"Everyone has a soul mate". "True lovers can read the mind of another." "All you need is love." A psychotherapist who has seen it all holes holes in some small stories of romance and explains why life is healthier and happier without them.
If we could pick some songs to get away from our heads, Diana de Vegh would define all the cunning old backstabs who say there's only one true love for each one of us: our best half, our gorgeous knight, we will be lost without. This line of thought, says De Vegh, a therapist in private practice in New York, is not well-formed - it is harmful, eating what he calls the myth of lack of love.
"In the rarity model, where there is only one person out there, we all fight for the man who is wealthy and handsome," he says. "Our relationships are based on fear: we observe and confuse instead of creating an environment in which two people try to unfold .
De Vegh, a remarkably stylish woman with intriguing blue eyes, meets with her customers at her office in Greenwich Village, where the rich textured wall decorations, deep purple sofa and fireplace prove the enjoyment in color and comfort. The strong sense of self was difficult to win: The reason she thought so much about how we can distinguish the romantic passion from the misconceptions we often surround is that she saw for herself how disastrous it is. As a very young woman, De Vegh was transferred to a case with then president John F. Kennedy - perhaps the ultimate fairy-tale prince. Her own experiences, and those of so many women she has been advocating in the past 15 years, have sharpened her ideas in ways in which fantasy, rather than completing us, solves us.
Love is the ideological female bones thrown out, "she says, saying that in our society, men often get the real power, while women feed on the false promises of" magical caramelized "romance - that an expert will feel our attention our identity, read our minds and learn our needs.
"Reading the mind is useful between a mother and an infant but not a sexual relationship between adults." When you want someone who can predict your thoughts and desires, you are really looking for an idealized parent - usually a combination of mom and dad wrapped in one. "For years, I was looking for men who would think I was charming and made me feel safe - like Dad's best girl," he says. The craving for this attention is rampant. "I see all women who say they are looking for romantic relationships, but I think they really want to be parenteral. We all want to feel special and dear, with our weaknesses being bathed with the favorite glow of a boring father, "she says." At the same time we want our dad's strong hands, we also want the sweetness and tenderness of the mother. " when romance goes south, he says, you end up like a child abandoned and lost.
"Everyone naturally falls in love with a beautiful, married man-our fathers," he says. "They bring us out to the world and if we are safe, we grow up to want something more interesting than the love of parents and children; we want an adult collaboration." But the prerequisite for this, he says, is a good relationship with ourselves.
It is when you see yourself as weak, with the value that depends on how someone else treats you, this love becomes devastated, says de Vegh. "Letting people determine who we are is the negative combination that turns our desire into a vulnerable position, changing our bodies from places of pleasure to betrayal areas and transforming loneliness into loneliness. I think when people say they are alone, what they are really saying they do not like their own company And something has to be done about it because if you do not like your own business then you are a victim who passes.