Adolescence And Violence Against Women
Adolescence is a stage in life during which we begin to explore emotional facets that until then were not considered important. However, the cultural influence has already touched us enough to reflect on what a relationship should be like.
First love makes us experience the feeling of being special and important to someone. This makes us feel good and different from others for the loved one, but at the same time it also causes us insecurity, fear of losing these emotions and anger when things don’t go our way. This is why we try to maintain the relationship, trying to get rid of all these unpleasant sensations.
The cultural models that affect us
If we pay attention to the romantic canons, we find ourselves in front of the padlocks that symbolize an unreal “We will be together forever”. They do not maintain the continuity of happiness, but only that of the bond, which one tries to make unbreakable.
Reality doesn’t have much to do with what you want. They tell us about the happiness of being in love and the fact that we have to find a soul mate, leaving aside that we are already complete beings and that emotions are unstable, because they increase, decrease, change and transform.
We try to control the other person’s emotions through physicality, we want to be loved forever and, instead of safeguarding the bond, we move based on our fear of losing the other. So we check his movements, his freedom, his way of dressing, his connections on whatsapp, his friendships, …
It is possible that in this way we can keep the person close to us, but not with us: his emotions will be unstable and, instead of being more united, a wall will be created both between us and our partner, and between the partner and the surrounding environment. We end up trapping our mate in a cage, the bars of which are made up of fear and insecurity.
The violence
The most paradoxical thing is that we ask ourselves if there is love in violent relationships, indeed if there is. What is sadder and more worrying is that love is the engine of violence for the one who practices it. Based on the principle of love, the person feels authorized to show jealousy, anger, insecurity and to condition the life of the other, all in an attempt to eliminate that discomfort caused by the fear of losing one’s partner. To avoid this, various strategies are used, including blackmail, insults, indifference, making people jealous, etc.
Behaviors of this kind come out of rigid parameters that say what a relationship and the attitude of a partner should be like. Both these attitudes, and the anger they trigger, are explained by flaunting the justification of love; the concept of this excuse is so deeply rooted in the couple that it is not only found in the mind of the one who practices violence, but also of the one who suffers it. This is how normalized machismo causes us to repeat patterns without questioning them, regardless of our gender. This is why we publish this article, because we have to reject and change the models of couple relationships based on male chauvinism.
Breaking our invisible cage is not just a problem of those in it: we all contribute to its construction by getting used to male-dominated behaviors, both by approving them and by remaining silent. This is why the change must come from the root. We must stop acting on our discomfort and start doing it thinking about our future, inviting our partner to do the same. This is how we will be rewarded every day, certainly not because, drunk with love, we will have concluded a contract that is held up only thanks to fear.
