Love – compassion, tenderness, sensitive connection, respect, fellowship — is tough to find, but even more difficult to accept and tolerate for many individuals.
Many people aren’t aware that being liked or highly appreciated makes them sad and resentful. This perplexing reaction is, in fact, primarily unintentional. Even a simple compliment, while first received and liked, might eventually elicit sentiments of skepticism or resentment against the person who bestowed the remark, as well as negative attitudes and critical thoughts about oneself.
Why Do I Get Sad When My Boyfriend Says I Love You?
Why is it that love, positive affirmation, and compliments can cause such despair? This post will go through a few of the most common reasons for this problem.
Being Loved Causes an Agonising Identity Problem
When individuals have been injured, they believe that if they welcome love into their lives, their entire universe would be broken, and they will no longer know who they are. It can be perplexing to be loved or perceived in a favorable manner since it contradicts the negative self-concept that many people develop within their families.
As part of a psychological survival mechanism, youngsters idealize their parents at their own expense during the growth process. This idealization process is intrinsically linked to sustaining a negative or defective picture of oneself. Because they are aware of their established unfavorable view of themselves, people are willing to suffer disappointment or humiliation, no matter how painful it is, but the intrusion of being loved or receiving good reactions is disturbing to their psychological balance.
Being loved causes anxiety because it puts at risk long-standing psychological barriers developed early in life in response to emotional pain and rejection, making a person feel more vulnerable.
Although being picked and highly appreciated is exhilarating and may provide happiness and fulfillment, it can also be terrifying, and the fear typically manifests itself as sadness and resentment. When compared to a childhood tragedy, love is often terrifying. In that scenario, the beloved feels driven to respond in ways that harm the lover, such as behaving harshly, isolating oneself from the lover, and pushing love away. People, in essence, keep the protective stance that they developed early in life.
Individuals respond without knowing what led them to react because negative reactions to pleasant circumstances occur without conscious awareness. They try to make sense of the situation by blaming or accusing others, especially those closest to them.
Being Loved Brings Up Thoughts of Grief and Regret From the Past
Being treated with affection and kindness elicits piercing grief that many people find difficult to ignore. Surprisingly, intimate moments with a spouse can reawaken memories of traumatic childhood events, anxieties of abandonment, and earlier emotions of loneliness. People are terrified of being injured in the same manner that they were hurt when they were youngsters.
Accepting Love Raises Difficult Existential Questions
Being connected to someone in a loving relationship makes one aware that life is valuable, but must finally be lost. If we value life and love, we must also accept that the end is unavoidable.
The feeling of being loved, in particular, causes one to place greater importance on one’s life, and the prospect of its end becomes torturous. As a result, rather than going through unpleasant sensations, individuals try to alter such love exchanges.
Close times in a relationship are frequently followed by attempts by one or both parties to de-escalate the situation or withdraw to a “safe” distance.
People, for the most part, construct the emotional environment in which they live. In reality, they are attempting to recreate the environment they knew as children in order to preserve psychological balance. Positive events and situations, notably the sensation of being loved, obstruct this process significantly.
People use the protection skills of selection, distortion, and provocation in their relationships to preserve a false sense of safety and security.
They choose partners that are similar to folks they knew when they were younger because they feel more at ease with people who suit their boundaries.
Second, they misrepresent their partners, seeing them as more similar to persons from their past than they are.
Third, they strive to elicit behaviors from their partners that are similar to previous exchanges. The ultimate effect is diametrically opposed to good and fulfilling partnerships.
Love is a complicated subject.
A collection of emotions, actions, and beliefs linked to intense sentiments of affection, protectiveness, warmth, and respect for another person.
When the phrase “I love you” is spoken in a relationship, things improve. The relationship organically develops, and the connection and bond increase. Taking that step may feel risky, yet it is through our vulnerability that we are able to connect profoundly and truly with another heart. Everything else will be surface-level if your words remain surface-level.
