Sebastián Girona, couples psychologist: "Living with emotional armor prevents us from giving ourselves away. Love is dangerous terrain, but also wonderful"

It makes us float.

She 'fools' us.

She lifts us up to caress the heaven of the

and throws us up to face the hell of the

.

It doesn't matter, as the song says, the time or the date on the calendar, because love

when it comes or goes, turns everything upside down.

But, what the hell is love, really, and does it happen inside us so that

like that?

"Love, in psychological terms, is something completely subjective and there are almost as many definitions as there are people. When we fall in love, a real revolution occurs

. It makes us have a

to the one that occurs when

The adrenaline rush and the frantic desire to be with the other person, especially sexually, brings us closer to

," explains Sebastián Girona, a psychologist specializing in couple bonds.

In that first phase, the whole bush is oregano and all the warts, beautiful and sexy moles.

"

that we all have on a daily basis, in this first stage,

, because the amygdala and the frontal cortex are temporarily deactivated. This mechanism causes negative thoughts or critical judgments about the couple to decrease. That's why "The person we like, at first, has no defect in our eyes. Perhaps that is where the saying comes from that '

'. When the effect of falling in love wears off, we find reality", says Girona.

But this cocktail of temporary obtundation has more ingredients.

"At the same time that our critical judgment is 'turned off',

: the hippocampus, the hypothalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex. This makes

. On the other hand, it is more than proven that the brain of a person hit by Cupid's arrow has very high levels of

. This generates, on the one hand, a lot of

and, on the other,

" .

To what extent is this idealization 'dangerous'?

"It is very dangerous if, during the high of falling in love, we make decisions that it would be better to adopt later and in a more considered way, how to live together, have a child, move to another city, etc. The effect of the 'crush' is so powerful that, when happens, if we have made any of these decisions or others of weight,

.

In love, obsessed, 'encoñados' (what a horrible expression, by the way), is there any way to distinguish what is happening to us?

"The criterion to find out if it is one thing or another is to identify if what is happening to us

. People in love have a good time and experience a wonderful sensation. On the other hand, obsessions generate more suffering than anything else and, from that point of view, they are harmful.

."

In the midst of the 'boom' of contact apps and 'second' (or 'umpteenth') opportunities, one might wonder if we can fall in love again at maturity with that (dangerous?) madness of youth.

"It is not the same to fall in love at 20 or 30 than at 40 or 50. Although they can be intense sensations,

and that makes us put other things in the balance when we decide start a relationship. At the age of 20 or 30, we go through life lighter and it shows. Later, the path itself finds us with other responsibilities and commitments. I think that this description that is usually made of feels like it crosses

, is more typical of the 20s and 30s than another stage".

Does the physique have so much weight in falling in love or is it a myth?

"That is something relative, it will depend on what each one is looking for and what their priorities are. There are people who give it excessive weight, which, perhaps, reveals a certain

Others, on the other hand, with a more robust inner world, put the accent on other aspects. In any case, this is something completely subjective and will depend on how we are in life in general".

This psychologist gives us his version of this theory that love is now more ephemeral.

"Without a doubt, now

because we live in a much more individualistic world and that goes against that 'us' on which each relationship has to be built. With so many

it is much more difficult and It's much more uphill to build a couple."

Why, even though we are already full-fledged people,

?

"When we start a relationship, we deposit a part of ourselves in the other, we get excited and show ourselves as we are, in the best of cases. All this means that, when the couple does not work and ends, we have to face the position of seeing

, not only because of the past and the present that we had and still have, but also because of the future that we thought we were going to have. All of this means that, inevitably, we have to go through our respective mourning and process the loss, which implies psychological work that, in addition to taking time and effort, can be traumatic".

And, based on blows

"Some people develop that callous over time and the amount of disappointments. However, sometimes this can be a double-edged sword, since going through life with emotional armor will prevent us from surrendering to the next story for fear that the same thing as the previous one will happen to us again. Inevitably,

".

So is it 'realistic' to believe in love?

Exists?

Yes, of course it exists, but it is

and, perhaps, more and more, despite the fact that there are applications that facilitate that possibility. In general, people strive to find it from the age of 25 to 45 and then , it depends on the luck they have had, many begin to throw in the towel, even if

, "he concludes.

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