Meaning of being in love and everyday falling
As I have already said in the introduction of this work, practically we all know what it is to fall in love, or rather, we know the sensations that each of us experiences when we are "under the spell of love". But what is falling in love?, What is being in love? Italian sociologist Alberoni tries to answer these questions like this:
Falling in love is not a daily phenomenon, a sublimation of sexuality or a whim of imagination. Nor is it an ineffable, divine or diabolical sui generis phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that can be placed in an already known class, that of collective phenomena. […] Among the great collective movements of history and falling in love there is a rather narrow kinship, the type of forces that are released and acts are of the same class, many of the experiences of solidarity, joy of living, renewal are analogous. (Alberoni, 1996, pp. 9-10)
We see with this quote the force attributed to the state of falling the Italian sociologist by equating it with the great collective movements. Coral Herrera (2011) comments that for this author falling in love means an adventure that is also lived in the great collective movements. In love, passion arises and all the emotions that each of us know.
It does not consider Alberoni (1996) that this action, that of falling in love, has the unique and unusual character in our existence, that is, that only happens to us once more, but that we can fall in love more than once and do not consider that always and necessarily falling to become love: sometimes it happens, but sometimes not.
In my opinion, one of the most remarkable aspects of Alberoni’s work is that this sociologist indicates the cultural character that the question of falling entails, he says: “Falling in some way is already prefigured by culture and a disposition by a disposition In mood ”(Alberoni, 1996, P. 67). Following the multiple readings that I have made to write this work I have been able. Therefore, we can say without fear of making mistakes that the question of falling is preferred, is designed and drawn by culture, and this provides us with a series of guidelines according to which we must behave when we fall in love: we have to behave in a certain way If we belong to the male gender and otherwise if we belong to the female gender and under this differentiation the inequality is hidden.
Therefore, we have to think of a different form of love, in a love that changes these stereotypes preferred by the culture in which we have had to live, in a love that ultimately translates into an egalitarian relationship for the parties that compose it, that is, equality between man and woman. We refer, then, to a love that goes beyond the rigorous patterns of heteronormativity, which does not understand both genres and values associated with equality.
What is romantic love?
Romantic love is a feeling that responds to cultural mandates and that represents one of the instruments through which patriarchy reproduces a tremendous inequality between genres.
Coral Herrera gives us a definition of this term:
Romantic love is a mythical product that has, on the one hand, a sociobiological basis that is based on emotional and erotic relationships between humans, and on the other, a cultural dimension that has political and economic implications, given that what is supposed to be An individual feeling, actually influences, forms and models the organizational structures. (Herrera, 2010, P. 76).
With this event we are clear several aspects to comment on romantic love: on the one hand, we would have to point out its mythical character, its nature of entelechy, something that obeys a series of beliefs, but which, as we will see, never ends to fulfill as the stories, the novels, the movies, etc. These beliefs are usually the following: eternal love, fidelity, eternity of passion, living happily forever, the person of your life … On the other hand, it is possible to point out their cultural character, since, as I have said in the Previous section, the way of loving is pregnant with cultural considerations. They teach us to love in a certain way and this way of loving changes according to culture and according to the historical era in which we are.
The way they teach us to love is very different if we are in the female gender or if we are within the male gender. If we are women, we have socialized with the idea that love is the most important part of our life, that our existence is only and exclusively meaning if we find a man. If we are men, we have been taught to realize as individuals, namely the importance of love in our lives, but to also understand that this is not the center of our universe because we have many more aspects in our life. Therefore, if we are women, our life will focus on the private field, on the scope of the domestic and if we are men, it will be focused on the public level (we will expand the content of socialization in the following section). With this we can realize that the socialization we receive in the love field is dictated by a patriarchal society. The existence of the patriarchy already spoke to us the feminist Kate Millet and although her sexual politics has almost half a century, it seems appropriate to bring the following appointment because much of its content can be applied to the present:
Even when today it is almost imperceptible, sexual domain is perhaps the most deeply rooted ideology in our culture, for crystallizing in it the most elementary concept of power.
This is due to the patriarchal character of our society of all historical civilizations. Recall that the army, industry, technology, universities, science, politics and finance – in a word, all the ways of power, including the coercive force of the police – is completely found in male hands. (Millet, 1995, P. 70).
This socialization in the love sphere, which is so opposite, generates a tremendous inequality between men and women because as we can guess it has as a logical consequence to relegate women to the private space, to the space of the domestic, to the space of care, to the maternity space while the public space is reserved for the male. They are clear, therefore, the social and political implications involved in these feelings that we are talking about that may seem a priori harmful and good and de facto cause a lot of damage to women.
In my view, this socialization so disparate in love makes women find “in the clouds”, dreaming of the love that Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock had or any of the great Hollywood stars in any of her movies, while man triumphs in life and is not found in the world of dreams. As Marcela Lagarde says:
It is always said that love is the engine of life and the sense of existence. But in our culture it is much more for women. For women rather than for men, love is defining their gender identity. For women, love is not just a possible experience, it is the experience that defines us.
Loving is the main duty of women. What should women be? We must be beings of love. And this, as a cultural mandate, not as an option, not for our will, but because it is the duty to be culturally assigned, the duty to be socially has been built in each woman. (Lagarde, 2001, P. 12).
That is why it is totally necessary The songs and unfortunately a long etcetera of cultural products. Women and men also have other emotional relationships (family, friends, co -workers, etc.), of love, of love after all, which are very important for all of us. Consequently, teachers have the obligation to eliminate this harmful conception of love that it only generates inequality, suffering and also, something that we will deal with later in this work, enmity among women themselves, since patriarchy forces us to compete between us same, something totally opposed to the concept of sorority that feminism is responsible for defending.
Aurora Loyal Garcia speaks to us about the need to the classroom:
Hence, we consider the concretion, contextualization of these feelings and love relationships in real, everyday situations, since, as Sternberg (1998) affirms the way of acting of people models their way of feeling and think, like the way in which the way of acting is felt and thought. To favor reflections on this issue that our culture draws as something consul same another or another. (Loyal Garcia, 2007, P. 68).
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