What is love? From the cradle to the double bed
The Hummingbird Clinic
The Hummingbird is a premier Center in Dubai that provides Mental Health services for Adolescents and Adults.
by @Leticia Rullan
We come into this world wired to connect with others—it’s inherent to our nature. Forming special relationships and attachment bonds with caregivers is crucial for survival, and this fundamental need evolves throughout life.
Psychologically, the most crucial relational experience for shaping personality is the subjective experience of being loved.
From birth, children process their relationship with their parents as love, but what is love? This is a complex concept. The complex love that constructs personality is a relationally nurturing process- it is certainly not purely affective, but one that contains cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic ingredients. Thus, there is a loving thinking, a loving feeling, and a loving doing.
The Loving Thinking
To build a mature personality, the child needs to feel recognized as an independent individual, with unique needs that are different from those of their parents. The lack of recognition or disconfirmation is a failure of relational nutrition on the cognitive level, which can lead to serious handicaps in the construction of personality. The same occurs with disqualification, which is a failure to value personal qualities by significant figures in the relational environment. Parents can be tender and affectionate with their children yet fail to recognize or value them adequately.
This may result in identity confusion, feelings of inadequacy, and damaged self-esteem - am I loved for who I am or what I do that pleases others?
The Loving Feeling
A mature personality cannot be built without the emotional elements of relational nutrition, which are affection and tenderness. It ?s about expressing the feeling of love, verbally and non-verbally: holding, rocking, touching, smiling, looking at him, caressing, providing that physical presence and comfort, without any practical intend.
Failure on this emotional level occurs in the case of parents who are distant, rejecting, or hostile toward their children, for different reasons - depression, addiction, excessive stress, because they perceive them as obstacles to their own individual fulfillment, or as allies of the other parent in a situation of marital discord, among others. You name it.
Nutritional deficiencies in the relationship with one parent can be compensated for by the other, but such compensations do not always occur or are not sufficient. This can lead to poor self-esteem (if they don ?t love me, it must be because I don ?t deserve it), anxiety, and a pervasive sense of emptiness that is very difficult for the person to fill in the future.
The Loving Doing
The pragmatic components of relational nutrition in the parent-child bond are summarized in socialization - the positive accommodation of the individual to society that is fundamental for survival and is largely the responsibility of the parents. For full success, socialization requires a balance of two aspects: protection and normativity. Normativity should guarantee the individual's respect for society, and protection ensures that this respect is reciprocal. When there is an excess of normalcy without protection, the outcome is a personality that tends to depression. On the contrary, overprotection without normativity can lead to antisocial tendencies.
Building our Individual Narrative
Based on this foundational framework, children organize their relational experiences into narratives—stories that provide meaning to their interactions and experiences. The content of these narratives, both in terms of identity and non-identity, forms the basis of personality. For the personality to develop healthily, the individual's identity must be solid—neither fragile nor overinflated—serving as a stable anchor. The non-identity aspects of the narrative should be rich, varied, and nurturing. Ultimately, relational nutrition, or complex love, becomes the essential material that sustains and builds the entire structure of personality.
What happens later in Adulthood and Parenthood?
Complex love flows downwards. This means that the quality of our parents ? love strongly influences the construction of our personality and how then we ?ll weave this complex love with our partners and ultimately our children. More simply, the love received as children significantly influences the love we give as adults, and then the love we give as parents.
How? Parenthood and conjugality represent distinct versions of relational nutrition, understood respectively as parental love and conjugal love.They are both present in the immediate environment of the child, and are typically embodied by the parents. We not only see and feel the love we receive from our parents, we also witness the love they give each other, and we incorporate it in our personal narrative.
As discussed above, Parental Love is based on cognitive, emotional and pragmatic complementarity, in which giving and receiving cannot be balanced—the chain is basically linear, and, for the benefit of the species, each generation pays its debt to the preceding one.
On the contrast, conjugality is based on cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic reciprocity:
All of this requires exchange, that is, an exercise of giving and receiving in a balanced way, with an important egalitarian component. What changes here, from parental love (the one received from our parents) to adult love (the one to experience with our partner)?
The shift from parental to romantic love transforms the nature of love from one of survival and development to mutual interdependence - from complementary, to reciprocity.
Secondly, pragmatic components also shift dramatically, replacing the parental focus on protection and norms with the intimacy and passion essential in adult relationships.
Now we can take a moment to reflect:
- How have you been loved at all levels - cognitive, emotional and pragmatic?
- How did this impact your personal narrative and sense of self?
- How do you experience these aspects in the give-and-take of your adult intimate relationships?
- How does this play out in yourself as a parent?
Understanding love as a process that integrates thinking, feeling, and doing helps us navigate its complexities across different stages of life. From the bonds formed in infancy to the intimate connections of adulthood, love is the thread that weaves our identity and relationships.