BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF
Love and desire are different things. There are not many more laps to give to this statement. Anyone who does the experiment of throwing the question "did you ever feel a strong attraction to someone other than your partner?" at a gathering of women who have long been in a monogamous relationship, will not be surprised that they all raise their hands. And we're not talking about feeling desire for Brad Pitt, David Beckham or Ricky Martin, but for a co-worker, a friend's brother, the father of my daughter's dance partner, the guy who runs the cafeteria that's two blocks from my house.
"Love does not come to put a stop to desire. It's risky territory. That you fall in love, does not stop your desire. If you are in this situation, you may not stop crossing paths with people you like, who excite you, who move you. Love does not guarantee fidelity," says psychoanalyst Gabriel Rolón.
Ok, very clear. Undoubtedly, the fact of being in a couple does not prevent or protect us from that, on occasion, we can feel attracted to another person. Desiring another is something inherent to the human being, it is an animal instinct, uncontrollable. But what do we do with that and what happens if that experience begins to generate in us stress and a tsunami of mixed feelings. What happens if those feelings are repeated, frequent, and take us further; For example, even confessing to a friend: I love my partner, but I can't wait to have sex with someone else.
Back to game
Every Sunday at noon in Benavídez. The same scene. "Hello, how are you? Was it your turn to bring Lucas back to the game? That's nice! We see it together." Every time Lorena (37) took her son to play soccer, Marcos, the father of another boy on the team, who was separated, showed her a particular enthusiasm. At first it was just good vibes, spending time drinking mate or chatting, along with the other mothers and fathers. But as the year went by, Lorena began to wait on Sundays, think a little about what she was going to wear, even simulate a day that her car did not work so that the four of us could go together. "I summarize in a few words what happened to me: I felt alive. The absolutely social encounters with Marcos became the best gasoline to face the rest of the week and wait for the following Sunday. It was like a very personal field, very mine, that had nothing to do with my marriage, totally manageable and satisfying for me, until he invited me to the theater one night, because he said he had been given two tickets. That's where the problem started. I wish I had had a switch to turn off that desire, but it wasn't," Lorena confesses.
Feeling attracted to someone other than a romantic partner is one of the dilemmas that bring more problems to those who are in a monogamous relationship, but also, let's admit it, it is one of the most common. How each one approaches this dilemma is perhaps the key and differential point: identify the limits, do not cross them, talk with the couple about what happens to us, respect the agreements we made ... or maybe not. It is like an imaginary line that makes us stay on the side of fantasy, but if it is crossed, there will be no choice but to face the consequences. How? It's a very personal response. Each couple is a world and each one solves (or not) their problems within that universe they built between the two, although there are a number of possible paths that experts explain.
Happily ever after?
Esther Perel is a renowned Belgian psychotherapist, author of bestsellers such as The couple's dilemma and Erotic Intelligence, who also has several interesting TED talks on the tension between the need for security (love, belonging, closeness) and the need for freedom (erotic desire, adventure, distance) of human beings. She points out that we live in an era where we feel we have a right to fulfill our desires, because the culture constantly tells us that we deserve to be happy. If before couples divorced mainly because they were unhappy, now they divorce because they could be happier.
Perel then asks why even many happy people, those who have a good relationship, are unfaithful. And the answer is found in that adventures are an act of betrayal, but also an expression of longing and loss: a desire to recover lost parts of ourselves. When we seek the gaze of another, it is not always that we are moving away from our partner, but from the person we have become. And it's not so much that we're looking for someone, but looking for another version of our own self.
The power of imagination...
Perhaps starting by defining the concepts very briefly helps to clear the picture. Loving involves feelings and is enduring over time; Desire is more like an impulse, something primitive, linked to chemistry. We all hear from time to time that you want what you don't have. Socrates already said it: desire is born of necessity when you do not have what you want. It often happens that what is loved implies presence and what is desired, lack. We love or hate something because it demands a response from us and we desire what is absent, what we lack. But how different are love and desire?, When do they no longer go hand in hand in a relationship?, Is it impossible to find the two in the long term in the same person?
A study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine (Oxford) indicates that sexual desire and love, although they show differences at the neural level, have a common set of brain areas. This suggests that love is built on a neural circuit oriented to emotions and pleasure (just like desire), but that love grows over time and more abstractly represents physical experiences. This is what shows that love and desire are dimensions that have a similar origin, but evolve differently, and it is not uncommon for them to open in different paths in the same individual.
"I've had a fake profile on different dating apps for months. It does not happen beyond the chat, but today I could not leave it, it does me good. I started seeing how my single friends dated again and again with guys they met on Bumble or Inner Circle, and the anecdotes they brought up afterwards. A little jealousy made me; I, who have been married for 18 years, began to think: Am I never going to be with someone again?, Am I not going to feel those nerves when they pick you up?", says Maga (41).
The relationship with her partner is good, she still loves many things about him like the day they decided to get married, he is a good father, they have fun together, they have projects, maybe the frequency with which they make love is not what she would like, but it does not generate anything to change this, because she also understands that the passion between them decreased. What he does feel, and very strongly, is curiosity about what it will be like to have sex with someone else, but he is far from encouraged. Therefore, resorting to a false profile gave him a little of that world that at least for now he will not be able to live. "Is this infidelity too?, Do I tell my partner?" he asks, and finds different answers depending on who he talks to or even their moods.
For Perel, the adventures are not so much about sex but about the desire for attention, to feel special, to feel important, as happens to Maga when she chats with other men, even if she does not finish making a meeting. What happens is that sometimes imagining that we kiss with that person we want can be as pleasant or more than hours of sex. "It's the power of our imagination and that's something we can't control," concludes the therapist.
Three paths
So, feeling desire for someone other than our partner is natural and it happens to all of us at some time. It is also true that we do not choose what we are attracted to, because there is a chemical issue, and on the other hand, society made us believe that desire is something negative and religions have a lot to do with this throughout history. We can add that it is not the same to be attracted to someone than to know that we really like that person. It is like climbing a step in the challenge of recognizing what is happening to us with an individual who is not our stable partner. And if we climb another step, or several at once, we can get to realize that desire that drives us. But what do we do with this that happens to us and we cannot hide?
The Spanish sexologist Ignasi Puig Rodas states that human beings are "imperfect monogamous" for many reasons, one of them is sexual attraction to other people, and that we can be in love, but that does not mean that our body can react to other sexual stimuli. "The fact that humans have decided that our system of relationships is through monogamy, is not a matter of nature, it is a cultural construct," he says.
In situations of this type, the expert outlines three options: keep the couple as they are and see what is done with that attraction to another person (therapy, avoiding contact); open the relationship (and establish what is allowed and what is not), although this implies that the other person can also have other affective bonds; Cut the relationship and have freedom to realize our desires without putting the other at risk. Of course, this will depend on each couple, the intensity of each attraction and what each is willing to win or lose.
Lorena went through all the stages: she agreed to go to the theater with Marcos, they kissed, the guilt was immense and she told him that she could not continue with this, she invested long therapy sessions, she talked to her husband about the possibility of opening the relationship, he was categorical that he did not want that, and they ended up separating. Marcos' did not prosper. And a year and a half after all this, they gave themselves a second chance with the father of their child. Today he thinks that perhaps love and desire merged again, but he needed to move away to understand it.