Love is the answer to all questions? Not quite. It also makes quite a few. Psychologist and couple therapist Oskar Holzberg answers them all.
Günther can hardly speak about it. For one, out of shame. And also because he still doesn't want to admit it. It is not. He's not like that. And yet he pushed Katrin against the door yesterday. She got nosebleeds. Not so bad? Yes, not that bad, even Katrin said then. But Günther knows it's bad. Something like that mustn't happen, he doesn't want that. This is not the man he thinks he is. But he was so angry. No, no but! There is no excuse for it. He was angry, as angry as when the father slapped him in the face. And now, now he is doing it himself. "I love her anyway. More than anyone else," he says. Katrin wanted to throw all love away. First he argued, pleaded, then shouted: "Then go, go!" And then he pushed her. He felt as helpless as he didn't want to feel. That was his anger.
Love is our most happy emotion. For the primate and emotion researcher Frans de Waal, the fact that we often understand love less as a feeling and more as a state than as unearthly power is due to the fact that we cannot attribute a clear facial expression to love. The slightly debilitating grin on the faces of lovers is definitely not the facial expression of love.
Love delivers us. This makes us vulnerable.
We experience love as an overwhelmingly intense emotion. When triggered in us – what we call infatuation – it dominates us. If we have to give it up – what we call lovesickness – it controls us too. Love makes us addicted to each other. From a positive point of view, it binds us tightly together. But it makes us dependent on the love partner. It delivers us. This makes us vulnerable. And when our love is threatened, it immediately puts us in the highest alarm state. We fight, flee or freeze. And in this state our dark sides appear.
The dark side of our self are the unresolved emotions and the never-digested conflicts that we carry within us from our life history. The more invisible they are to us, the greater the risk that they will determine us. Unresolved violence leads to violence or submission. Unfulfilled needs for hopeless hope, the inability to separate and endless lovesickness. Suppressed fear of jealousy, delusions of love, stalking and aggression. We can see in the crisis we are living in how destructive these emotional conflicts escalate in pairs. Injured people hurt people. We cannot control love and therefore react aggressively or desperately, lost, break down.
Love binds us together. Since we have been humans, it has been existential for us. This is how we live and survive. That's why love is so intense, so absolute. That's why we experience them as something bigger than ourselves. Something that we can hardly stand. Because love, we forget in our enthusiasm for it, demands everything from us.
Relationship problems find their place in this small column. But love is too big for this column too. Love can produce everything in us. Even our darkest pages.
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