Because living is an experience that we only practice (a priori!) once, each of us moves forward with the idea of discovering, learning, evolving, growing, in short, becoming an adult. in all aspects of one's family, friendship, student, professional, romantic lives... But becoming an adult in love, precisely, what can that mean?
Between a hunger for fusion and a thirst for independence, clumsy missteps and overconfidence, between a grain of madness and a shower of habits, a morality, customs, an education willingly enjoin us to behave like adults, but to above all, keep a child's soul.
So, to love over time, what do we do?
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Also read: These couples that last: “The strongest unions are based on four pillars”
“Love while becoming mature?
I think it's knowing what works for you, and arranging what can more or less fit together with others,” says Bettina, 18, in her final year.
“Being an adult in love?
It’s a political question!, says Emma, 30 years old.
Because it is moving forward in an anti-sexist approach to the couple.”
Simon, 52, married and father of children, almost sighs at the question: “I am sometimes nostalgic for an amateurism in love, for all these gestures which were first.”
Suzanne, 73, a restaurateur who has still not retired, exclaims: “I became an adult in love at 36, with a child, discovering myself as a single mother.
Then I loved it, but never again under the same roof!”
Between testimonies, experts and words of love, deciphering a sentimental education which, perhaps, never ends.
“You act like a child” or the imprint of origins
On the subject that concerns us, psychoanalysts willingly take us back to the indelible imprint of young years.
“Freud thought a lot about the way in which, in an adult love life, the patterns of childhood life are replayed,” recalls Isabelle Alfandary, professor of American literature and critical theory at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, and author of writings combining psychoanalysis and philosophy.
“Without this word, infantile, ever being pejorative for him.
Yes, we make children in love, she confirms.
It is even the resource of love life.
Childhood always slips a little into the couple, it replays itself there, even hidden, masked.
This is why the exclamation that we can address to others, such as “You are acting like a child!”, although a little terrifying, is not false.
» Psychoanalyst and writer Sarah Chiche (1) summarizes the matter as follows, during a Monaco Philosophical Meeting dedicated to love (December 2022): “Maternal attachment means that when the baby cries, the mother (or father) feeds him, showing him her love.
Then, when we grow up, it's not because we shout that someone will appear, because we shout that we will be fed or loved!
I know, it's gray and disappointing, and it's called adult life.
But that’s what creates the lack, and therefore the desire.”
“His fate will decide mine” or the fantasy of fusion
This desire, at the beginning of the story, often circulates in fusion.
Indeed, it is a desire for fusion.
It is Berenice, who swears to Titus: “To the pleasure of seeing you, my accustomed soul no longer lives except for you.”
It is Antiochus, Bérénice's faithful friend in Racine's play of the same name, who truly loves her, says nothing about it, and assures: "His fate will depend on mine."
It will all end badly... Caroline Kruse, couples therapist, author in particular of
Savoir-vivre in Love
(Ed. Le Rocher pocket), explains things like this: "The problem is that in the romantic relationship, as in life everything In short, we do not necessarily grow at the same pace as the other, in the same way, following the same stages.
At the beginning of the relationship, in the period of fusion, there is no gap, quite the contrary, and the harmony which is expressed in terms of fullness, of perfection, often resembles what we imagine of the fulfillment of very early childhood, as if we gave each other what a mother gives to her baby.
And reciprocally.
We find everything in the other, who finds everything in us.
The difficulty arises when it is necessary, if we want the relationship to continue, to emerge from fusion, to become part of reality with all the disappointment that it necessarily entails.
No, neither of us are carefree children anymore, but adults with jobs, tasks to share and all kinds of responsibilities.”
When questioned, our senior high school student reacted: “At 18, I see a lot of young couples around me who stay together all the time.
During the week, on weekends, during vacations... I tell myself that they don't know how to create shortages.
I would like to believe that as we grow up we become more independent.”
The philosopher Fabrice Midal, by offering an online course this winter on fulfillment in couples, evokes the question of fusion, which sticks like caramel to the teeth of romantic desire.
“If we think that a couple is “me + me”, we are very wrong.
It won't work, he warns.
Because the couple quickly becomes a territory of transactions from one self to the other.”
We give, we take away, but we don’t build.
“You have to understand that what matters is not the “me”, it’s the relationship.
Which has its own existence, and which we must learn to decipher.
What is she saying ?
What is she calling?
How is this relationship alive?”
The important thing, according to Midal, is to “open up to the magic of what unites us, to something greater than this “me + me” that holds us.”
“If we think of a couple, it’s “me + FilippoBacci / Getty Images
“You act like a child” (bis) or the mental load
How can we explain at this stage of reflection that in the adult testimonies collected for this investigation, one of the most hurtful argument phrases perceived is “You’re so childish!”
(another version: “Be a little adult, what!”)?
Return to the couple x-rayed by Caroline Kruse: “In previous generations, certain couples put up with a distribution of roles which required the woman to maintain an inferior status: that of a childish woman, cute and a little capricious , whom her husband protected by providing her with food, shelter and pocket money.
We know that this scheme no longer works, because neither women nor men want it anymore.”
In her consultation, the therapist encounters "few situations where the man reproaches his wife for behaving like a child", but "more and more women who complain that their partner behaves like a kid, s 'slumps on the sofa to play on his cell phone, listens to nothing, forgets everything'.
“I feel like I have another child at home” usually marks the start of trouble, the phrase that rings the alarm.
And sometimes has repercussions on the sexual relationship, making these words of Zola current, in
Une page d'amour
(1878!): “This marriage still surprised him.
Charles adored her, getting on the floor to kiss her bare feet.
She smiled, full of friendship, reproaching him for being such a child.
A gray life had begun again..."
The arrival of a baby often changes things, says the therapist.
According to which, if a woman could previously take pleasure in mothering her partner a little, now that the child is here, she has changed status, role, and no longer has either the time or the desire.
“What seems important to me is that everyone first realizes that neither of them wants to settle in the place that the vicious circle assigns to them: abusive mother or irresponsible kid.
Then, therapy work on each person, on the roots of the families of origin and on the relationship, can help us understand why this relational pattern has taken hold and how to unravel it.”
But make no mistake, when, in 2024, a woman asks her partner “to be a man, not a child, this is in no way a return to the macho sexuality of the patriarchal pattern classic, analyzes Caroline Kruse.
What she wants is an egalitarian adult relationship, which allows her, in return, to feel in her place as an adult woman.”
“Dreaming about being in love” or writing your personal story
At the very beginning of Maupassant's
Une vie
, Jeanne is this spoiled post-adolescent who “began to dream of being in love.
Love!… She just had to meet him!
What would it be like?
She didn't know exactly and didn't even ask herself.
It would be him, that's all.
» A century later, Annie Ernaux, in
Mémoire de fille
(Éd. Gallimard), remembers.
She is 18 years old, assists a colony monitor who takes the light.
“Everything about her is desire and pride.
And: she is waiting to experience a love story,” writes Annie Ernaux.
“Often, we like the potential we see in others, more than the other as they are.
So, we're quite wrong, because it's a personal story that's also important to write, right?
, continues Emma, our 30-year-old witness.
The psychologists and philosophers interviewed agree: “As extraordinary as he or she may be, if we expect too much from the other, we will fail!”, summarizes Fabrice Midal.
Her advice for a happy adult relationship?
“Accept the fact that the other does not belong to you, of course, but above all will never understand you!
We already disconcert ourselves, so why should the other succeed in principle in understanding us?
“As adults, we need to understand that the spark is not constant, that it comes, goes, and comes back,” YAY Media AS / Alamy Stock Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
Julie Neveux is a lecturer in linguistics (Sorbonne University) and author of the very beautiful essay
The Language of Love
(Ed. Points), where she dissects the words of love, books, films and songs to support them.
The adult in love?
“Probably the one who retains the intensity of childhood, but has the words to say it.
Who can take the risk of language, to explain their needs, their feelings, their connections, declares the researcher.
Childhood often corresponds to an intensity of seriousness, a magnificent seriousness that goes with oaths of eternity.
Adulthood is more about understanding that the spark is not constant, that it comes, goes, comes back.
How to love without being worried is perhaps the great question of maturity.”
“You act like a child” or the joy of an adult
“Does this mean that when we have finally “grown up”, everything relating to childhood or adolescence must be prohibited in an adult relationship?” asks Caroline Kruse.
To answer immediately: “Not at all.
It's almost the opposite.
It is when we feel secure in our place as a man or woman that we can safely play at regressing.
Except that it is not at all the mother/baby fusion regression of the beginning of the relationship.
It's more about rediscovering the lightness of childhood.
Laughter, companionship, complicity, creativity, including in sexuality.
Everything the couple invents together, as equals.”
Suzanne, the septuagenarian in our witnesses, adds: “we become adults when we no longer need a role model.
I hope to discover more stirrings, emotions.
But I don’t have any more pressure for that.”
There remains enthusiasm for.
“In love, we say yes, summarizes the philosopher Raphaël Zagury (Philosophical Meetings of Monaco), it is the very essence of love, which always has the germ of a grain of madness, which always has a linked part with the madman.”
This means ?
“The fact of being suddenly distraught by a strong emotion,” he answers.
Fear of love?
Fear of death ?
Interviewed in the pages of Le
Monde
(from December 8, 2023), Marc Trévidic (former investigating judge at the anti-terrorism center of the TGI in Paris) confides: “At 20, we don't have self-confidence.
We are afraid of the complexity of the world, we are afraid of love.
It's paradoxical, but I think I was afraid of life, even though I had passions and a future ahead of me.
At 58, I am no longer afraid of life, probably because I am starting to be afraid of death.”
For the philosopher Fabrice Midal, “love is not often comfortable.”
Loved and be loved?
"Not easy.
Because it engages us.
It takes courage.
But it’s worth it.”
The love story of Antoine Mesnier, in the fall of 2023, bears witness to this.
This 65-year-old doctor, father and grandfather, confided on a television set (
C l'hebdo
, October 14, 2023) to having learned two years earlier that he had Charcot's disease.
Muscle atrophy, loss of autonomy, difficulty breathing, limited life expectancy.
He recounts this in a book,
Bon Anniversaire Antoine
(Éd. Mollat), as well as the recent meeting with his lover, the doctor and journalist Marina Carrère d'Encausse, while they were filming a documentary together (2).
Antoine's words to say it are astonishing in their gentleness, intelligence and maturity.
Love to death?
Let's say instead: love before dying.
Ultimately, it is this certainty of death that makes them irremediably adults.
And at the same time, so free to love?
(1) Sarah Chiche is the author of the novel
The Alchemies
, Ed.
du Seuil, and An
erotic history of psychoanalysis
, Ed.
Payot, 2018.
(2) Their meeting gave birth to the film
End of life
: so that you have the choice
, on france.tv.