Romantic or erotic love: Falling in love…

 The infatuation: The egg and sperm that create the romantic partner, although all lovers fall in love to maximize their identity, or their self-esteem!                                          

(**From the book "The Psychology of Love - Romantic Love - Learning to Love" written by this  author, on pages 110-112)

**By Hector Williams Zorrilla          

All lovers fall in love to maximize their identity, or their self-esteem...

The life experience of love is an emotion, and as such, all its expressions are emotional. And the most reliable proof of this is in erotic love. 

The first stage of this cycle, falling in love, is an emotion that follows all the rules of other emotions: shame or shyness, anger or anger, jealousy, fear or fear, hatred or resentment, etc.  

The basic goal of emotions is this: they all maximize self-esteem. This is the first and basic meaning of their expressions. The emotion of anger when expressed says:"you have invaded my spaces, you have entered them without my permission and you have violated them. With my anger or anger I'm trying to make you feel bad, the same way you did with me."

All emotions are defenses used by self-esteem. 

And the two components of falling in love, emotional attraction and sexual attraction, are also self-esteem defense mechanisms.

The emotion of falling in love can be a combination of identification, projection, sublimation, compensation, regression, etc., but at this point, that fact matters little in contrast to the reality that it is an emotion that seeks to maximize the self-esteem of the person expressing it. 

All other emotions seek to maximize self-esteem by using rejection or separation, that is, by concentrating on the "self." With the manifestations of all other emotions, people gather their energies around "themselves", their identities, as defensive resources to any external threat. That's what happens with shame, fear, hatred, jealousy, etc. With the emission of all these emotions, people retreat, separate themselves from their threatening objects and concentrate on themselves.

But,With the emotion of falling in love the opposite happens, and here is one of the great paradoxes that complicate its existence. 

When I express the emotion of shyness, I'm saying, "Hey, I feel threatened by you, so I subtly ask you to step away and allow me to enjoy my own self-worth."  But when I express the emotion of falling in love I say, "Hey, I'm deeply drawn to you, so I ask you to allow me to share my self-worth with yours." 

In other words, the emotion of falling in love calls for the creation of a shared self or "ego á deux." 

The search for bonding, for the creation of a shared "self"," is the basic explanation given to the question: why do people form loving couples?  

My idea is that couples are formed in the psychosocial spaces or bonds that their members establish when each one finds his/her other self. The positive perceptions that each participant of the couple sees in their other self, are responsible or the critical point that leads to the formation of the optional couple. It is the positive perceptions towards that other discovered self that allow its members to choose each other among other alternatives that they may have.

Related to the idea of examining the emotion of falling in love as the creation of my shared "self" is that of Winch (1958), and his theory of complementary needs; Murstein (1961), who says that the couple is compelled by similar needs; Kubie (1956), talks about the discrepancies between the conscious and unconscious demands of the members of the couple; Framo (1970), explains this on the basis that couples relate to a two-way psychic contract involving transactional agreements; Bowen (1966), says that people tend to form pairs with another who has the same basic level in the differentiation of their personality; Napier (1978), exposes that each member of the couple tends to choose their worst nightmare; Solomon (1981, 1988), argues that love is the creation of shared identity through the ideas, judgments and values of its participants.

The expression of the emotion of falling in love in the creation of that shared self shakes the very foundations of the personality of its participants. Not because of the rather popular idea that human beings feel and perceive themselves lonely and separated until we find an erotic partner, from which the assumption is derived that all human beings need and seek "their other half". 

The personality is shaken in the process of creating the shared self possibly on the contrary: the cultural over-emphasis that promotes the invasion of its spaces, among other reasons. Because the emotion of falling in love is not passive, nor receptive, but reactive, active, dynamic and, above all, creative. It is responsible for the creation of the loving couple. It provides the sperm and egg for fertilization, although other elements in the procedural cycle of love assume responsibilities in its growth.

I have to make a pertinent clarification regarding self-identity and self-esteem, two realities that differ qualitatively. 

The first concerns the structure of the self; the second to the values of the self. Possibly in many people, the expression of the emotion of falling in love involves the creation of the structure of the self, but most people have their self-identities or the structures of their selves sufficiently established in time when the emotion of falling in love manifests. They are the values of self or self-esteem, the shared creation, that lovers try to maximize with the expression of the emotion of falling in love" (Pages 110-112).

**The author is a psychologist, college professor and writer 

Life is beautiful. La vida es bella...