In our contemporary society, finding love seems to have become a true epic. Millions of lonely hearts everywhere are yearning for a healthy and fulfilling love relationship, but struggle to meet. The field of encounters is now like an inextricable jungle where everyone stays in their corner, dare to take a step towards each other for fear of being pushed back.
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Romantic relationships today:
Traditional romantic codes have been swept aside in recent decades, with social upheavals and challenges to male-female relationships. The advent of feminism, the facilitation of divorce, and growing individualism have shattered the old rites of seduction and romantic conquest.
👉 In this new disorder, uncertainty and incomprehension between the sexes reign.
Mass loneliness
This crisis of the romantic bond is reflected in telling figures: today in France, no less than 70% of the 5.8 million people living alone aspire to a relationship. Whether they are single, divorced or widowed, young, trendy professionals or lonely retirees, all these “single people” are hungry to meet their soul mate, but very often they don’t know how to go about it.
Behind this statistic lie in reality very diverse realities, as a socio-anthropological study has highlighted.
👉 The profiles range from the young divorced executive lost in the face of his new independence, to the eternally single people stuck in a love wandering for ease, through the disillusioned who give up or the compulsive seducers seeking love from conquest to conquest.
Most of these single people have one thing in common: faced with the failure of previous poorly experienced or idealized relationships, they have lost their bearings and their confidence in love. Worse, many harbor fears and resentments that prevent them from moving forward.
What is “knowing how to love”?
The expression “knowing how to love” refers to the ability to have a healthy, fulfilling and lasting romantic relationship. According to Odile Lamourère, this involves several key elements:
1) Self-awareness
Identify your real needs, strengths, weaknesses and objectives in love, instead of idealizing the other and the relationship. Be clear about your own expectations.
2) Authenticity
Know how to be yourself, assert yourself with your differences without trying to correspond to an ideal image. Demonstrate transparency in the relationship.
3) Generosity
Adopt an attitude of openness, listening and respect towards others in their singularity, without wanting to possess or change them.
4) Trust
Establish a climate of serenity and emotional security, where everyone feels free to be fully themselves.
5) Shared pleasure
Cultivate a relationship based on mutual desire, amorous wonder, sensual and carnal tenderness in the harmony of bodies and hearts.
“Knowing how to love” thus allows two beings to flourish together with intensity, while preserving their respective autonomy in a bond of trust and freedom.
👉 Far from power struggles, dependence or selfishness in love, “knowing how to love” aims to recreate the balance between the intimate fusion of lovers and their essential mutual respect.
Healthy relationship: reconquering romantic authenticity in steps
Faced with this mass emotional distress, the urgency would be to relearn the basics of a healthy and balanced love life. This is the ambition of the author Odile Lamourère through her work “Le savoir-aimer”. A specialist in human relations, she develops a methodology to approach the search for the ideal partner with the same strategic rigor as the search for a job.
👉 The first step is to do in-depth self-knowledge work:
Identify your real expectations, your strengths, your weaknesses, your objectives. An essential reset to no longer idealize others and love, but on the contrary lucidly take into account the differences and difficulties inherent in any lasting relationship.
The goal is then to generate the conditions most conducive to a true encounter, made of authentic dialogue, mutual listening and mutual respect for individual identities. To do this, we must re-appropriate a new common “love vocabulary”, free of unsaid words and misunderstandings.
👉 The stakes are high: reconnecting with a healthy and fulfilling concept of love, based on generosity and trust. A “knowing how to love” made of desire, shared pleasure, recognition of differences, tenderness and intensity. An ideal that would allow two beings to love each other freely, without ego or destructive dependence, while preserving the autonomy and authenticity of each.
A subtle but essential cultural counter-stance to take in a society which still too often cultivates power struggles, possession and the tyranny of the ideal image in love. It is at this price that today’s lovers will be able to find the path to true carnal and spiritual intimacy, made of serenity as much as passion.
“Knowing how to love”, an ideal to cultivate
Faced with the challenges of new romantic realities, the quest for “knowing how to love” appears all the more essential and urgent. It is not a simple disembodied ideal, but rather a concrete learning process to be undertaken to restore all its meaning and beauty to love.
Knowing yourself, being authentic, showing generosity and trust towards your partner: all essential conditions for accessing this fulfilling relationship based on sharing, respect for differences and individual freedoms.
A journey of life which will allow lovers to love each other intensely, in carnal desire as well as the tenderness of bodies and souls, while preserving their respective integrity. A true alchemy where everyone remains fully themselves without alienating themselves from the other.
Far from the deadly power relations, this “know-how to love” invites lovers to write their own score in freedom and harmony. An ode to love in what it has of noblest and most joyful.
A demanding ideal certainly, but one that we must constantly cultivate and transmit, otherwise we risk seeing the romantic relationship become perverse and extinguished. It’s up to each person to be the architect of their own happiness together, by (re)learning the founding gestures of “knowing how to love”.
