emotions, which has a certain trap. How are emotions worked? Nor that they were merchandise. You can invest time in them... But work them? Nobody wants to work anymore, to arrive home after 40 hours a week of work with the feeling that an Excel of emotions awaits them. Just like no one wants to poison themselves with something toxic. We must not dye love with languages that harm us. If we bring this language into our relationships, no one will want to be in them.

Q. Let's leave Illouz and Han. Amaral: "Without you I am nothing." Pitiful philosophy?

A. No! There was some criticism in the early two-thousandth by certain feminist sectors who said that the song spoke of an absolute surrender and that, therefore, it was toxic or harmful; that proposed a model of love in which the woman, or at least the subject who sang the song, who is feminine, was in complete surrender to you, as in a certain bond of vassalage. But we are interdependent beings, we depend on others and everything else to exist. "Without you I am nothing" is totally lawful. It's also okay to say that in a love relationship we depend on others. That's the way it has to be.

Q. Has the way we talk about love changed?

A. Since feminisms there has been an insistence on the importance of chosen family ties and friendships. That is changing the way we see love.

Q. Like when romantic love supplanted medieval marriages?

A. Romantic love, the inevitable love Twilight style, made the marriage bond cease to be group interest and began to look for individual or couple interest ... The model we live with today, where there is also romantic love, includes eligible love, links based on uncertainty, haste, the idea that the selfis something that can be improved through a you, both commodified: look at First Dates or Women Men and Vice Versa. Individual freedom is valued and very little emotional involvement in these relationships. The myths of romantic love have been deeply criticized: there were structures of domination and oppression that hurt women above all. In the same way, this new model presents unsustainable, violent characteristics and dynamics that harm us. In that sense they are comparable.

Q. It makes a very concrete definition of love. "Bathing, feeding, protecting", but also "inviting to a party".

A. I take from feminism the idea that, for a good life to occur, we have to be cared for; The impulse to care comes from loving and loving is to fix attention on others. Bathing, feeding, cleaning... Those are careful, but they are very paramount. That definition must be extended to the everyday. Call someone, talk to someone, invite someone to a party, tell someone that they are handsome, that you like how they think. Look carefully. I feel that our gaze is pre-established on our work, our success, our future. And we don't realize that the things that make that possible are other things that are here and that are always happening, like being with others. And without that, why do you want to succeed? What do you want to work for?

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Source: elparis

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