Love Needs A Mirror, Not A Magnifying Glass
When some people are in love, they act almost like snipers. They hold up a magnifying glass to find their partners’ defects, faults and assumed weaknesses. They ultimately undermine and destroy the relationship. That is the paradigm of the coward. A person who does not understand that love needs a mirror, not a magnifying glass.
When it comes to relationships, no one knows everything. Most of us have crashed down more than one cliff and left wrecks of dreams and hopes behind us. We have been shipwrecked at sea by impossible love and cowardly passion, whether we were scared or just indecisive.
There is one type of relationship that usually causes more chaos than others. It is the one where one or both members act as “identity destroyers”. They focus their attention on everything they do not like, all the things that bother them with their partner. Why? To mock and control.
They do it because that’s how they take the reins and compensate for their hurt self-esteem. Almost without realizing it, we are caught in a hamster wheel, where our own inertia catches us in a dangerous dynamic of unhappiness.
A dynamic where people hold up magnifying glasses, but can not see their own holes and their own immaturity in the mirror. They do not realize that love needs a mirror to thrive.
Howard Markman is a professor of psychology at the University of Denver and one of the most well-known relationship researchers. His widely published works illustrate with precision and originality the many problems that occur in the framework of the ordinary and everyday.
One of Dr. Markman’s most interesting ideas is that most people who go into couples therapy are convinced that the problems and unhappiness are caused by the other person.
They carry the impossible hope that the therapist will provide “healing” or “cure” the wrong behavior of partners. If it were up to them – and this is what they often expect from the expert – their partners would be taken in the ear and punished for their bad behavior.
Behind most couple problems there are usually no mental health problems, but rather a problem with relational dynamics. A dynamic that the two have built up and that defines how they relate to each other.
For Dr. Markman, the issues raised at these meetings are often linked to certain deficiencies related to emotional education and psychological skills. Therefore , he suggests that we teach “psycho-education” in schools from an early age.
The goal of psycho-education would be to provide us with strategies, tools and skills so that we can help ourselves. It would teach us to see ourselves in the mirror. This is to identify our fears and insecurities, but above all to tear down society’s rigid roles and gender norms.
When it comes to love, some people are swept away by these roles and norms. They may have inherited them from their own families. Maybe they have learned that “it is better to be quiet and harden” or “if he does not do this, he does not love me, so I should be angry.”
Basically, the idea is to establish a base of self-knowledge so that we can take care of ourselves and thus show the best version of ourselves in our relationships.
In the colorful, complex and ever-growing web of relationships, there is always room for conflict. Instead of seeing it as negative – as a disease we can be infected with – we should see it as an engine that pushes us to improve and strengthen the relationship.
Conflicts stir up the deepest of our being. However, we still create unnecessary conflicts by obsessively ignoring the fact that love needs a mirror and instead holding up the magnifying glass against the other person’s alleged defects.
We do it while being unaware of our own emotional responsibility. We do not realize that we sometimes go through life so naked and cold that all we want is for someone to be our protection. Our warm place.
But listen: this formula never works. All people who serve as “protection” and “doctors” only feel useful when needed. Unfortunately, this is a dependent relationship.
Sooner or later, the person will run out of energy, life and dignity. This is because the person lives under a relentless magnifying glass because the other person does not understand that love needs a mirror in which one can reflect on oneself.
Let us not allow this to happen. Let us stand in front of a mirror and rediscover ourselves as well as our self-esteem. Do not let yourself be drawn into a relationship where you have to sacrifice your own happiness to be loved.
