romantic love – Página 2 – Coral Herrera Gómez

agosto 18, 2023agosto 18, 2023

How to Enjoy Love: Tools to Transform Romantic Love, by Coral Herrera Gómez

Introduction

The Love Thermometer
The Unlove Thermometer
Tools for Enjoying Infatuation
Tools for Demystifying Happy Couples
Tools for Demystifying the Romantic Myth, Princesses, and Prince Charmings
Tools for Enjoying Sex More
Tools for Addressing Self-Deception
Tools for Emotion Self-Regulation
Tools for Overcoming Self-Sabotage and Abuse
Tools for Dealing with Fear and Jealousy
Tools for Addressing Romantic Masochism and Victim Mentality
Tools for Working on Self-Esteem
Tools for Overcoming Emotional Dependency
Tools for Dealing with Power Struggles in a Relationship
Tools for an Ethical Approach to Love
Tools for Managing Anger and Pain
Tools for Separating with Love
Tools for Going Through Grief
Tools for Committing to Yourself
Tools for Being Practical and Realistic
Tools for Creating Your Own Violet Glasses
Tools for Nurturing Love
Tools for Expanding and Multiplying Love
Tools for Applying Theory into Practice

Romantic love is one of the most beautiful experiences that humans go through, but also one of the most painful. Millions of people dedicate tons of time, energy, and resources to finding their soulmate, believing that doing so will transform their lives, save them, solve their problems, and bring immense happiness.

The romantic dream often leads us to suffer greatly, as finding our "better half" is very challenging, and even when we find them, we often end up disappointed because relationships are not as beautiful, perfect, and marvelous as portrayed in fairy tales and movies.

The romantic myth is a collective illusion, a shared mirage across nearly all cultures worldwide, laden with false promises. We dream of a romantic paradise, yet in reality, we spend more time suffering from love than truly enjoying it. I believe that women suffer more from love than men do, because from a young age, we are bombarded with the idea that love will save us.

We are taught to place love and caring at the center of our lives. Our love for a man often puts many of us in a submissive position, and unconsciously, we assume traditional feminine roles that create dependency on men.

This contradiction causes us great suffering: we want to be free and autonomous, to build equal, healthy, and beautiful relationships, to enjoy life with or without a partner, and to reconcile our feminist beliefs with our feelings and ways of relating.

But it's quite difficult. As we start working to enjoy our relationship with ourselves, love, and life more, the main challenge we face is putting theory into practice. We receive no emotional or sentimental education that helps us learn to love ourselves properly: the only references we have to create our emotional world are the adult romantic relationships in our closest family and social circles, and the novels, movies, series, and songs of our culture.

We need tools that help us love and treat ourselves well, to resolve conflicts without violence, to identify and express our emotions so they don't overwhelm us and harm anyone. In the current educational and parenting system, all we are taught is how to suppress them, differently based on whether we are girls or boys: it's clear to us from a young age that girls shouldn't get angry, and boys shouldn't cry.

Our emotional education is based on denying and repressing our emotions, which is why when we experience intense emotional stories, we become unwell: our mental health deteriorates as we suffer.

And that's when we seek help from professionals: when we are already broken, both externally and internally. In reality, these professionals should be able to help us from the beginning, to understand human relationships, and to work to make them less conflicted and painful.

Until very recently, within feminism, it was assumed that romantic love was a trap for women, and that in order to be free, we had to give up falling in love with a man. As I devoured feminist books for my thesis, I thought, it can't be true, there must be a way to reclaim love, redefine it, transform it, reinvent it.

There must be a way to liberate love from sexism: and there is.

Love is in a constant state of construction, so we can keep the best aspects of our culture of love and get creative in imagining other ways of loving and caring for ourselves.

Since the romantic is political, the work is not only personal but also collective, and I feel that there are more and more people eager to transform love in order to enjoy it.

I believe that more and more of us are working on a love revolution that includes not only romantic love but also caring and networks of affection that support and accompany us on the journey of life.

The common goal of this emotional revolution is to love ourselves well, to love each other more and better, to free love from all its sexist baggage and patriarchal structure, and to learn to build beautiful, healthy, and egalitarian relationships.

Many women are coming together to imagine other ways of loving ourselves beyond the patriarchal romantic model, and to create our own love utopias that serve as an alternative to the romantic hegemony of sadomasochism and the glorification of suffering.

We are working to relate to each other and organize ourselves differently, so that our relationships are free from violence and exploitation, so that we can love without suffering and without causing suffering to others.

We are engaged in an emotional and loving revolution that is both personal and political.

I am writing this book convinced that we can suffer less and enjoy love more. Throughout my research on romantic love, I have found that there is no magical formula for happiness in a romantic relationship, but we can build our own tools to strive for a good quality of life, to suffer as little as possible, and to transform love in a way that reaches all of us.

Three years ago, I founded the Love Laboratory, a research group composed of women of different ages and countries dedicated to studying romantic love and working to find a way to love ourselves without suffering or causing suffering to others.

We are a bit like the peasants of love: we sow seeds and we are already reaping the fruits of the work we are doing together. Our common goal is to enjoy sex, love, and life more, and our mottos are: the romantic is political, and other ways of loving are possible.

We analyze patriarchal romanticism to identify and dismantle the myths with which we are seduced, and to understand how we have internalized all gender mandates through love. We work on self-awareness through loving self-criticism: we want to know ourselves better, work on our patriarchies, and learn to love ourselves and others well.

In the Love Laboratory, we have a toolbox that we feed with the lessons we have accumulated since we fell in love for the first time to those we are acquiring in the present.

We also nourish our toolbox with good advice. Advice that we give to our dearest friends to seek happiness, take better care of themselves, leave relationships in which they are not happy, and stop wasting time with guys who don't know how to enjoy love...

This advice is based on the affection we feel for them and on common sense, which we all have since we were old enough to reason. It's simply a matter of applying these pieces of advice to ourselves, listening to ourselves with love, and getting to work to help ourselves.

We also feed the toolbox with tricks, strategies, formulas that have worked for us to deal with mourning, jealousy, fear, guilt, suffering, emotional dependency, ego, self-esteem, assertiveness, empowerment, self-care, the machismo violence we have suffered, and the way we have worked on all of this to be able to enjoy love.

Together, we generate resources and tools for self-critical analysis, both individually and collectively, and to put into practice our own love utopia.

In this book, I share some of the tools we work with in the Love Laboratory. I feel that since I published my doctoral thesis until now, there are more and more people looking for ways to stop suffering for love and to free themselves from the patriarchies that inhabit us. It's not easy because we have very few references of people who enjoy love.

Most of our heroines and heroes are great sufferers, and the love stories they offer us are based on the sadomasochism inherited from Christian culture.

So, we have to undertake a cultural revolution to imagine different heroines, heroes, plots, and other happy endings. We need to invent new models of love and rediscover the diversity that is hidden behind the hegemonic model of the heterosexual couple that forms a happy family.

It's a huge task that we have to do together in order to experience love on a much broader scale, without limiting it to romantic partnerships.

We need to explore new ways of loving each other, new ways of relating and enjoying life: as couples, in groups, and on our own. We need to pool all our energies, our love, our imagination, our creativity, and our knowledge to carry out the revolution of love, affection, and care.

We want to learn to love ourselves more and better, and the question I get asked the most in my conferences, workshops, and online courses is: how? So, in this book, I wanted to share my working methodology, which is quite simple.

It starts from the idea that most of our problems are not personal but collective problems. Therefore, we need to find collective solutions.

Since love causes us so much suffering, it is necessary to work on it to transform it and free it from machismo and patriarchy. Women have always talked a lot about love, patriarchy, the sexual division of labor and life, emotions, desire, and eroticism, relationships between men and women, but until recently, it wasn't considered a political issue.

Today, thanks to feminism, we have come to understand that suffering for love is not a matter of bad luck but a social and political issue: what happens to one of us, happens to all of us.

Romantic love is a gigantic social and cultural construct that changes according to historical periods and geographical areas. We learn to love in a capitalist and patriarchal organizational system, inherit beliefs and taboos, assume norms and prohibitions, reproduce customs, and when we have internalized all the patriarchal romanticism, we reproduce it and pass it on to the next generations.

The first step to start working is to analyze how we learn to love, focusing on the difference between men and women. We are educated differently, have different expectations about romantic love, and that's why it's so difficult for us to love each other well.

Furthermore, we live in a system that takes advantage of half of the human population: our relationships are exploitative.

Understanding why women voluntarily subject ourselves to these relationships of domination and submission is helping us better understand our love culture and dismantle all the myths that seduce us to place love at the center of our lives.

The second step is to do exercises and generate tools that serve to free love from machismo and free ourselves from the patriarchies that inhabit us. In order to put theory into practice, it is very important to become aware of how we internalize patriarchal romanticism.

Once you identify everything that hurts you, doesn't help you, or you don't like, it becomes easier to design a strategy to work on everything you want to change.

The third step is to put the strategy into practice: it is very important to have confidence in oneself and understand that no woman is doomed to suffer for love, that everything can be worked on, that relationships can be enjoyed as well as singleness, that we can experience love differently, avoid painful relationships, and exit violent relationships.

To achieve this, it is necessary to work extensively on personal self-esteem and collective empowerment. In the Love Laboratory, we have always been accompanied by the battle cry of "Yes, it is possible!"

Love is an energy that moves the world, and there is no need to limit it to romantic relationships. The more love we have in our lives, the happier we will be, and the more diverse our loves and larger our affections, the easier and more beautiful life will be for each and every one of us.

A romantic partner cannot be the sole source of love: it's just one relationship in the network of affections we build from childhood to death.

The tools we work with are primarily strategies that we design based on the questions we generate in our research processes. These strategies help us look at ourselves from a different perspective, see ourselves from the outside, give ourselves good advice, and take care of ourselves and each other.

These strategies sometimes work and sometimes they don't, which is why we need to keep experimenting, choosing, and discarding. It's an exciting research process, and as we share it with more women, we nourish ourselves with good advice, our own experiences, and the experiences of others. Our comrades' stories help us understand what we're going through and build our own life narrative.

One of the key aspects of our work is to prioritize enjoyment, save ourselves from suffering, avoid problems, manage our emotions, and be practical in facing reality. The idea is not to waste time and energy searching for the ideal person or insisting on making a relationship work that isn't and won't work.

If we are together, it's to enjoy, and if we're not enjoying, then we're certainly better off apart.

With this focus on enjoyment, it becomes easier to take care of ourselves, make good decisions, and free ourselves from the need to be loved. We should spare as many tears as possible.

Suffering makes us look unattractive and ages us. It's the exact opposite of what happens when we fall in love and are happy: we appear radiant, our hair, gaze, and skin shine, and everyone notices our nights of love.

When we suffer, on the other hand, our dark circles, bags, and wrinkles become more pronounced, our smile fades, our gaze becomes dull, and our skin dries out. We're always more tired because suffering drains our energy and joy of living.

Suffering is not free: besides aging us, it damages us both internally and externally. Our mental and emotional health is harmed, as is our physical health. We become love addicts, isolate ourselves from others, and have such a strong need to be loved that we're willing to beg or demand love on our knees.

As we are tired of suffering, we need to find a way to reclaim our right to pleasure, well-being, and happiness. What we want is to put all our learnings into practice and share them so that everyone can use them in their personal journey.

The Love Laboratory is a space for collective knowledge building where each person contributes with their questions, readings, experiences, both from their past and present. This is how we are constructing a complete methodology that allows us to ground our dreams in reality, while still taking great care of ourselves.

Each person builds their own romantic utopia, but there is a foundation without which it's not possible to enjoy love: for a relationship to be beautiful and healthy, it must be free, equal, based on mutual respect, kindness, support, complicity, and companionship. With these basic ingredients, each individual can construct their own model of love and design strategies to shape it and bring it to life.

All our work is based on self-awareness and self-critique in the realm of love, where we identify what we don't like, what we could improve, or what we could avoid to be better.

Then, we think about how to eliminate those patterns, how to break free from cycles of pain in our relationships, how to end power struggles in couples, how to work on jealousy, guilt, fears, masochism, victimhood, Ego, self-esteem, and power.

In this book, I share the work I've done throughout my life, as well as some of what we've been doing in recent years at the Love Laboratory and in the School of Love. You'll find tools to create your own violet lenses, to know if you're being loved properly, to end the war against yourself, to learn how to take care of yourself and love yourself properly.

You'll also find keys to working through grief, to enjoying sex more, to using your power without harming others, to being more realistic, to avoiding victimhood, to not subjugating or dominating others, to resolving your problems through communication, empathy, and assertiveness.

There's a lot of work ahead of us, but we must have fun in order to enjoy the process. Because it has no end; it's a lifelong journey. It's an exciting challenge: it's about nothing more and nothing less than separating love from suffering, and uniting love with pleasure and enjoyment.

It's about learning to relate and organize ourselves in a different way, finding ways to overcome hatred, conquer loneliness, and unite to build a better world where love reaches everyone.

This revolution of care, affection, and love must be pleasurable: if we want to stop suffering, we need to enjoy all this work. My advice is always that it's more enjoyable to work surrounded by brave women and men who are on the same path as us.

Because the joy of living and the desire to enjoy are contagious: the more we are, the faster we will progress in the transformation we need.

I hope you enjoy these tools, find them useful for your journey, and that my tremendous desire to reinvent and enjoy love is contagious as you read this book.

Coral Herrera Gómez

agosto 17, 2023

Masculine strategies to make women suffer

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The patriarchy educates men to believe that the end justifies the means. And since the end, for many, is to have one or several women at their feet, always available to them, they don't pause to consider the ethical dimension of their behavior. They don't stop to think that causing suffering to someone to have power over them is abuse and violence.

A liberated woman with whom you have enjoyable sexual encounters can tell you yes or no when you want sex. On the other hand, an enamored woman will come running into your arms at any time. This is the difference between free women and women imprisoned by love. Men educated in the patriarchy view love as a war, and for them, making women captives is like a game: it's a challenge to their masculinity, similar to the one they play when they go hunting. They love to collect trophies to show off their power, to increase their prestige, to reaffirm their masculinity, to feel important, to garner applause and arouse envy from others, and to have many available women around them.

This isn't just the case for alpha males; it also happens to left-wing men, feminist allies, and progressive polyamorous individuals. They believe their dating techniques are appropriate because they were used by their great-grandfathers and fathers. They learn them from movies, series, novels, and tabloid press, but they also learn them from the men around them: almost everyone does it; it's considered "normal."

From a very young age, they learn that a ball comes back to you at a higher speed the harder you hit it against the wall. There are several jokes about the similarity between balls and women: they know that if women fall in love and suffer, they will become more submissive, and they can manipulate them to keep them on hand when they need them.

And how do they make women fall in love? Almost all follow the same steps: first, they make them laugh, then they shower them with orgasms and attention, and afterward, they distance themselves so that the women don't think they have completely won them over and to make them start suffering.

Patriarchal men know that women have a serious self-esteem problem, which makes us insecure and jealous. They also know that we are very afraid of being alone and of not being wanted by anyone because we are bombarded every day with the idea that we must make an effort to find a partner and invest a lot of money, time, and resources to look beautiful, be fashionable, excel in everything, and be perfect in order to be loved and to prevent our beloved from seeking other women.

Many men take advantage of this low self-esteem to make us touch the sky with our fingers and then bring us down to hell. Their techniques are very effective, which is why there are so many women suffering for love: women broken by pain, women with terribly damaged mental health, depressed and medicated women, women who commit suicide, women in therapy trying to heal their wounds...

We are millions who want to stop being slaves to love, and we put a lot of effort into it. But love is a very powerful drug, and from a young age, they make us addicts to turn us into love junkies, to make us dependent on a myth that sets our bodies, hearts, guts, and sexuality on fire. We spend a lot of energy and time trying to be loved, and then it takes us years to detach ourselves from romantic love. The price we pay for falling in love is too high, but nobody talks to us about the tremendous cost of suffering for a man's love.

Patriarchal men don't evaluate the impact their desires and needs have on others: they simply use strategies that work for them without considering whether they cause suffering or not. They don't think about whether it's ethical to bring women to their knees for their own benefit. They've been told that anything goes in love, that there are no rules or restrictions to limit their exercise of power. They've been told that women are cunning and that they have to defend themselves against feminine charms: they know that the only way to control women who have rights and feel free is through love.

Many haven't even heard of emotional responsibility: they don't take responsibility for the strategies they use to get what they want because these are the methods that have been used for generations.

Some believe that we suffer because we want to; they tell us that we're actually free and could leave them whenever we want. They believe that we like it and that we enjoy suffering, that it's in our nature and inherent to women.

But it's not inherent: women learn to suffer before learning to enjoy love. From a young age, we're presented with the image of great sufferers as beautiful and special women. They mythologize them to make us cooperate with the patriarchy, which wants us bitter and preoccupied with romantic love. As we grow older, we don't believe we have the right to receive care and love; we've only been taught to give them.

Abuse in relationships is normalized and romanticized: we're made to believe that in order to experience passion, we must suffer. We're led to believe that when Cupid shoots his arrows, we're destined to endure suffering for love. We go into love defenseless and vulnerable, while they go in wearing helmets, shields, and swords. We approach love with illusions, thinking it holds our salvation, and the blow we experience when we realize that romantic love is a deceit and there's no reward for suffering for love is deeply painful.

That's why it's so important to become aware that we must stop suffering for love. To do that, we need to understand the techniques that some heterosexual men use to subjugate us and keep us under control.

Here are their

Mixed Signals: They give you mixed signals, alternating between affection and distance. This rollercoaster of emotions creates intense highs that hook you in, followed by lows that cause you to suffer.
Ambiguity: Some use ambiguity, not clearly expressing their feelings. They appear confused, say one thing then another, tease hope and then take it away, often portraying themselves as tormented to evoke empathy.
On-again, Off-again: They appear and disappear, creating uncertainty and anxiety. Their presence and absence mimic the ebb and flow of waves, keeping you in a constant state of emotional turbulence.
Promises of a Future: Some make you feel incredibly special and talk about a future together, using well-practiced techniques reminiscent of modern-day "Don Juans."
Undermining Self-Esteem: Others make you feel insignificant while appearing larger-than-life themselves, further eroding your self-esteem.
False Love: Some claim to be madly in love, making grand promises of a future they might not be able to fulfill. They understand that promises fuel hope and illusion, even if they are knowingly deceiving you.
Feigned Emotions: Others may not be in love at all, but they pretend to be enamored to manipulate you into falling for them. They understand that sweet words can open hearts, even if their intentions are destructive.
Manipulation: these techniques are used to manipulate emotions, causing suffering and dependency. Recognizing these patterns can help empower women to break free from such harmful dynamics.
Some impose their ideal of a relationship upon you without considering your desires or understanding of love.
Others are deniers of the relationship, insisting that despite the years you've been together, you're nobody, you mean nothing to them, and you'll never be a couple. Some hide you from their loved ones, others don't, but most take advantage of the non-committed privilege to do as they please, according to their appetites or needs.
Some provoke jealousy in their partners to prevent them from feeling unique, to ensure compliance, effort, and constant fear of being replaced.
Others cry and play the victim to keep you attentive to them, catering to their needs while neglecting your own.
Some confine you to a monogamous relationship, convincing you of their monogamy while they are not. It's plain sexism and selfishness: they maintain a diverse sexual and romantic life while they remain the center of your world. Look at how brothels in any town or city are full of men during the day. Monogamy is a big scam that serves to suppress our sexuality, domesticating and confining us.
Others propose open relationships, enjoying the power of having multiple women in the same space to see them compete and vie for their attention.
Some are very "honest," elaborating in detail about how they flirt with other women and how much they enjoy it.
Others are deeply dishonest: they conceal information or deliberately lie all the time. When caught, they apologize and lie again until the women either give in or leave.
Some provoke anger to make you submit; for example, if they know you're upset, they might start an argument to divert attention from your anger.
Others use the silent treatment, refusing to talk to you and showing complete indifference to make you feel remorseful and guilty.
Some make you believe they'll love you forever but neglect you in the present, while others are stingy with love, offering it in minimal doses to keep you always wanting more.
Some create triangles: they make you believe you and another girl came into their life at the same time, or they involve an ex in the current relationship. This way, they live like kings, with two women vying for their attention, causing both to suffer as he moves between them. He might alternate between them or be with both simultaneously, and neither finds it easy to break free from this triangular prison.
Others demand that you give yourself completely, convincing you that your freedom, projects, social and emotional networks, and passions are obstacles to the relationship. They ask you to leave everything behind and focus solely on them.
Some make you believe that without them, you're nothing, that you won't be able to find happiness away from them, that you owe them everything, that your happiness depends on them, and that you have no value on your own.
Others praise you to make you feel like a goddess, although they might also do the same with others.
Some see you as a suitable wife candidate, while others view you solely as a lover. Despite your efforts to escape stereotypes and patriarchal mandates, they tend to label and treat you according to their perception of the type of woman you are (good woman/bad woman, wife material/casual fling).
Some lack empathy entirely and are unsupportive; they don't care if you cry for them. They believe it's your problem, that you brought it upon yourself, and they couldn't care less if you're breaking inside. Others, on the other hand, relish in seeing you desperate, sad, bitter, anxious, and full of distress. They feel important when they witness their partners cry and watch them grovel for scraps of love. They consistently try to make you believe that your struggles are due to your craziness, and that you are responsible for your own suffering.
Some want you to always agree with them, solve their problems, and rescue them from themselves. Others want you to respect their freedom to live life on their terms. However, they all understand that to have a woman at their mercy, they must make her fall in love and make her suffer. They believe it doesn't matter if they have to lie, toy with your feelings, deceive, and emotionally manipulate you to achieve this.

This pattern of relating is so normalized that we often fail to recognize that causing someone to suffer is a form of violence. Emotional manipulation is a form of violence, but it's presented as an act of love. We've been told time and time again that "those who love you will make you cry." They make us believe that love and hate are the same, and that "those who fight the most are the ones who desire each other the most." However, the truth is that any kind of relationship, regardless of its nature or duration, should be based on mutual care.

Whether it's a virtual or in-person relationship, whether it lasts for a night or three years, any relationship between two people engaging in a sexual connection should be founded on empathy, respect, complicity, solidarity, and care.

This way of relating has become so normalized that we hardly realize that causing someone to suffer is violence.

Emotional manipulation is a form of violence, but it's presented to us as an act of love. We've been told countless times that "those who love you will make you cry." We're led to believe that love and hate are the same, and that "those who fight the most are the ones who desire each other the most." However, the truth is that any kind of relationship, regardless of its nature or duration, should be based on mutual care.

Whether it's a virtual or in-person relationship, whether it lasts for a night or three years, any relationship between two people coming together to enjoy a sexual connection should be founded on empathy, respect, complicity, solidarity, and care.

Love is not a game if it hurts. If you cause others to suffer, it's because you're behaving badly.

The good news is that everything can be worked on and de-patriarchalized.

Now that we know who benefits from the suffering of women and why they want us to suffer, we must rebel and not allow any man to emotionally manipulate us and play with us.

The heart of patriarchy lies in the relationships we build as couples, which is why it's so important to understand these male techniques and refuse to live on our knees in the face of love.

The suffering is over; now it's our turn to start enjoying.

We all own our love: we won't be fooled anymore.

Coral Herrera Gómez

En Español: Técnicas masculinas para hacer sufrir a las mujeres

agosto 17, 2023

Maybe it’s not romantic love, but just boredom.

Maybe it's not romantic love, but just boredom.

Maybe it's not that we're in love with love, but that we need strong emotions.

Maybe we're not falling in love with men, but with how they enjoy life.

Why do we get bored?

Because all our basic needs are met. If we had to spend the day searching for food, clean water, shelter, warm clothing, then we wouldn't have time to get bored, nor would we be invaded by existential emptiness.

We get bored because our day-to-day consists of producing, reproducing, and consuming: it's a cycle of routines where it's hard for us to find meaning in life.

We get bored because our lives are monotonous and with very little change, which is why we enjoy watching the crazy lives of celebrities through screens: parties, dinners, dances, travels, romances, weddings, baptisms, divorces, inheritances, family feuds...

We love novels and movies where characters are constantly facing death, risking their lives, passionately loving, living on the edge, and transforming throughout the journey.

We're hungry for emotions and change: we feel like robots and dream of an intense life because we're numbed, hibernating on the couch, living everything through a screen, especially during this year of pandemic: our family, social, sexual, and romantic relationships have been minimized. So have our horizons: being within four walls leads us to yearn for something magical to happen that completely changes our lives.

Women who feel bored

Boredom is political: patriarchy wants all of us bored, entertained with beauty, and obsessed with romantic love.

The more bored we are, the emptier our lives become, and the more dependent we are.

The more dependent, the more vulnerable we are to romantic addiction, and therefore, the more submissive we are and the more obedient to patriarchy's mandates.

To understand why women get so bored, take a look at the toys girls play with. Everything is pink: they've taken away all the other colors of the rainbow, our world is small and monochromatic, revolving around money and beauty, romantic love, and motherhood.

Girls as young as six already know that boys are the geniuses,

and within a couple more years, they realize that their greatest passion should be the love of one of them.

Women fall in love with men who are in love with life and know how to enjoy it.

It's possible that we might not even fall in love with them truly, but with their freedom, their energy, their ability to savor life, to have fun, to learn, to meet new people, to carry out their projects, and pursue their dreams.

Perhaps we don't need a man to escape boredom: maybe what we need is to find pleasure in things other than romantic partnerships and the ideal family.

Men's Passions

Men cultivate their passions and find pleasure in countless areas of life: music, art, sports, knowledge and science, technology, spirituality and religion, magic, culture, politics, and economics...

The great geniuses of Human History are men who were obsessed with what fascinated them, men who forgot about the world while composing music, painting pictures, sculpting, writing novels, searching for fossils, climbing mountains, diving into the depths of the sea, flying in contraptions, researching exciting topics, advocating for human and animal rights, forming unions or political parties, exploring the boundaries of nature, discovering new stars and planets...

Meanwhile, we have few examples of passionate women. The only women we see in movies and novels are women obsessed with a man, and who are miserable if the man mistreats them or ignores them. They are always alone and bored, have no emotional bonds with other women, and if they do interact with others, it's to make them suffer.

Women Who Suffer for Love

They don't let us enjoy life because they tell us that we were born to suffer, to give ourselves up, to sacrifice, to endure, and to give up everything for the love of a man.

Most girls are educated to dedicate their time and energy to looking beautiful with the ultimate goal of being chosen by a man as a wife.

Girls who don't fit into this role quickly realize that their passions are not "girly things": patriarchy makes us believe that "normal" women enjoy shopping, reading fashion magazines, and spending afternoons at the beauty salon.

This is the feminine model they offer us: egocentric and narcissistic women who spend all day looking at themselves and taking care of their beauty, their only treasure. Their only goal is to be loved.

That's how the Disney princesses we idolize in childhood are portrayed. They live alone and waiting, locked up and bored, sighing and combing their golden hair a thousand times until the most important moment of their lives arrives: when the prince comes to rescue them.

How are we educated for boredom and suffering?

Firstly, we are taught that pleasure is for men: for us, it is considered sinful.

Secondly, we are made to believe that one must sacrifice to find happiness, and that one must give up oneself to enter the realm of romantic paradise.

Thirdly, we are taught that happiness is individual, when in reality it is collective: we cannot be happy if those around us suffer, and if we do not all have the same rights.

How are our passions extinguished? They inject us from a young age with the Great Passion of Romantic Love, which flourishes and grows inside us, becoming the center of our lives and overpowering all other passions.

They make us addicted to romantic love, which is why when asked, we do not know what gives us pleasure, and we do not know what makes us happy. For some women, it takes years of therapy to discover what they truly need to live well.

We are educated to worry and occupy ourselves only with our physical appearance, promising us that love will come to us through beauty.

This is how they manage to focus women on themselves and their great romantic passion, and not worry about the rest of the world.

They make us believe:

that we have come into this world to be beautiful, to love, and to care for others.
that love always comes first.
that it's normal for us to give up our affections, our projects, and our hobbies when we enter into a partnership.
that nothing we do matters.
that we must dedicate our time to superficial things that are of no importance to society.
that women who pursue what truly interests them must pay a high price: they end up alone.
that women who have succeeded in doing "men's things" are unfeminine, lonely women, odd women that no man desires as a wife.
that if you deviate from the norm, you will end up alone, and no one will want you - this is a constant threat.
that men do not want women engrossed in their own dreams, but rather engrossed in them.
that men want women who are good wives and good mothers.

What models of femininity are offered to us?

We barely know about the women activists who fight for human rights, nor do we have role models of women who care about their community and their planet.

Women who struggle to survive each day amidst the exploitation, poverty, and violence of patriarchy, and women who are building a better world, remain invisible.

What do the famous women in our culture do? Generally, they sing, dance, act, pose, fall in love, get married, have children, and get divorced. They are role models for the girls who idolize them.

Dreaming Women

When we are asked what we desire, what gives us pleasure, many times we don't know if these are our own desires or ones we have learned.

When we see women who haven't made romantic love the center of their lives, that's when we realize that maybe our dreams aren't really ours. They've been manufactured to make us believe that happiness lies in the love of a man and in motherly love.

We invest tons of time, energy, and resources into these dreams, shaping our lives around them.

Our dreams enslave us because in them, the most important thing is a man. Without them, we cannot be happy. Our emotions depend on a single man, and they change according to his behavior.

Not just our emotions, but also our self-esteem and life projects depend on relationships with men.

What happens when we are without a partner, or when we don't find a partner?

Our life loses its meaning, and we are terrified of the emptiness. We don't know why we're alive or what to do with our existence. We feel incomplete because we've been told a thousand times that we are halves, and without the other half, we are nothing, we are nobody.

Rebellious Women

Feminism advocates for the right of all women to pleasure, enjoyment, and living a good life.

That's why we want to educate girls to be autonomous, to not become addicted to romantic love, to learn to enjoy life just like boys, to feel equally free as them, to unite with each other, and to find the meaning of life in their dreams, passions, and networks of affection, rather than in a single person.

Feminist women are working within ourselves to better understand who we are, to connect with ourselves, to discover our own passions, and to find spaces and time for our own pleasure.

And we know it's important because patriarchy wants us to be sufferers, embittered, and frustrated.

We also know that life is more than just work, caregiving, and consumption: we have the right to have fun, to immerse ourselves in other worlds, to share our passions with other women, and to celebrate that we are alive.

That's why we are working to demystify the ideal of the couple and the happy family, to remove men from the center of our lives, and to place ourselves there instead.

We have so much love within us, and we don't have to waste it on just one person. We have an enormous capacity to love many people at once, to enjoy life, and to bring joy to others as well.

So if they want us to be bored or in love,

they will find us passionate, joyful, and in rebellion,

because life is too short!

Coral Herrera Gómez

Artículo original: Igual no es amor, es aburrimiento

Etiqueta: romantic love

How to Enjoy Love: Tools to Transform Romantic Love, by Coral Herrera Gómez

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Masculine strategies to make women suffer

Maybe it’s not romantic love, but just boredom.