Fear of love Fear of love occurs among people, who pay special attention to it. They consider love to be the main condition for successful life and welfare. They strive for love but they tend to suppress this feeling, waiting for ideal conditions and an ideal person to share this sacred feeling with. Thus on the one hand such a person yearns for love and on the other hand it can't find it in everyday life. This discrepancy begins to form in childhood during the period of puberty. A person reads books, watches films, etc. All examples of lofty feelings, shown there are sometimes very far from reality and form unreal expectancies and ideals. A person begins to dream about his/her future, where he/she will meet true love and will live happily. This aim determines personal behaviour for the rest of life and is not likely to change despite all possible negative experience. When a person makes his/her love the main aim of life, all other life aims are regarded to be unimportant and love begins an unrealizable obsession, which prevents a person from solving everyday problems and be realistic. This ideal of love is above all personal abilities. It is made of numerous images from books, poetry and films. It contains all aspects of an ideal person and includes appearance, look, style, smell and other details. The fact that this ideal looks very concrete prompts that a person thinks about love too much and pays little or no attention to other aspects of human life. On the one hand constant thinking about love makes a person very unpractical. Impracticality in turn favours alienation and more intensive plunging into pipe dreams and never-never. The formed ideal serves as a protection from life. A person withdraws into himself in order to avoid risks, in order to let an ordinary and imperfect man/woman enter his/her life. Such a person constantly demonstrates indifference to other people. He/she thinks that he/she has time to wait, but the tension, caused by love expectations increases. It prevents him/her form normal communication with relatives, friends (if any), peers and colleagues. Permanent stand-off makes other people avoid this person and this fact disturbs and distresses him/her. This makes this person think that love will never come to him/her. Fortunately love is sometimes more active than a person, who is waiting for it and asks a withdrawn person to let it enter his/her life. It becomes a dilemma for this person and he/she hesitates and doesn't know how to act in this situation. It is very difficult to open for a reserved person before a supposed lover. Contradictions between reality and inner wishes lead to tragedy whatever scenario is chosen. People can't live without love but they need to have life experience to understand how to tackle with it. Reserved persons lack this experience because they are unable to build relationships with people. Fear of disappointment dooms this person to failure. He/she feels it subconsciously and avoids risks. Thus appears an exclusive circle. The more this person wants to meet love, the less are his/her chances to find it. As we have mentioned above, this problem begins to form in childhood. That is why parents must teach their children not to form generalized characters in their mind and not to let these characters determine their life aims and expectations. Child's mind is an inner world which is filled by stereotypes, ideals and patterns with the active help of parents. Parents simply want their child to become a good person and to teach it to differentiate good and evil, but at the same time these ideas and conceptions are either obsolete or artificial and are very far from reality. They make a person unable to make decisions and understand themselves. |